Quiet Quitting Isn't New or News

For crying out loud can we stop inventing new terms, running in the direction of the next new shiny thing and instead focus on what matters: helping people do the human work so that their lives get better at work? Can we please just hanker down on the work and land the wins of the pandemic? Can we please just insist on the good dynamic of the team and on the well-being of the individual and set aside time and resources to better them? Can we *please* at long last take a hard look at our performance management and remuneration systems and include the hard self-work and teamwork in them? What’s the real hold-up? How are we getting derailed by new terms of new flavours?

Here’s the thing - as humans, we are eternally in pursuit of newness and excitement and our sense of fondness for adventure and our eternal pursuit of the next thing is what keeps us going and what makes us grow, but the downside of it is that, when we grow tired of the repetition, we drop some important themes if they should be repeated in vain far too often.

For an example of this, we only need to look at the news cycle and see how long until any current event -irrespective of how important or significant it is- takes to be travelling from breaking news to a forgotten item present only on a ticker if that. Not very long at all. If you’re still not sure that’s right, just take a look at the proportion of the news still concerned with the war in the Ukraine today versus a few months ago. It hasn’t magically stopped or taken any turns for the better, on the contrary, the human drama has meanwhile taken unimaginable proportions, but it has lost its “breaking” shine and it has been banished to the “in other news” section because the press has determined the public interest has waned.

The same phenomenon applies to the human work in the business world. We are collectively growing tired and slightly embarrassed to have to repeat the same common sense things over and again in particular since their importance was ever so clear to begin with.

Corollaries such as “humans are not resources but beings with emotions and lives” or “we have to care about our employees' wellbeing” or even “we have to start finding ways to elevate the human discourse and build a better life for our employees” are still all true and sorely unresolved but how unsavoury to have to repeat them ad nausea.