The Antidote to Quiet Quitting? The Galvanising Human Work

Like we said yesterday, “quiet quitting” is most certainly not news and over the years it had many a names - “coasting”, “doing the bare minimum” or “inner resignation” but they all amount to the same thing - “disengagement”and its more insidiously disastrous cousin of “active disengagement” - we genuinely do not need a new term, we need a solution.

It is perhaps useful to note that quiet quitting refers to the inner mental process disengaged employees go through so that we decide whether it is more or less damaging to the enterprise than the other big trend we are traversing in the form of the great resignation which in turn is heavily predicated on the lack of engagement. Which one costs you more? Which one is more likely to be befalling you? Whether that matters or not is a matter of opinion but they are both flavours of the same in-success. That is one thing we can all count on - if we don’t reverse this trend of active disengagement then the only path we can count on will be that of failure.

Make no mistake about it, the quiet quitters are the people in the famous adagio of “Our people are checked out - what if they leave/ It’s worse if they stay!” so they are the same people who would be part of the Great Resignation should they have enough personal brand or opportunity.

As this video says, we are no strangers ourselves to consecrating a new term (HumanDebt™) and that can make it sound hypocritical that we find these other new ones to be unsavoury distractions but in our defence, we simply needed a term where there was none. What other words/phrases reliably encompassed what we are faced with when it comes to our “human resources”? Properly showing the extent of what we owe them in respect, support and care? The myriad of unresolved issues. The many abandoned projects. The lack of structure and clarity. The toxic culture. The persistent command and control that breeds fear. And the resulting lack of connection to the general purpose and -at times, even more disastrously- to their own self of worth.

We are of course not claiming we are the first to have noticed the extreme amount of debt we owe our people, on the contrary, but we are the first to have put name on it and that name has meant that we can come together and not only discuss it but hopefully reverse it.