"Quiet Quitting" and Linguistic Distortions
Everywhere I turn, I’m seeing the term “quiet quitting.”
What does it mean? And how does it relate to inclusive language?
Quiet quitting is a slightly different take on Kim Kardashian’s famous “It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” First popularized on TikTok, an early definition says it’s something like “not outright quitting your job” but “quitting the idea of going above and beyond.”
Like many new terms, quiet quitting is being mapped to different real-world scenarios.
For some people, it’s mapped to something positive. Pushing back at an inappropriately demanding workplace. Not doing more work than you are paid for. Not working more hours than you should. Not pushing yourself to the point of burnout.
This is more frequently the mapping of employees – people who are selling their labor. They are considering what hourly price is appropriate and how much of their labor they want to sell.
But for most of the onslaught of articles and think pieces in August and September, “quiet quitting” was seen as something negative. A dangerous activity where employees are cheating employers out of what they deserve. Where employees are passive aggressive. Where they are doing the bare minimum and leaving their teammates and managers in a bind. Where they need to be shamed or cajoled into doing more.
This is more frequently the mapping of company leaders and managers, and of people writing for leaders and managers.
I don’t like the term “quiet quitting” for either of those mappings. Because it violates two of my principles of inclusive language:
Principle 1: Reflect reality
Principle 4: Incorporate other perspectives.
There are three major linguistic distortions that cause problems when it comes to reflecting reality. They are masking language, softening language, and inflating language.
“Quiet quitting” is a great example of inflating language. Inflating language presents reasonable behavior as problematic. And inflating language almost always describes the words and actions of people with less power (organizational power or social power).
The behaviors presented as problematic by people worried about employees “quiet quitting” are quite reasonable.
Staying within your agreed-upon scope of work
Working the agreed-upon number of hours
Working at a sustainable and reasonable speed rather than being in permanent crunch mode.
And if your workplace is filled with disengaged employees? That tells you there are real problems with the culture there.
The other issue with “quiet quitting” is that it doesn’t incorporate other perspectives. In particular, the focus is entirely on the employee as an individual, with no attention paid to the context that the employee works in and is responding to.
Understaffing and skeleton crews, bad management, pandemic stresses, and long-term illnesses are just some of the factors affecting people’s lives and workplaces.
“Quiet quitting” entirely leaves out the responsibility of the employer to create a safe and functional workplace. Or to create an inclusive workplace that identifies and removes obstacles.
In the US, we tend to be extremely individualist. And so we focus on individual people and not on the systems and larger contexts that are causing problems. The semantic framing for quiet quitting focuses only on the employee. It places the blame and responsibility on the individual only.
So I recommend dumping the term altogether. If your organization is dealing with low employee engagement, chances are good that it comes from low levels of trust, low psychological safety, or unchecked bias.
Looking for and addressing root causes is what will shift things – not telling employees that it’s their job to be exploited and self-sacrificing.
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