What is the root cause of the "Quiet Quitting" movement?
And if you are the boss, what you need to do about it?
A couple of days, ago, this news article, Quiet quitting the new threat to workplace productivity, reported
With the Great Resignation beginning to fade into the background, a new kerfuffle is brewing and threatening workplace productivity.
Rather than moving onto another employer, some workers are choosing to stay put and “quietly quit” – putting in minimum effort while on the job so work does not take over their life.
The Quiet Quitting movement burst into the scene around on 26th July when this TikToker released this video. Soon after the release, it became viral. Today, this has become a new kerfuffle on the Internet.
The Quiet Quitting movement is not new. It began earlier in China on April 2021. Over there, it was called the 躺平 (“Tang Ping”) movement. 躺平 literally means “lying flat” in Chinese. According to the Wikipedia, this movement is
… a rejection of societal pressures to overwork, such as in the 996 working hour system, which is often regarded as a rat race with ever diminishing returns. Those who participate in tang ping instead choose to "lie down flat and get over the beatings" via a low-desire, more indifferent attitude towards life.
The 躺平 movement is such a threat to the establishment that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pulled out their censorship tools to suppress the proliferation of this idea.
Today, this idea has travelled to the Western world in the form of the Quiet Quitting movement.
If you are a boss reading this article, you need to pay attention. You need to understand the root of the problem before you can come up with effective long-term solutions. There is no quick fix to this problem because it has been in the making for at least a couple of decades. The long-term solution is certainly not cheap. But it is cheaper than not fixing the problem at the root.
So, what is the root cause of this movement?