Are your employees quiet cracking and quiet quitting? Here’s how to help them before they rage quit

If you have been browsing social media, you may have seen someone launch into a tirade of reasons why their company is terrible before storming out the door in dramatic fashion – sometimes with a brass band in tow.

This is the trend of rage quitting, the art of having a social media savvy tantrum where all employment grievances are laid bare and the former employee gets to leave with their five minutes of viral fame to light the way home.

While rage quitting is embarrassing for employers (and the employee too in many cases), the brash nature of it may be distracting us all from a deeper employment crisis that is lurking below the surface.

Quiet quitting and quiet cracking are far worse than rage quitting, and we want to help you combat them.

What is the problem with quiet quitting and quiet cracking?

Quiet quitting involves an employee disengaging from work and fulfilling their duties to the letter of the contract and offering no further effort or enthusiasm than that.

Meanwhile, quiet cracking is when an employee is staring longingly at the door but feels unable to leave their job due to a fear of unemployment.

Both phenomena are problematic due to the quiet, insidious way they can erode the cohesion of a team and result in poorer mental health and reduced productivity all around.

If you need your team to pull together to meet a tight deadline, the quiet quitters will be reticent to engage and this could lead to further ramifications if your clients become unhappy.

The global pandemic has irreversibly changed the way that businesses operate, not least by making remote and hybrid work more popular than they were before.

This has led to a change in standards among employees as they have come to expect a degree of flexibility from employers.

Given that they were the youngest generation in work during the pandemic, Millennials have been found to “consistently work the least number of hours” compared to other generations and show “the strongest evidence of quiet quitting.”

According to a report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), “almost three in five workers said they were more likely to ‘quiet-quit’ if their manager did not provide the flexibility to work from a location that best suited their needs.”

However, the true scale of the problem extends far beyond the impact of the pandemic or the feelings of one generation.

The CIPD Good Work Index determined that a significant minority of employees were feeling disengaged at work and were struggling to feel fulfilled.

How can employers combat the growing quiet cracking and quiet quitting crisis?

While some employers may be dismissive of quiet cracking as they see the captive nature of employment as ultimately beneficial, this is wholly reliant on a poor job market.

If the job market improves and the fear of unemployment abates, or if a better offer appears in front of your employee, then you may find your company begins to lose staff.

It is therefore vital that you engage with employees to determine how to better meet their needs.

The CIPD Good Work Index found that “keeping employees engaged, enthusiastic and immersed in interesting and absorbing work is important because experiencing positive emotions at work is associated with a lower likelihood of seeing themselves quitting their job.”

One way in which this could be tackled is by having more confidence in your team.

“Three in 10 employees still report they are overqualified for their role and a third say they have the skills to cope with more demanding duties”, so the onus is on employers to position staff in roles where they will feel they have the opportunity to demonstrate their skills.

This can be achieved by focusing on training and upskilling, the exact nature of which can be better defined by having regular appraisals.

This could also pave the way for giving a greater variety of tasks to your team and allowing people to try their hand in other departments if they are growing tired of doing the same thing every day.

You do not need to guess what will make your employees work better and be happier if you take the time to engage with them.

We understand that it can be challenging to get employees to be honest about what will help them connect better in the workplace, which is why we want to support you with our expert HR services.

If you want help on how you can maximise your workforce, retention, reduce turnover or any other related HR/People matters, please reach out to Juliet Mellues or Kim Baden.

Juliet Mellues