Quiet Quitting, Quiet Firing and Loud Quitting: Explainers

Quiet Quitting – An employee doing what they are paid to do to the best of their ability, but doing no more. At its basis this is about a worker setting boundaries to not be exploited by an employer and is thus a rejection of Extreme capitalism that assumes an employee will accept any and all ‘opportunities’ for a chance to ‘get ahead’, i.e. build more wealth in competition with colleagues and in broader society to acquire more material and status goods. Some QQs may be prepared to do more work, to the best of their ability, if paid. Others are not interested in doing more work, even if paid fairly for it, because they recognise the extra costs to them of that work in terms of their broader roles in society and the impacts on their health, and because they have deprioritised the acquisition of material and status goods.

Quiet Firing – An employer, most often a manager or group of managers, deciding that a worker or group of workers is no longer beneficial to them – or perhaps the worker(s) has tried to improve the culture which threatens the manager(s) as in the case of ‘whistleblowers’ – so the workplace is made intentionally hostile to that worker or group of workers to psychologically coerce them to leave rather than them being overtly fired with potential costs including, but not limited to, legal action or bringing extra attention to the manager(s) internally or externally. Results in greater toxicity, because those implementing such a strategy are inauthentic and incapable of the authentic compassion and empathy necessary for a healthy work culture, which may be counteracted by offering (real or illusory) enticements to others to encourage the isolation of those being quiet fired so that colleagues lose their own empathy and compassion for their colleagues who are being mistreated.

Loud Quitting – Is when an employee has become so disillusioned with a workplace that they will leave but will not do so quietly taking to social media and other means to expose the toxic workplace culture responsible for traumatising them. Many career advisers suggest that this is an error for the worker, and while there is some validity to the view that there may be career consequences, it is important to not trivialise the trauma to which the employee has been subjected especially when their voice (cries/pleas) was disregarded. I do not profess to know what was going through that dear, precious woman’s mind, but it would appear to me very obvious that by taking her life by jumping off the Ernst & Young building where she worked, for very long hours in an environment she had told friends she was mistreated, Aishwarya Venkatachalam’s final statement to the world was a piercingly loud one against toxic workplace culture and racism. As a society we cannot let that statement pass without action – we must not remain tone deaf to these cries for help from very many amongst us! #sayhername

First Published on LinkedIn on 21 September 2022

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