If you’ve heard of the “Great Resignation”, you haven’t seen anything yet. In order to take stock of the phenomenon “quiet quitting” (or “silent resignation”), take a look at the keyword #quietquitting : it has just exceeded 40 million views on the TikTok social network.
This is about employees describing their new approach to work. A strictly minimalist design: “I do what I am paid for, what is in my job description, and above all nothing more. No question of answering an e-mail outside working hours, no need to ask me to do excessive efforts, to commit myself more than reason in the life of my company”, they explain. The answer will invariably be: “it’s no, and it’s without me”.
As a reminder, this “great resignation” led, still at the start of the year, some 20 million Americans to leave their jobs, twice as many as ten years ago. And in France, since the end of 2021, nearly 520,000 have been recorded per quarter, which is much more than usual.
The “quiet quitting” is clearly the little brother of the “big quit”: you give up your job for a better salary and a better balance between personal and professional life. We do the minimum because we no longer want to give everything to our work, as our parents used to do. And above all, we know that we can find better elsewhere, in a context where companies are fighting to recruit.
There is, since the Covid, a clear desire to no longer let work invade everything and to preserve the now sacrosanct balance between pro and personal life. Inflation makes things even worse: when you feel that your salary is no longer enough to meet your expenses, you have less desire to commit. But, recently, a Gallup study questioned the commitment of employees in 160 countries. The world average was 21% of employees engaged in their work. In France, this figure fell to… 6%. Beware, silent resignation awaits us.