Is There a Cure for "Quiet Quitting"?

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Management Tip Unpacked. It's our monthly LinkedIn Live series where we'll help you make sense of your career, the workplace, and the wider business landscape. I'm Nicole Smith with Harvard Business Review. So quiet quitting, by now you've heard of the term, maybe even have thought about quietly quitting yourself. But why is this a buzzword now? Workers have been disengaged for decades, and quiet quitting is a real phenomenon for managers that they need to watch out for. Today we wanna go behind the buzz and the trends, and instead get to the truth behind quiet quitting. Before, before we, um, have this conversation, we're going to, uh, ask you that you put your comments in the, uh, in LinkedIn, in the LinkedIn live stream. And joining us today for the conversation is Caroline Webb. She's an economist, executive coach, and author of How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life. I'll be starting us off with a few questions for Caroline. When you put your questions in the comments, don't forget to tell us where you're from. Hey, Caroline.

Hi there. It's great to be here. Thank you.

Likewise. Uh, so you know I have to ask you what does quiet quitting even means? It seems like collectively people have come up with, uh, not one solid definition, but you when we talked earlier said that it can mean different things to different people, and you've noticed two types of definitions have emerged. Maybe-

Yeah, very much so. There, there's a huge range, and I think anybody joining us today has seen that range. I think on the one hand, there's the very negative, passive tone, which is, you know, I'm doing the bare minimum to not get fired, and that might be, you know, leaving early, it might mean arriving late, it might mean checking out of things that people were previously doing. It might mean ignoring emails, although, you know, that probably happens plenty all the time anyway. Um, but then on the other side, I think there is a version of this that I'm also seeing, which is a more proactive version, which is where people are being clear about the