Sep 4, 2022
Quiet Quitting, Loud Working, and Understanding Our Goals and Needs
The concept of quiet quitting has gone viral. What I make out of it is the need to focus on:
- the self
- burnout and work-life balance
- personal and professional goals
- knowing your role and whether you can adjust it through a career conversation or compensate in other ways.
Quiet quitting revolves around the idea of doing the absolute minimum amount of work per your contract and job description. The amount of extra effort you put in depends on whether you feel rewarded enough through the monetary compensation and support you receive.
There are jobs where âquiet quittingâ is just whatâs expected. But we need to be careful about bringing unnecessary stigma to the concept of doing the baseline expectations in your role.
I think there are a few ways to reach the breaking point and resort to quiet quitting:
- Overworking yourself to the end of burnout and eventually feeling that no one appreciates it. However, no one would have expected you to go overboard in your impact, to begin with
- Feeling unsatisfied with the characteristics of your role from the beginning, hence experiencing a lack of motivation to engage
My suggestion for those finding themselves slipping into âquiet quittingâ mode as described in these two ways should consider focusing on themselves in a constructive way, leveraging a growth-oriented mindset.
This means assessing where you are and where you would like to be in a few months and even a few years. A great way to do this would be to build up a personal development plan! Include your hobbies, all your personal goals, and even your family. Then critically consider which parts of your plan you can apply to your role. Identify opportunities where you can converse with your manager to ensure that your company supports parts of your plan. An example could be getting sponsorship for part-time education or resources for child-care support, the possibilities are endless!
Once you have established your goals, where your role can helpâand most importantlyâ where it canât help, you can look for opportunities outside of work to supplement your progress towards where you want to be.
Through self-development, we are no longer âquiet quittingâ. Instead, we establish what we want to invest our time in and how much we want to allocate so that we live with intent and purpose.
I believe that we can take quiet quitting and turn it into loud personal development planning.
