PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Is there something wrong with simply doing what's in your job description at work? Is it unreasonable for companies to expect employees to buy into the corporate hustle and to always go above and beyond?
Questions like these have been getting more and more attention as the concept of "quiet quitting" has been gaining traction on TikTok. Jennifer Rossi Long, senior director of West Chester University's Twardowski Career Development Center, joined “KYW Newsradio In Depth” for an examination of so-called “quiet quitting” and its implications.
“Quiet quitting” may be a new term, but it is not a new concept, Long said. “It basically labels a situation where you do your job, nothing more, nothing less.” As she explains, that may be a good mindset to embrace — for employers and employees, alike.
Listen to Jennifer Rossi Long’s examination of ‘quiet quitting’
'There's no actual quitting involved here'
She says the “quitting” part of quiet quitting can be misleading. “It's really doing what's in your job description, and what you were paid to do and not going above and beyond,” she said. “And so I think for some people, it's been adopted as a way to describe mentally checking out.”
Long says it raises some questions about what it means to be checked out — is it passive-aggressive, or is it an appropriate work-life balance to do the job that you were hired to do.
“More importantly, who is defining it as ‘mentally checking out’?” she said. “Is it the employee, or is it an employer that's considering it ‘mentally checking out’ in a negative context? Because, to me, doing the job that you were hired to do sounds appropriate.”
Related
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, a prevailing workplace narrative was “nobody wants to work,” when, in fact, everyone was just trying to survive, Long said.
“The name really just doesn't do it justice, because there's no actual quitting involved here. You’re still doing your job,” she said. It may have seemed like quitting to some, “because it goes against what people understand to be valuable in our work culture — that's hustle, that's burn the candle at both ends, give your all, take on more, run on those passion fumes.”
However, Long said, “people are multidimensional, and they want to have lives outside of work, and that should be okay.”
'Encouraging people to see themselves as more than their job'
Long said this is why labor unions were established — to protect workers from their employers taking advantage of them, and to make sure they are compensated for the job they are hired to do. She said the pandemic may have energized this sense of justice and fairness in the working world, but at a more basic level, it may have taken a global health crisis to force people to realign their priorities.
“It's not unusual to see something massive happen to economic markets, job markets, to people's everyday lives, and have them sort of reevaluate what's important to them,” she said. “It kind of causes you to reprioritize. What are the things that are important to me? And what are the things that are not?”
That critical eye could be extended across all of American society, she said. “That hustle culture can be harmful to a person's identity, to their mental health, to their physical well being — because there's always something more that they're chasing.”
Related
When TikTok user Zaid Khan helped make the concept of “quiet quitting” go viral, “he was really encouraging people to see themselves as more than their job, and to not be defined by what they do.”
Long said feeling guilty for spending time on things outside of work is unhealthy — “you know, because we all have lives outside of work. And we shouldn't have to pretend we don't.”
The pandemic helped break down that fiction. “Especially as work and life came crashing together over the course of the pandemic, we couldn't pretend we didn't have lives outside of work, because we were fully in it.”
Related
For people who buy into it, and for those who are against it, she said, “quiet quitting” is seen as a kind of protest against, or a way to resist, hustle culture. But Long says it might be more helpful to think in terms of a spectrum between two extremes.
“You could have ‘hustle culture’ on one side of the spectrum — like, the highest level of that hustle culture. And I would actually put ‘apathy’ on the other end of that spectrum — just doing nothing at all,” she said.
In the middle, between those extremes, said Long, there's plenty of room for balance and for quiet quitting.
Listen to the complete conversation
Related
