First there was quiet quitting. Most of us have, at this stage, got our heads around the post-Covid label for the trend towards disaffected workers doing the bare minimum needed to earn their salary and not lose their job. Like a lot of management jargon, “quiet quitting” posits a phenomenon which is as old as work itself as a new insight.
There is, in truth, nothing new about clock punching, but at the same time the prominence of the term, which has spawned countless think pieces, and the lack of a negative connotation speaks to a change in attitudes to work and its role in our lives.
Now Forbes magazine informs us of another far more dangerous and, it says, insidious trend: soft quitting. This is defined as choosing to disengage emotionally from your work without necessarily reducing your output. It’s the quality of your work that suffers as you lose your enthusiasm for it.
According to Dr Diane Hamilton, a business behavioural expert and the author of the Forbes article, soft quitting will gradually eat away at a company’s culture and productivity in a way that is more damaging and harder to fix than quiet quitting. She links soft quitting to the Chinese trend of “tang ping” or “lying flat” which involves getting out of what was once called the rat race and embracing a minimalist lifestyle.
Soft quitting: Why are so many workers emotionally disengaging from their jobs?
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Quiet quitters can be managed back to higher productivity. Soft quitters, however, have to be persuaded and cajoled. The output of a quiet quitter can be increased by giving them more work to do. The soft quitter has to be convinced what they are doing is worth doing. Hamilton does not advance any evidence for the coming epidemic of soft quitting, although she does reference research which suggests that the number of Americans who want to change jobs is at an all-time high. Gallup, which carried out the research, refers it as the “great detachment”. It says that “while turnover numbers may have slowed, employee productivity concerns and future talent loss are hidden organisational risks. In addition, when employees feel detached from their work, organisational change initiatives are likely to meet indifference or resistance.”
Soft quitters, by their nature, are hard to spot, Hamilton points out.
As you might expect of a business behavioural expert, Hamilton offers various jargon-heavy solutions to soft quitting such as the need for organisations to “cultivate a culture of curiosity, purpose, and continuous development” in order to ensure “work aligns with personal goals and continuously providing growth opportunities”.
It’s hard not to be cynical, but somewhere in the middle of the corporate buzzword bingo lies a truth that most of us recognise. Most of us have experienced the emotions she describes at some stage in our working lives. The difference this time is perhaps that people are acting on them. The fear of consequences – such as losing your job – that might have made you push these thoughts to the back of your mind seems to be absent among soft quitters.
Why that is the case is another question entirely, but the blame has been laid at the feet of Covid, social media, emotional burnout, affluence, the welfare state and good, old-fashioned laziness. Gallup points to hybrid work as a possible culprit – its data shows that remote workers are consistently less attached to their company’s mission.
It is perhaps a little early to call this a global trend – a few more articles are needed before that happens – but if we are truly entering the era of soft quitting then perhaps artificial intelligence has arrived in the nick of time.
The development of large language models such as ChatGPT and the powerful computer chips on which to run them may mean that rather than try to motivate employees gripped by existential angst, it might just be a better idea to for businesses to simply replace them with a machine. It won’t worry too much about where its life is going, and what it all means. It looks like this is going to happen anyway if the truly terrifying predictions about the impact of AI on the jobs market are in any way true.
This time last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a report which concluded that 40 per cent of global employment is exposed to AI but this is heavily skewed towards high-skill jobs and thus advanced economies are the most at risk. The number of jobs that will be affected rises to 60 per cent for advanced economies.
A series of three reports prepared by the Department of Finance and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment last year found that about 30 per cent of workers here are employed in roles that are at risk of being replaced by AI, and that Ireland’s labour market is marginally more exposed to AI than the advanced economy average (at 63 per cent vs 60 per cent), but that the impacts are not all negative.
In around half of cases the impact will be negative, believes the IMF. This is because tasks currently carried out by humans will be carried out by computers, which will lead to lower demand for labour, lower wages and ultimately fewer jobs.
The IMF also predicts that higher earners will benefit most from AI as they will share in the benefits in terms of higher profits and increased productivity as jobs and wages are cut further down the chain. It concludes that AI will likely worsen overall inequality, something it calls – in a masterly understatement – a “troubling trend that policymakers must proactively address to prevent the technology from further stoking social tensions”. It warns that comprehensive social nets and retraining programmes will be needed for people who lose their jobs. More prosaically, you can’t help thinking that nothing is going to encourage soft quitting more than seeing your boss get richer as you work harder for less.
It is perhaps no coincidence that we are falling out of love with work just as machines come along to do it for us.
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