At this point, most people have heard of the term “quiet stop,” where employees do the least amount of work on their jobs or set high boundaries with management. To be clear, quiet people aren’t trying to lose their jobs, they’re simply looking to create a healthy work-life balance and focus more of their time on non-office activities.
The phenomenon is taking over and now silent workers make up half of the adult workforce in the US.
According to a new study from Gallup, 50% of US adult workers describe themselves as “disengaged” at work. These individuals are “underperforming and psychologically disengaged,” according to Gallup’s poll.
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The rest of the population is made up of two groups. One group are people who are “engaged” in their work and the other group are “actively disengaged” at work.
32% of workers say they are engaged at work, the lowest number since 2014 but higher overall than in the early 2000s, when Gallup began tracking U.S. worker engagement trends. Interestingly, 18% of workers say they are actively disengaged at work, the highest since 2013, according to Gallup’s tracker.
“What we’re seeing right now is a breakdown in the employee-employer relationship,” Jim Harter, chief scientist of Gallup’s workplace management practice, said of the study.
Gallup 2022 data comes from a sample of 15,091 full-time and part-time workers age 17 and older in the US. The election was held in June 2022.
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Gallup has listed several things to help employees quit quietly.
“Employees are the new customers,” Stefan Meyer, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School who studies employee motivation, told Insider. “There are big differences in what people really want.”
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An August story from the Wall Street Journal described a fallout from the quiet resignation of some U.S. leaders. Those bosses include Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington and ABC’s “Shark Tank” co-star and Oshers EFF chairman Kevin O’Leary.
“Quitting silence is not just about ending work, it’s about ending life,” Huffington said.