Workers aren’t just quiet quitting. Managers are quiet firing, too

“Quiet quitting” may be a new workplace phenomenon hitting the corporate world, but it turns out there’s a simultaneous trend bubbling to the surface at the same time: quiet firing. 

Quiet quitting is a term that took off early last month following a TikTok video made by user @zkchillin, who says the idea is to meet expectations of a job and resist the urge to go above and beyond your set duties. 

“You’re not outright quitting your job, but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond,” he explained in the video.

“You’re still performing your duties, but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life — the reality is, it’s not.

“Your worth as a person is not defined by your labour.”

Some bosses have been put in a difficult position because of the movement — largely spearheaded by the gen Z workforce — with their overperformers having stepped back from working overtime, answering emails outside of working hours, and performing actions outside of their contractual obligations.

Once the term was coined, workers began pushing back about being called “quitters” just for respecting their own boundaries, and are pointing out that bosses and managers have been guilty of their own workplace movement: “quiet firing”.

But despite the post-pandemic drive of quiet quitting, quiet firing has been around for quite some time and is often built up over months or years. 

“A lot of talk about ‘quiet quitting’ but very little talk about ‘quiet firing,’ which is when you don’t give someone a raise in 5 years even though they keep doing everything you ask them to,” Randy Miller, a software developer, tweeted in response to a quiet quitting thread. 

Quiet firing is also known as ‘managing out’ or ‘construction dismissal’ where, rather than firing staff members directly, managers use passive aggressive tactics to push certain staff to quit.

Are you guilty of quiet firing? 

Some toxic management behaviours are performed subconsciously, including bias towards favourite workers or expecting certain staff to do extra work without compensation.

But others are more direct, like not giving workers earned raisers; a demonstrated lack of respect towards subordinates; and minimal paid time off or sick leave.

A manager may also ‘ice out’ an employee by neglecting to include them in important discussions — whether by email threads or certain meetings — and can also extend beyond just a manager to a group of people, whereby senior male leaders may choose to exclude female workers from certain discussions, spurring a toxic environment.

Leaders may also not give staff career progression opportunities, make staff take pay cuts, or bullying their subordinates.

It’s not just the corporate world that is guilty of these actions, either. Hospitality and retail workers are subjected to rostering cuts in order to slowly be removed from the business, demonstrating that the quiet quitting movement is no longer just a conversation about workloads — it’s about the relationship between employers and employees.

Speaking to WorkLife, leadership expert Izabela Lundberg says neither quiet quitting or quiet firing are healthy trends.

“Both of them are a reflection of a very toxic culture,” she said.

“If an employer or manager is deploying quiet firing, it reflects badly on their company culture.

“While quiet quitting and quiet firing were born from lack of communication on both the employer’s and employee’s ends, these trends are paving the way for companies to address how they might fail to tend to the needs of their workers.”