Quiet Quitting

What is quiet quitting? And why do I think we will see more of it in the coming months...

Key topics:

✔️ Quiet quitting ≠ ghosting. They sound similar but are different things.
✔️ If layoffs and hiring freezes continue and we start to see a recession taking shape, I believe we will see more quiet quitting essentially out of financial necessity.
✔️ Sometimes in life, we have to do what the crisis demands. And that's OK.


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Transcript

0:15

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find it online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now, here's your host, Sara Causey. Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. So today finally, I want to talk about quiet quitting. It sounds a lot like ghosting, but it's actually a different phenomenon. And I'm also going to make a prediction that we will see more quiet quitting in the coming months. And I'll explain why I think so. It's easy to mistake quiet quitting for ghosting. Because the two things sound really similar. It's quiet quitting sounds like Bob and accounting, very discreetly packed up his desk, left for lunch, wink wink, and then just never came back, turn off his cell phone and assume that people would figure out that he had ghosted them whenever they didn't get a response. But quiet quitting is something different. It's when a person is in a job, they're not happy, they're not engaged, they really don't want to be there. But they have to be. Typically those reasons involve the salary and the benefits. Or they might involve the timing. Maybe the person just got there, they've only been in that job for a month or two, they realize it's not a good fit, but they're not ready to make a leap out of that job yet, they may be thinking it'll look bad on a resume, or they'll have to do a lot of explaining and interviews why they want to make a change again, so soon, it could be that a spouse or partner is in a job transition themselves, and they don't want to put the entire household into a state of job transition, they want to wait till things are a little bit more settled. So for whatever reason, the person needs to be in that job, but they truly don't want to be. Now a cursory search on Google will bring up plenty of YouTube videos, as well as some articles on Reddit and on Twitter. This is not a new phenomenon. And I think that we will begin to see more of that happening in the coming months. Why is that? Well, I'll give you my standard boilerplate here. I'm not an economist. I'm not a member of the World Economic Forum. I'm not a hedge fund manager for billionaires, not a professional financial planner or advisor. I'm just giving you my opinion, based on my own life experiences, take it or leave it, it's not to be mistaken for legal advice or financial advice. Just putting that out there at the beginning. I feel bearish and pessimistic. I really do think that we're going to head into a recession. At the very least, I think we're going to have some type of slowdown. And we're already seeing the repercussions of that initially getting started in the job market. We see companies going on hiring freezes, we see companies having layoffs, and just a short time ago in the throes of the great resignation. Companies having hiring freezes or layoffs seemed unfathomable. Yet, here we are. So again, I really do hate to sound pessimistic, and I hope that I'm wrong. But I think we may be in for a long, hot summer, not in a good way, followed by a winter of discontent. I hope I'm wrong, I really, really do. But I think the best strategy is to be prepared, one of the worst things you can do is bury your head in the sand and be overly optimistic. I am very big on mindset. I think it's important not to just dwell on gloom and doom, we can get ourselves into a lot of trouble from a mindset and an emotional perspective, by just being pessimistic 24 hours a day. One of the easiest ways to achieve that is by listening to the news. If you have the news, or some kind of political commentary on it does not matter which side of the political fence we're talking about. If you have that on in the background, 24 hours a day, you are going to be a rageaholic you're going to feel terrible about the world, you're going to feel terrible about your fellow human beings, everything's going to hell, everything's terrible. So you don't want to put all of that kind of information into your brain over and over and over again. But I think that Tony Robbins does a really good analogy, you don't go out into your garden, when see weeds and say, there are no weeds, there are no weeds, you've been down and you pick the weeds up, and you pull them out of the ground, get rid of them. But you don't focus on the weeds. You don't say I'm going to ignore my beautiful tomato plants and my peppers and my melons and my carrots, I'm just going to focus on the weeds or that's not a good state to be in. And I think that as Wayne Dyer also has observed what you think about what you where you put your focus on is the direction your life tends to go in. So if you're just all the time going, everything's terrible. The world is a dystopian hellscape then you're going to attract in more reasons to feel that the world is terrible and it's a dystopian hellscape so I think there's a good balance between the world is a nightmare. We're all going to die. The zombie apocalypse is a On Us versus being like Pollyanna, with rose colored glasses saying everything's fine, this is fine. This is great. Like, we need to have a middle path where we are looking at the market. And we're taking a step back and making an honest appraisal and saying, okay, there are companies that are laying off, there are companies that are going on hiring freezes, reading the tea leaves, looking@fortune.com and CNBC, there are major CEOs calling for a recession, there are people on the other side of the spectrum to saying we probably won't have a recession, we probably will have a little bit of a contraction, a little bit of a clamping down, but it won't be bad. And there are still companies that are hiring right now. So it's not by any means all gloom and doom. That being said, I predict that we will see more quiet quitting over the next few months. Because as that contraction happens, which I think that it will, we're already seeing it in the job market. As some of the companies put the brakes on their hiring. They say wait a minute, let's get a lot more thoughtful and a lot more intentional about what we're doing. The housing market is a really good analogy here. Because we had buyers getting FOMO, we had people going this might be my last chance ever in my whole life to buy a house, I've got to do it. Now people got caught up in bidding wars, they were waving home inspections, it was like we, we don't even have to physically go look at it, you can just do a video walkthrough and we'll make you an offer on the spot. I mean, it's crazy. The amount of just sheer panic and frothing at the mouth happening in the housing market was just nuts. Some of that is starting to die down to because the Fed has bumped up interest rates multiple times. And so what someone could afford a two and a half percent interest rate is totally different, at five and a half percent, then you add in the increase in homeowners insurance, the increase in flood insurance, the increase in property taxes. And there are a lot of people who have said, Whoa, wait a minute, we thought we had FOMO, we thought we were like really on fire for Jesus about doing this. And we've decided now not so much we kind of want to get prepared for what's going to happen in the economy. And we don't want to be left holding the bag. We don't want to have a mortgage payment that we can't afford. And in the event that one of us or both of us were to get laid off. And we had to go for a period of time without any income, we don't need to have a mortgage that's twice or three times what we were paying before. It's just just not worth it. Companies are doing the same thing. From an HR and talent acquisition perspective. They're looking at how insane the job market was, and how crazy it was to try to get people in the door and get them to stay. When the great resignation was in full swing. It was a very strange and crazy time. But the strangeness and the craziness has remained it's just morphed into a different type of oddity, because you have some sectors in the market that are still hiring, they're still going strong and other sectors of the market that are like, No, we're done. We expanded way too much way too fast. We wound up with duplicated positions, we paid people way more than we could actually afford to. And so now we've got to do the old trim, trim, and start getting some of them out the door. So I think quiet quitting will become more common. And here's why people will start to look around at the job market and go home. Okay, I think I've quantum linked through the job market enough, I think I need to stay put. So if you have happened to have landed at a place that's like, Hey, this is maybe not so great. Maybe I got a little bit blinded by the money. Or maybe they misrepresented the conditions. And now that I'm in the door, it's kind of I'm not so crazy about it in a recession. And in a situation where unemployment is high. Statistically, it takes longer for that unemployment to go back down. In other words, when unemployment ramps up, it ramps up fast. But then in order for it to abate and for the job market to correct it takes a longer amount of time for unemployment to go back down again. So if we do start to see higher unemployment rates, we start to see more companies having hiring freezes and or layoffs, people are going to suddenly go hope it's time for me to just stay where I'm at. I don't want to try to leave, I don't want to run the risk of being out on the job market at a really, really bad time. I think I just need to stay where I'm at. And if I were to make a change, it would have to be careful measured out it would have to really, really, really make sense in order for me to jump ship during an economy like this. So if you get in the door somewhere and you're not happy or you feel like maybe they misrepresented exactly what it was going to be like, one option is quiet quitting. Now I'm just going to be clear here. I'm not advocating that people quiet quit. I'm not advocating that people do the bare minimum say screw it. I don't want to be here anyway. What you will find in a recession especially if we have a nightmare scenario like we Did 2008 2010 I've talked about this publicly before, if you were in a job and you needed that job, you did whatever it took to stay in that job, because you did not want to be out with the people who were laid off unemployed and scared to death, you just you did whatever you had to do to get through the crisis. And if we have another scenario like that, again, I hope and pray that we don't. But if we do, people are going to say, You know what, I'm going to do whatever it takes to stay here in this job. So quiet quitting may look a bit different, it may have more effort involved to it, it may have a little bit more schmoozing and sort of playing the corporate political game, in order to keep your job. Again, I really, really hope that I'm wrong about all of this. But I think it's important to be prepared. And I think it's important to consider your options. In my opinion, there's nothing worse than being caught off guard not having a good game plan, not having that real solid sense of confidence that you know, you could survive. So talk to a professional financial planner or financial advisor if you feel like you need somebody to get into your individual finances and give you some advice. But I want you to really think about whether or not it's worth it to Job hop one more time. That's only a question that you can answer for yourself. I cannot answer that for you one way or the other. And I wouldn't presume to likewise, I would not advocate that you quiet quit. If you do choose to do that as a survival mechanism. There are plenty of people who are doing it. And sometimes in life, we just have to deal with the crisis demands, whatever it is that we have to do to hang on and make it through a downturn. That's what we do. And that's okay. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you haven't already, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.