The telltale signs of quiet firing and other 'quiet' workplace practices

CTV National News: New ‘quiet quitting’ trend Melanie Nagy explains how workers are sending a message to employers that their worth is not defined by the length of their work day.

Add “quiet firing” and “quiet managing” to the list of modern terms that describe familiar workplace practices.

The two have emerged following the popularization of the term “quiet quitting” on the social media app TikTok in August.

While definitions vary, quiet quitting essentially describes employees setting boundaries to prevent burnout and adhering to them by starting work when they’re scheduled to, doing the work they’re assigned and leaving on time.

Career coach Adam Broda described quiet managing in a post on LinkedIn on Aug. 29. He said it involves managers stepping back and giving employees more agency by not checking shift start and end times, allowing people to work where they want, eliminating unnecessary meetings and encouraging guilt-free time off.

“Quiet managers operate with a high level of trust in their employees, and don’t micromanage,” Broda wrote. “This way, the job becomes more of a support role.”

Another post by LinkedIn News editor Matt Lockie on Aug. 25 defined quiet firing, a more insidious workplace practice, as diminishing an employee’s role by withholding raises or promotions, shifting responsibilities toward tasks that require less experience or deliberately withholding development and leadership opportunities, in hopes that person will resign.

To Patrick Stepanian, who manages a team at human resources consulting firm Peninsula Canada, “quiet” labels might be new, but the concepts they refer to have been around for a long time.

And the fact that they’ve resurfaced in the public consciousness suggests people are eager to move on from the neoliberal attitudes toward work that have dominated since the 1980s, as unionizing sees a resurgence among the tech, e-commerce and service industries.

“It’s a re-examination of the relationships that were (previously) defined between employers and employees,” Stepanian told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Wednesday.

“We’ve had a certain way of thinking about the bargains we strike and what people do to get money, and that’s dominated for the last 40 years. Now we’re having another shift.”

Melissa Nightingale, co-founder of business management consultancy Raw Signal, believes the pandemic has been a significant driver of the current shifts in the way people think about work.

“Overnight, many of our deeply-held assumptions about work — from where it happens to when and how — were turned upside down,” she told CTVNews.ca in an email Wednesday. “It’s not surprising that, as many employers look to bring workers back to the office, their employees want to examine assumptions about what this new phase of work will look like.”

Here is how Stepanian, Nightingale and her husband, Raw Signal co-founder Johnathan Nightingale, break down quiet quitting, quiet firing and quiet managing.

QUIET QUITTING

Stepanian views quiet quitting as workers pushing back against environments where it’s assumed they will take on additional tasks not stipulated in their contracts, or work outside their scheduled shifts, with no acknowledgement or compensation from employers.

Rather than condemning employees who refuse to put in extra work for free, he said employers should adopt a positive mindset.

“You reward people for going above and beyond but you don’t punish them for not doing it,” he said.

When employees can’t set healthy boundaries with their employers, Melissa Nightingale said, it’s easy for a 40-hour work week to creep into a 50-plus-hour work week.

“As managers, it’s our job to address workloads and resourcing,” she said. “And if…you’ve assumed your people would ignore the clock and keep going well beyond their own indicators for burnout, this is your workforce saying they will go this far, but no further.”

In a situation where an employee is staying late to complete tasks they should reasonably be able to finish within their scheduled shifts, Stepanian said supportive managers should help figure out if their workflow can be improved for better results.

“If the employer or manager is able to raise a reasonable point of improvement starting from a positive place, and there’s an actual involved coaching element to this, that, to me, speaks hopefully about who the manager is,” he said.

QUIET FIRING

An informal online survey posted by LinkedIn News on Aug. 25 found 83 per cent of more than 20,000 respondents had either experienced or witnessed quiet firing at work.

To Johnathan Nightingale, quiet firing essentially describes a longstanding, persistent practice sometimes called “constructive dismissal,” in which a manager who wants to avoid officially firing or laying off a worker makes their working conditions so toxic the employee resigns.

It’s “a new phrase for an old and awful practice,” Nightingale told CTVNews.ca in an email Wednesday.

Managers guilty of this practice might reduce or remove an employee's contractual duties, resulting in a drop in the employee’s status within the company; exclude an employee from decision-making processes they would previously have been involved with; and significantly reduce an employee's hours of work, according to a definition of constructive dismissal by the Government of Canada.

Nightingale said a manager may justify constructive dismissal in terms of saving money on severance costs, or avoiding lengthy bureaucratic processes, “but the truth is that they’re making a really harmful and unjustified choice.”

Constructive dismissal is prohibited under Canadian labour laws. Nightingale said anyone who might be a victim of quiet firing or constructive dismissal should start taking detailed notes about any changes made to their role, whether anyone else was impacted and how conversations with management have gone.

“What was management’s response when you raised concerns? Keep emails. You’ll likely want your own legal advice, and when you do, they’ll ask for a paper trail right away,” Nightingale said.

“Human resources can sometimes help here as well…But some HR folks enable this bad behaviour, so having outside legal advice is important if you can afford it. And if you’re in a union shop, talk to your steward about your concerns early.”

QUIET MANAGEMENT

Stepanian said he takes a hands-off supportive approach that could be called “quiet management” in managing his team at Peninsula Canada. He doesn’t look over employees’ shoulders, micromanage their shift start and end times or dictate all the tasks they work on throughout the day. Stepanian described his team as efficient and highly-skilled at problem solving, and said that, when established early and supported by clear communication, the quiet management style can be an effective one.

“It requires sort of a reinforcement of ‘I’m here. I’m in charge of this team, but I trust each one of you to do whatever it is you’re doing to a certain high standard, and that I don’t have to baby you. I am trusting you,’” he said.

Still, there are risks to this management style employers should be aware of, cautions Melissa Nightingale.

While a more trust-based management style can deliver benefits to both managers and employees, Nightingale said it’s important for managers to make sure individual employees’ preferences are accommodated without negative impact to other employees.

“The challenge of management is figuring out how to set policies and expectations across your team, while still understanding and responding to the needs of individuals,” she said. “This is often what makes it a hard job to do well.”

Regardless of the label used to describe it, Stepanian and Nightingale said any successful management style relies on regular and positive communication. In fact, Stepanian said communication – or the absence of it – is the thread that connects quiet management, quiet firing and quiet quitting.

“All of this comes down to clearly communicating expectations as early as possible, and sometimes frequently, so everybody’s on the same page,” he said. “It’s about setting expectations up front.”