What managers should know about quiet quitting

With countless videos critiquing workplace norms and more people re-examining their relationship to their job, the idea of “quiet quitting,” or giving up on the “above and beyond” mindset, has taken over. A September 2022 poll by Gallup found that “quiet quitters make up at least 50% of the U.S. workforce.” 

For some employers, the concept of quiet quitting might stoke fears of disengaged workers doing the bare minimum. However, the conversation around healthy boundaries at work is an opportunity to overhaul how we approach daily operations, rethink incentives, and reinforce a healthy work-life routine for all employees. 

Here’s how a company like Slack is approaching flexible work and employee experience strategies to give workers the structure, tools and resources they need to establish boundaries, improve satisfaction, transform productivity, and avoid burnout.

You know FOMO, but what about JOMO?

Everyone has felt the dread of missing an important work call, updates to a work project or a fun happy hour, but how many have felt the joy of missing out (JOMO) at work? There’s an unmatched dopamine rush when we close our laptops for the weekend or turn off notifications to go on vacation. Little bursts of JOMO throughout the workday can pay off in a big way. 

One strategy for achieving JOMO is the Do Not Disturb (DND) setting in Slack. The DND feature can turn off notifications to give your brain a break and some much-needed focus time. Custom statuses that quickly indicate if you’re busy making lunch, taking your child to sports practice, or engaging in a moment of meditation during a self-care break also help you take back control of how your colleagues reach out. 

Lead with empathy

Considering how employees’ time should be prioritized will help you decide how your team needs to work together. Is their time greatest used by collaborative, synchronous brainstorming meetings? Or is it better to have teams set aside time to prepare their own ideas and then come together for faster, more efficient meetings?

One simple way to offer structured flexibility is to consider core hours when everyone can work together at the same time. During these core collaboration hours, you know you can ping your colleague, start a huddle or schedule meetings to move a project forward. These hours should be established with the time zones of individual teams and employees in mind. 

Set the right example

It’s critical for leaders to lead by example when it comes to healthy work boundaries. Ashley Kramer, the chief marketing and strategy officer at GitLab, champions workplace flexibility for her employees. Whether hitting the slopes or working from another city, she has made flexible work at her all-remote company fit any lifestyle. During a Frontiers 2022 “Crack the Code on Remote Work” session, Kramer shared, “The digital headquarters means remote and real, and all it takes to create that collaborative and creative environment is having the right toolkit, living your values and thriving together as a company.” 

Putting up PTO statuses, relying on scheduled-send messages to be delivered during standard working hours, and using emoji to help express tone and intent all add a more human element to the workday and are a step toward avoiding burnout and the desire to “quietly quit.”

Eliminate meeting fatigue 

Meeting fatigue is real, and at Slack we believe there are better ways to communicate than back-to-back meetings. “Focus Fridays,” or no-meeting Fridays, give employees the opportunity to dive into their to-do list without their flow state being disrupted.There are also innovative ways to communicate critical information without defaulting to a 30-minute team call. Slack has introduced features like huddles and clips. Easy-to-join short meetings with huddles and asynchronous recorded messages like clips provide new ways to hit “delete meeting” and take that weight off your calendar. 

At Slack Frontiers 2022, Kat Coulter, a senior product manager at Intuit, said, “We’ve been loving huddles for quick, ad-hoc conversations. And we’re very excited about the new co-working capabilities, especially the ability to share screens simultaneously. I think this new experience in huddles will re-create the feeling of working alongside a teammate in person.”

Low-code and no-code tools for automation

Many employees have to battle a steady stream of small daily tasks—from submitting a timesheet to updating a weekly status report—that lead to frustration and the perception of a never-ending, overwhelming to-do list. 

To streamline tasks and free up time for the work that’s actually part of your job description, teams can turn to Slack workflows. As noted at Frontiers 2022, the Army Software Factory (SWF) is a big fan of speeding up administrative work.

“We use Slack workflows and bots to automate our basic admin processes, and then we use more advanced workflows for things like ticketing and notifications,” Captain Austin Herrling, the Army SWF’s chief data officer, says. “We’ve been able to quantify the time it takes for service requests to be processed before and after implementing workflows, and, on average, our platform team is able to save about 40 work hours a week with this flow.”

They’ve even created bots to help foster a positive team culture, including one that cheerfully reminds people to go offline for the weekend every Friday afternoon.

Find your passion and learn to love your job again

At Slack, we take our own advice to free up more time for work that engages us. Employees can use clips to record and send videos of themselves and their screens to share important updates. Teams working across various time zones can schedule messages so their colleagues get them when they are online and active. For true collaboration, employees can use Slack huddles for informal audio-first conversations or for deeper co-working sessions with multi-person screen sharing and video as an option.

With intentional flexible work policies and leading by example, employers can build a more modern workplace — one that offers desirable, healthy and effective employee experiences for their teams, making quiet quitting just another forgotten TikTok trend.