Quiet quitting? Quiet firing? Just stop spying on employees so much

Across workplaces right now, there’s a struggle between bosses and employees. Returning to the office vs. working from home. Cost of living increases vs. stagnant wages. Is it any surprise we are seeing concepts like ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘quiet firing’ emerge?

After nearly three years of COVID disruption, employers, keen to regain control over their workforce, are monitoring employees in ways never before seen. Employees, now used to flexibility, are pushing back.

Employee monitoring is not new. Foremen, with a keen eye for discipline and a clipboard, have been ready to pounce since the Industrial Revolution. Two centuries on, it is delusional to believe micro-monitoring every keystroke, reading instant messages or recording screens in real time will prompt an employee to give their full, focused commitment to a role.

Remarkably, Australia ranks first in the world in its use of technology to monitor employees.

Loading

Let’s be clear; not all employee monitoring is problematic. Using monitoring technology and data to improve health and safety, reduce fraud, identify incoming cyber-attacks, or prevent data loss are examples where such actions are ethical and justifiable.

Much more challenging to explain is the use of technology to monitor online behaviour and performance of individuals, through surveillance. What happened to values-based companies seeking to foster mutual respect or create psychologically safe workplaces?

Trust is difficult to build and even harder to maintain in a culture where suffocating micro-management is par for the course. All close monitoring will do is prompt those you lead to find innovative ways to ‘quietly quit’, an idea first created by Zaid Khan, a Gen Z, in a video which has since gone viral on Tik Tok. “You’re not outright quitting your job,” says Khan, “but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond.”

Australia is not immune from this form of subtle employee activism. A 2021 Herbert Smith Freehills report, which surveyed leaders in large Australian corporations, revealed executives ranked workplace surveillance as the number one reason likely to trigger an outbreak of employee activism.