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Long ago, employees and employers were on the same page: You come in, you work, you go home. Remote work was a thing, but not a common one. Around 17% of jobs were performed mostly or fully remote—but that number jumped to 44% during the pandemic.
The Scary Dark Times of Change
Then the clouds of the pandemic rolled in, effectively blocking out the sun for a while on the “normal” way of going about day-to-day routines. We were all there, we know what happened and how it affected us and those we know…so I won’t give you war flashbacks by recounting all the ways in which we found ourselves stumbling around in the unknown.
Except for the one change that, arguably, was a positive for a lot of people (even if for artificial reasons): the need to work from home for those who could. For me, a shy introvert with severely misunderstood autoimmune issues, it was like I had won the lottery—not only could other people not come near me, but I also was encouraged to do my job (copyediting) from home. My dad likes to say that for all the devastation COVID caused, it was the best thing to ever happen to me. Due to those health issues, I could not hold an office job; I relied on freelancing to make a living before the pandemic. Thankfully, I was fortunate enough to find my place in a company that allows me to WFH for most of my week. But what about those who don’t have medical or other “legitimate” (for lack of a better phrase) reasons to work remotely?
The New Normal…and the Next New Normal, and the Next…
Once those clouds began to part, the workforce noticed a shift in power. Employees now had the upper hand and remote work was the preferred method. It was that way for a while but, once in-office attendance started to become a requirement again, that paradigm shifted once again. It was not a blanket shift—some companies kept the first new normal where remote work was fine and if you wanted to come into the office, more power to you. Others adopted the three days in, two days remote method. Some just said “back in, no questions.”
I was speaking to my cousin over the weekend (a theoretical chemist, business owner, and the smartest person I’ve ever been annoyed by) about the dichotomy of remote work. For him, he pushes for his employees to be in office—he’s more comfortable with that. For me, for those reasons mentioned above, I feel the opposite. He told me that a lot of the employee workforce shares that sentiment, some even taking large pay cuts to continuing working remotely, while a lot of the seniority-level workforce shares his viewpoint.
Obviously, this is a rolling change. If you’ve ever seen Game of Thrones (or read the books), the theme of a wheel is prevalent—sometimes you’re on the top, sometimes you’re on the bottom, and so the wheel keeps turning. (If you’ve never seen it, I envy you the deep disappointment and anger you didn’t have to experience at the ending.)
Quiet Quitting Became Quiet Cutting
With that metaphor in mind, the new trend recently noticed in the workforce is being called “quiet cutting.” A direct antonym of quiet quitting (the term coined to describe employees no longer going above and beyond in their jobs while not outright leaving them), quiet cutting is now the term used to describe “what happens when you lose the role you were hired for, but not your job.” The wheel has turned.
Why, Though?
Well, it could be for a few of reasons—switching up where resources are being fed, someone in that role left, your skills are needed elsewhere. Or there could be some less wholesome reasons that you’re being pushed to quit without the messiness of being fired outright—or it could be retaliatory for pushback of frustrated employees. According to the Wall Street Journal article linked above, “Adidas, Adobe, IBM, and Salesforce, among others, have reassigned employees as part of corporate restructurings. Mentions of reassignment, or similar terms, during company earnings calls more than tripled between last August and this month, according to data from AlphaSense, a financial-research platform.”
So What Does This Mean?
Honestly, I have no idea. To the best of my knowledge, it seems to be the ripple effect of the Dark Times and all the ways in which our lives sort of fishtailed for the last three (read: what feels like 50) years. The work pendulum swung pretty far one way, and now it’s swinging pretty far the other way. It seems to be a tennis match of sorts, and right now the ball has been lobbed into a different court.
While I don’t claim to know even a fraction of the driving force behind quiet cutting, it does seem to me that the dwindling workforce coupled with the pushback of returning to the office makes for a strange coincidence in timing of this trend—which, mind you, I read an article about for the first time only last week…whilst on vacation, in line for a ride at Magic Kingdom, and thus panicked ever so slightly. But my point, though, is that this is something I hadn’t heard of as a trending pattern until very recently.
Obviously, disruption of anything causes strange consequences in places—actions have an equal and opposite reaction—and change is forever inevitable, so hopefully we find a happy medium in all this soon.
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