Will everyone stop doing things QUIETLY at work

It's quiet time apparently, but will everything be silent under the fluorescent lights of our open plan offices forever? 

Bianca Farmakis after filing this story

It's quiet time apparently, but will everything be silent under the fluorescent lights of our open plan offices forever? 

A silent hell is ensnaring me and the instant-coffee corner at work this year, as all things quiet become the way to conduct business.

I am slamming my keys typing this out for all to hear my vexation. It’s my belief the quiet quitting/firing/promoting phenomenon of 2022 is the greatest flop since the girlboss movement of the mid 2010s.

Let’s begin with the first of the silent strains: quiet quitting. 

The answer to the burnout that incinerated a (somewhat) post-pandemic workforce, encouraged employees to do the bare minimum of what is required in roles they no longer wish to fulfil. 

Avoiding responsibilities that will otherwise be passed on to your peers might look like a radical resistance to workload and underpaid staffing issues. Actually, the passive aggressive decision to silently resist opportunities and duties splintered two more muted employment practices: quiet firing and quiet promoting. 

Employers caught on to the languid exodus of their staff by slowly rescinding their responsibilities and administering them to those they consider the cream of the crop. Those are the ones willing to work hard for no immediate additional pay. Those taking on the quiet promotions do it so they might get a loud cheers at after-work drinks and a hand pulling them up the rungs of the corporate ladder. 

So why is everything so silent under the fluorescent lights of our open-plan offices? 

Call me the optimistic Zoomer who spent the first two (real) years of their career suspended in a makeshift office from home trapped listening to directions via a call with the picture quality of a faulty VHS tape. Fine. 

But I won’t let go of the hopes that all the perks of collaborating with your colleagues, disagreeing with your boss, and Googling “how to ask for a pay rise” before attending a performance review would come back in stereosonic quality when we got back to the office. 

Still from The Devil Wears Prada.

Quiet quitting/firing/promoting, whatever silent derivative you choose to employ in your workforce, is the “hook up” culture of the corporate space - only instead of meaningless sex and a growing orgasm gap, we have meaningless interactions with our employers and colleagues and a growing burnout epidemic we’re too performatively timid to address. 

The gears of capitalist corporate culture continue to turn in their rusted fashion, and none of the solutions to our overworked, overstressed lives were communicated well enough to grease up the machine. Everyone just…went silent?

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I came back to the office with a covid-induced desire to yell across the halls and (metaphorically) flip over a (proverbial) desk when the situation called for it. It’s not (entirely) from a desire for the dramatic, but a thirst for aspects of office life that foster better working conditions.

Inflated accusations of harm are often used to avoid accountability, Sarah Schulman wrote in Conflict Is Not Abuse. 

In the context of quiet quitting and the terms that followed, it encourages a culture of stillness, one that neglects to address the insidious issues: an inability to communicate, to navigate ways to make a workforce healthier, and to step up or away from an opportunity when it is required.

Perhaps we grew too used to the deafening silence of a poorly connected conference call or deafened by the demands discreetly delivered outside the dot points of our original job description.

Quiet solutions to workforce issues only served to create new corporate conundrums. I only hope the next trend to tackle the office is as loud and brazen as every self-aggrandising post on LinkedIn.