The 5 worst HR Trends of 2024

We seem to have become obsessed with the volume at which employees and employers do things.

Everywhere we turn, a new quiet or loud trend (usually at the expense of the Millennial or Gen Z worker) emerges out of nowhere.

I’ve been joking all year that each week a new BS HR trend drops—to the point which I actually wrote satire about a new trend plaguing CEOs back in May. My post on “quiet roasting” created so much buzz on LinkedIn, I half expected Business Insider to write about it as if it were a real phenomenon.

To quote my fave Hebba Youssef , I’m loudly annoyed.

If you’ve been following me this year, you know these trends are not new, and usually, they already have a name!

So here they are, the worst HR trends of 2024:

5. Rage applying

You ever have a day so bad at work that you got home and applied to 20 jobs on LinkedIn out of anger, frustration, or anxiety?

That’s rage applying.

Here’s the thing though, people have been leaving toxic jobs, whether dropping the mic and walking off (rage quitting) or applying and landing a new role.

This ain’t new.

I do think the emergence of this term over last year or so into the lexicon has more to do with a labor market that favors organizations and not workers.

Where one would love to walk off the job, finding a new role has become increasingly difficult (the average job hunt takes 6-9 months). So applying to any role that crosses your feed becomes the outlet for dealing with feeling stuck in a place that devalues your time, experience, and input.

4. Quiet vacationing

Quiet vacationing is when someone takes a “secret” vacation without requesting leave or informing their manager. They either work remotely, or if things are slow, remain available via Slack and regularly check email.

We’re in that twilight zone between Christmas and New Years right now. Let’s not pretend that back in the day, Barbara and Jim didn’t spend their in-office hours during this time working hard. They took three trips to the coffee shop downstairs, hourly smoke breaks, and browsed the JCPenny catalog.

My point is, if there’s no work to do…why require folks to use their valuable PTO.

Also, if your team doesn’t feel like they can take vacation (or tell you about it), sounds like a culture and trust problem.

3. Hushed hybrid

This trend emerged in 2024 among increasing RTO mandates. It’s when managers allow more WFH days or increased work flexibility, all off the record.

This is just people management. Pre-pandemic, this is how things worked. Managers used their judgement to determine what’s best for their team. Managers know their people—how, when, and where they work best.

I can’t with yet another cutesy term for employee experience.

I also can’t with the need for managers to spend so much brain space enforcing workplace policies that make no sense.

2. Silent layoffs

A silent layoff is when an organization drives employees to quit on their own without severance rather than laying them off en masse.

They do this by intentionally diminishing the employee experience. I’ve seen this work most effectively this year by:

• RTO mandates
• Forced relocations
• Reduced bonuses, stock grants
• Lower overall compensation
• Limited office perks
• Restricting promotions and career growth opportunities

However, these layoffs are anything but silent. Employees can hear them coming a mile away with talk of organizational restructuring, enhancing office culture, doing more with less, market headwinds… oh yes, and the many multiple rounds of actual layoffs.

If we want to talk about actual silent layoffs, we can look to the genius of Jack Welsh of 1980s GE. (I’m being facetious about the genius bit, obviously). GE introduced the forced stack ranking of employees and annual termination of the bottom 10%.

Today, 30% of Fortune 500 companies use the vitality curve (lovingly referred to internally as rank and yank). It is worth noting, GE abandoned the practice as ineffective.?

1. Quiet quitting

Quiet quitting gained popularity in 2022 in a Business Insider article about employees “coasting” at work. I see it as the umbrella term for any new media-coined phrase describing someone giving less than 150%.

Some of the most unserious I saw this year were:

• Resenteeism: the act of showing up to work, but being mad about it?
• Employee nesting: sticking with an employer for more than a few years without trying to climb the corporate ladder

These terms have gained an almost mythic presence in the last two years. It is the biggest (and bullsh!ttiest) workplace boogeyman of our time.

When leaders or the news lament about the scourge of quiet quitters, they paint of picture of the disaffected employee who simply stops showing up or doing any work.

What the trend is actually about is employees simply doing what is expected. No more, no less. They may be less engaged than they were previously, but still showing up, meeting expectations, and going home at the end of the day.

Honestly, that’s a solid employee.

This is why I hate this trend.

It’s saying that a person who has decided to no longer give every waking hour and ounce of energy to their employer is somehow contributing nothing. Employment isn’t all or nothing. It’s a contract. Money provided in exchange for time and/or a specific set of services.

Any effort, time, or energy on top of that is bonus.

And employers who want more bonus, should in turn improve their Employee Value Proposition or EVP. (More on that another time)

Expecting everyone to be a rockstar-ninja-rocket-ship-emoji employee isn’t realistic.

Quiet quitting is a misnomer.

Again, it’s just about humans responding to their workplace and choosing balance and boundaries over unquestioning loyalty to an employer who would replace them the same day they

It is decreased engagement. End of story.

Is everyone disengaged?

I want to dig a little deeper into employee engagement in general, because given the number of times we’ve seen articles fear monger about quiet quitters, quiet vacationers, and hushed hybriders… it seems like it’s an emergency.

Like with any characteristic slice of a population, employee engagement exists along a spectrum (there's that curve again).

This is nothing new. Since we were hunting and gathering, there was probably a slice of Homo sapiens who loved their work, and a slice who absolutely hated it.

Some hunters were enthusiastic; they searched for the best game, stayed out late on a hunt, and asked their clans what type of meat they wanted next. While some just nabbed the first sickly deer they could find and returned home with gristly meat. I assume.

In the 25+ years since Gallup has been measuring employee engagement, the highly engaged and actively disengaged workers have varied. Generally, the engaged outnumber the disengaged about 2:1.

In 2024, the US reached an 11-year low in employee engagement—down to 30% from 33% in 2023. Likewise, disengagement rose 1% to 17% in 2024.

For comparison, in the last 11 years, the highest recorded engagement was 36% in 2020 and the highest disengagement was 19% in 2013.

We’re talking about a 6- and 2- point swing top to bottom, respectively. Not an emergency as we’ve been led to believe by endless news articles about an avalanche of lazy workers who are just collecting a paycheck. 13,000 news search results and counting.

But no, everyone is not “quiet quitting.”

We are, however seeing the results of a diminished employee experience, whether by circumstance or intention.

Happy people are more engaged at work. Unhappy people, less so.

HR trends and engagement in 2025

Given the state of the world (and general disdain for workers in this current moment) I predict that engagement will continue to fall in 2025. However, the loss in engagement will fall out of the highly engaged part of the curve down to the middle 50% (rather than converting the highly engaged into actively disengaged).

My HR friends and I are so tired with a new article each week warning of a new employee boogeyman. Quiet quitting. Quiet vacationing. Resenteeism.

It's all predictable response to a bad employee experience. That's it. But it's easier to:

• put a kitschy name to it
• blame the individual and not the system
• blame the generational punching bag
• get lazy instead of do the work to fix a broken culture

Next time we see a new HR trend hit the stands (and we will), before losing it, ask:

• is this really something new or do we already have the language to describe it?
• is this a systemic problem or down to a handful of rowdy individuals?
• what does the data really show?

Here's where media literacy meets employee experience.

BONUS!

Want more on this topic? Listen to my conversation with Stacey Nordwall on Toot or Boot: Revenge of the HR Trends

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