Can the corporate Wellbeing be an antidote to the phenomenon of Quiet Quitting?

“Quiet quitting” is a term that describes employees who simply are fulfilling their job requirements, but not taking working overtime nor volunteering for extra projects or responsibilities nor?responding to messages out of hours, or taking on work that’s outside of their job description even when their calendars are full, or stay late every night just to prove their commitment.

The understanding of the phenomenon requires we share some preliminary assumptions.

Firstly, if we just measure or intend the quite quitting phenomenon as the employee's attitude of purely adhering to contractual working hours, doing neither more nor less, we risk going astray and being inconsistent with the modern model of the employment relationship that is increasingly "activity or performance based" instead of "time-based" as a result of new way of working ever more flexible and agile.

The Quite quitting - if intended as a strategy to manage the work agendas in a way that gives proper room for fulfillment to one's personal, emotional and family dimension- is not a problem at all if it concerns workers who remain well performing, motivated, engaged and actively participant in the company's value culture. Indeed in this case we are dealing with a rare and ideal example of an efficiency exercise.

On the other hand, a problem of quite quitting arises for workers who transit from a history of high motivation and active engagement to a condition of passive participation, chronic disengagement, and isolation from other team members, with a side effect of increasing the workload of other colleagues.

?This may occur as a consequence of distress induced by at least 3 factors:?

1. Finding oneself in a burnout condition due to having adopted in the past a workaholic style peculiar to the hustle culture inherit by an US cultural model that we have considered for decades as a winning approach and for which pushing extra working hours and job commitment over the limit, weekends included, makes one unique and deserving, determines career, success and high pay levels, as well as arousing admiration from superiors and colleagues. A profoundly individualistic style, sometimes narcissistic, very much centered on a type of personal ambition and competition taken to the extreme and in the face of which there is a very high risk of burnout phenomena and a significant deterioration in the quality of interpersonal relations with the team and the work organization.?
2. The supervening inappropriateness of skills and competencies brought about by the digital transition and the so-called "dealing with ambiguity". The latter experimented during ?the Covid is definitively a perspective consubstantial to Industry 4.0 and the forthcoming Industry 5.0 for which we are forced, individuals companies and businesses, to come to terms with social, economic and political models that are fluid, unstable and constantly evolving also due to extremely variable and conflicting geopolitical contexts and the increasingly decisive influence of legislative and regulatory policies at the national and EU level.?
3. The pervasiveness of new technologies, which in the sphere of labor relations together with the so-called process of deconstruction of physical space-time barriers of the enterprises, whereby companies are not constrained anymore to a physically and spatially confined place of work, have facilitated phenomena of permanent connection and digital overworking, inducing massive experiences of work-life blending, as opposed to work-life balance, that often lead to overlapping work and private life and vice versa.? In such a context, defined by uncertainty and volatility of economic, social and political patterns, permanent digital connectedness and work-life blending, the HRs have the daunting task of understanding how to reinforce the motivational drive of the no-longer engaged employee, and this certainly passes through a rethinking of the concept of well-being, which, however, should not be declined only at the level of each single employee (also because it would be unrealistic to think that we can give voice to every specific need of each employee) but should be understood primarily as organizational well-being. Specifically, there is a need to orient the labor organizations toward social sustainability goals, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030 and in particular Goal No. 8 precisely dedicated to promoting the conditions for full and productive employment and decent work for all. The ability of a corporate organization to be socially sustainable, moving from the traditional Fordist and Taylorist paradigm toward a paradigm attentive to the value of the person, is nothing but the ability to create the conditions for "human well-being"(safety and health, equity, training, participation), distributing them equally by social classes gender and generations, and to realize relational contexts in which, by minimizing inequality and information asymmetries, the employees are actually able to express and implement their talents, creating added value for the organization itself with a positive impact on the dynamics of profitability and profitability. It means redefining a corporate organization bringing a culture of flexibility, psychological safety, acceptance of error, inclusiveness through targeted diversity management policies and a welfare and wellbeing offer capable of improving the quality of the work-life balance in a way that is concretely functional to the satisfaction of life's needs in the multiplicity of contingencies in which it is expressed (parental care, personal care, disability care). But organizational well-being and socially sustainable corporate organization means above all rethinking the skills and competencies model by retraining the employee's employability, through a balanced mix of new hard skills (digital, technological, sustainability skills) and functional soft skills that make each employee capable of interacting and measuring up to the complexity of phenomena involving not only the company they work for but more generally the global market and civil society. And it also means rethinking the leadership model, which, in order to be functional for a socially sustainable work organization, can no longer be a directive and command leadership. An authentic leadership style is required that is a leadership capable of stimulating, through dynamics of trust, active listening and enhancement of talents, an heartfelt participation of the team and the individuals in the dynamics of the company, generating efficiency, productivity and increased corporate reputation. In a word, organizational well-being and socially sustainable corporate organization basically means providing quality of and in the work relationship and quality of life in a broader sense. Under this perspective, they represent the new form of remuneration that - together with salaries in line with pay benchmarks and net of flexible pay positioning choices for particular strategic clusters of employees- can generate powerful leverage on the company's ability to attract talent or continue to motivate and keep engaged the existing employees. To come to an end. Here’s a harsh truth: some employers who think they have a quiet quitting problem actually have an overworking issue or a competencies/skills mismatch.?And here’s the thing: every employee needs to (properly) switch off from work when they go home and the best managers should encourage this.?Also every employee needs to be provided and trained with the necessary skills and competencies to properly meet the Employer's and business' expectations.?Persistently ignoring employees’ boundaries by asking them to stay late, calling them after hours or expecting to perform well without the proper skills, could mean they end up disengaging and "quite quitting"from their roles and accountabilities.