Gallup: 90% !!! Quiet Quitting is the new NORMAL
Amine MECIFI
Public Speaker - Author - Quiet Quitting Advocate - Fighting Corporate Toxicity
Near my daughter’s school, berry plants with sharp thorns and ticks have overgrown, restricting the path and posing a hazard to the children. Despite the school's complaint to the council weeks ago, the issue remains unresolved. One parent shared a photo in our WhatsApp group of a little girl with red circles near her knee—signs of Lyme disease from a tick bite. She was injured by one of these plants and had to go to the hospital.
While conversations about cost, environmental impact, and scheduling were likely taking place, I decided to take action. Armed with a cutter, I spent a couple of hours clearing the dangerous branches, ensuring the kids' safety. They can keep discussing, but the problem is temporarily solved. And when the branches grow back, I'll be there again.
You probably sympathize with my actions as a decent human being. But here’s an unsolicited piece of advice: never do this in the corporate world.
In corporate environments, following established processes is paramount, even if those processes are flawed. Taking initiative might hurt someone’s ego, and in many companies, ego is more sacred than the well-being of the team or the success of a project. People would rather waste billions or bankrupt their company than admit they were wrong or the processes they worship aren’t working.
I remember working for a company that lost one of the largest healthcare systems in the world (the NHS!) as a client due to an inflexible process that no one could explain the reason for in the first place.
It sounds like something out of a dystopian novel about the USSR, but it’s better to lose the NHS by rigidly following processes than to win the NHS by bending them.
This mental rigidity is like the berry plants I mentioned earlier—it's growing everywhere inside the corporate world. You can't move a finger without getting stung by it. It's reached a point where people have stopped fighting and are now immobile, prostrated in resignation.
We have become a nation that doesn’t want to work—not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t! People are hired for their skills, interviewed for them, and then asked not to use them. Instead, they are told to sit in a corner and keep quiet.
Working has been redefined. It’s now means getting paid to sit in Zoom meetings and pretending to understand and finding value in the gibberish shared there.
Quiet quitting has become the new normal. According to the latest figures from Gallup's State of the Global Workforce 2024 report, 90% of employees feel detached from their roles and are slipping into a comfortable state of quiet quitting, from paycheck to paycheck.
If your company has 10,000 employees, it means 9,000 of them aren’t really engaged—and who can blame them? This attitude has become mainstream. Figuratively, a gun is held on their head and they are asked not to work.
Since I left the corporate world, I’ve rediscovered the long-lost pleasure of working. Now, I can think about something and make it happen. I can envision a book, write it, and see it on the shelves. I can imagine a SaaS idea just before sleeping, and two months later, the MVP is released.
For years, I felt myself getting dumber with every meeting I attended. In the corporate world, even the plants are fake. Don’t get me started on the smiles, friendships, and handshakes. I felt like I was slowly dying, the lights in my head dimming in that fake world that is now collapsing under the weight of its own stupidity.
This is not an unavoidable fate. It's still possible to imagine and create a different way to work with each other. We can build environments where people thrive, give their best, are properly rewarded, go home proud, and don't dread Mondays.
Yes, it's possible, but most companies would rather bite the dust and pay the ultimate price than accept change. To be fair, at this stage, change alone won't save the day. We are collectively too deep in trouble to think in terms of small changes.
We need a Revolution.
Gallup Report details:
Architecte Solutions
5 个月L'humilité est la precondition à l'évolution... L'ego devrait pouvoir s'en satisfaire à plus d'un titre.
Cybersecurity Architect, Microsoft @ IBM
5 个月That’s deep. I remember your story with that manager who refused his employees to replace the drives for NHS, just to make a point, knowing he is about to screw the company but didn’t care because it was not his ??own?? company. Indeed, ego is the number one killer on every project. Love any format you use to share these experiences, my friend.