Understanding quiet quitting: A guide for contact centre professionals

While contact centres aren’t solely responsible for employee happiness, what does fall within an organisation’s sphere of influence are the occupational, social, and financial elements of wellbeing. Quiet quitting is an understated yet impactful symptom, which has arisen as a response to long-standing institutional blind spots and in some instances employee manipulation or exploitation. This subtle act of disengagement underscores a growing need for recognition and professional meaning.  

So, in an era of workplace awareness, how can contact centres meet these evolving responsibilities? It starts by unravelling the intricacies of quiet quitting and addressing deep-rooted issues which lead to disengagement.

What is quiet quitting? 

Quiet quitting isn’t quitting a job entirely, it’s all about engagement and effort: quitting doing more, not going that extra mile. Forget above-and-beyond, it represents disengagement and should ring alarm bells for managers and supervisors trying to provide quality customer service.  

Plummeting engagement levels are the start of a slippery slope, typically praised activities like teamwork, using soft skills and problem-solving begin to grind to a halt. This, in theory, should impact potential raises, promotions and career development. So why do people still choose to quiet quit? It’s all about expectations and the mismatch between recognition, reward and effort. If you don’t feel valued then why waste your efforts, if you don’t feel fairly rewarded what are you really risking? 

The social and economic context 

It’s been suggested the roots of global quiet quitting trends lie in China, with its intense endemic culture of hard work and long hours. Popularity, momentum and global recognition though, came largely due to a viral video on TikTok in 2022. 

At the time, coming out of the pandemic, a significant number of employees found themselves reevaluating their priorities, embarking on a quest for meaning, and adapting to the transformative shift brought about by the widespread adoption of remote work. This created a perfect storm, fundamentally reshaping employee attitudes towards work. It compelled many people to conserve their energy and passion for activities where their contributions had meaning and were appreciated. While ‘acting your wage’ succinctly captures the essence of quiet quitting it does trivialise some of its important drivers.     

Quiet quitting versus the Great Resignation and other workplace trends 

In a spectrum of workplace trends, the Great Resignation and quiet quitting are reflections of contrasting employee sentiment. The Great Resignation, characterised by widespread resignations or quitting, is driven by the belief that better opportunities exist elsewhere. Employees actively seek change, motivated by the pursuit of improved work-life balance, enhanced compensation, and alignment with personal values. This trend, albeit disruptive, due to higher turnover rates, carries a positive undertone; taking control and forging a rewarding career.  

On the other hand, quiet quitting, is akin to resignation in its second sense, the acceptance of something undesirable but inevitable. Instead of actively seeking new opportunities, employees disengage from their existing roles and withhold, what they view, as uncompensated additional effort. While less overt than the Great Resignation, quiet quitting poses its own set of challenges. Understanding these attitudes and nuances is crucial for organisations as new trends are merging all the time like snail girls, loud quitting and malicious compliance.   

Fostering open dialogues: a collective approach to quiet quitting 

There is a clear relationship between workplace culture and quiet quitting. An unhealthy workplace dynamic is rife with potential triggers, and often quiet quitting will go unnoticed. Positive culture on the other hand, coupled with open communication, has the potential not only to prevent quiet quitting but also to reverse its effects. These dynamics impact all employees, irrespective of their roles—managers, supervisors, and agents alike—since anyone can experience burnout or disillusionment.  

Facilitating stress management and objective decision-making is something contact centres can help with. Incorporating the right break frequency and encouraging healthy coping strategies for stress promote a positive working environment. This allows employees to critically examine perceived pain points and increases the chance of them taking positive action rather than choosing to quiet quit.  

While some organisations have yet to implement culture-positive policies with mutual goodwill and the courage to engage in challenging conversations, employees can voice their needs and inspire institutional changes. Despite this some mismatches will still occur and the ability to offer objective feedback and leverage contact centre tools for self-assessment can be crucial in maintaining realistic and fair conversations. Navigating career dissatisfaction can become an empowering process, advocating for, negotiating on and securing more personalised terms to achieve higher levels of job satisfaction.  

Mitigating and managing quiet quitting  

Recognising the pivotal role of feeling valued, managers can leverage workforce engagement strategies and performance insights to track the unique contributions of each team member. Much of this data collection can be automated, both saving time and informing development plans. While it’s easy to reward top performers, acknowledging consistent improvement and efforts, especially during challenging periods, is also a critical element of recognition and reward schemes. 

It’s not only performance metrics but considering attitude and effort that ensures a holistic approach. Implementing impromptu or regular feedback mechanisms, both internally among colleagues and externally with customers can highlight difficult-to-quantify yet noteworthy actions and behaviours that might be overlooked when viewed solely as data points. 

Data visualisation, analytics and feedback tools can be used to spot early signs of disengagement, such as a drop from being a high performer to an average one or a shift in attitude impacting customer interactions. Recognising these signals enables intervention, allowing supervisors to delve into individual concerns and collaboratively address the root causes of quiet quitting. 

A final aspect which shouldn’t be overlooked is sustaining day-to-day engagement and employee motivation. By leveraging automation and AI-tools in both customer-facing and agent workflows contact centres achieve several important goals:  

• Minimising the number of low-satisfaction tasks, 
• Reducing the monotony of repetitive responsibilities,  
• Promoting a sense of fulfilment and achievement,   
• Empowering agents during complex interactions with AI-generated suggestions and prompts,  
• Improving outcomes and experiences for customers and agents. 

After all the satisfaction of a job well done comes from overcoming challenges. 

Adapting to the future of work with CCaaS 

Navigating future changes to working norms and the challenges of managing remote employees necessitate a strategic approach that fosters trust and connection within the contact centre. With a multitude of demands on supervisor time, automation and unified communications tools are a powerful ally. By embracing cloud-based contact centre technology, organisations can not only address current issues but also unlock the potential for new and innovative workforce management and scheduling challenges. 

Adaptability to shifting working norms will no doubt boost employee morale and engagement, while open communication can quickly remedy new pain points which will no doubt emerge. In this context Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions offer multifaceted benefits that extend beyond mere adaptability. CCaaS solutions provide the tools and frameworks needed to optimise workforce management, integrate UCaaS and AI tools to support both customers and agents.  

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