The two appeared after the term “quiet resignation” was popularized on the social media app TikTok in August. While definitions vary, quiet quitting basically describes employees setting boundaries to prevent burnout and sticking to them by starting work when scheduled, doing the work assigned to them, and leaving on time. Career coach Adam Broda described quiet management in an Aug. 29 LinkedIn post. He said it involves managers stepping back and giving employees more power by not controlling shift start and end times, allowing people to work where they want, eliminating unnecessary meetings and encouraging guilt-free time off. “Quiet managers operate with a high level of trust in their employers and do not micromanage,” Broda wrote. “That way, the job becomes more of a support role.” Another post by LinkedIn News editor Matt Lockie on Aug. 25 defined silent firing, a more insidious workplace practice, as diminishing an employee’s role by withholding raises or promotions, shifting responsibilities to jobs that require less experience, or intentionally growth and leadership opportunities, hopefully. that person will resign. For Patrick Stepanian, who manages a team at HR consultancy Peninsula Canada, the labels “quiet” may be new, but the concepts they refer to have been around for a long time. And the fact that they have re-emerged in the public consciousness suggests that people are willing to move on from the neoliberal attitudes to work that have dominated since the 1980s, as unionism sees a resurgence in the technology, e-commerce and services. “It’s a rethinking of the relationships that were (previously) established between employers and employees,” Stepanian told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview Wednesday. “We’ve had a certain way of thinking about the opportunities we do and what people do to get money, and that’s been dominant for the last 40 years. Now we have another change.” Melissa Nightingale, co-founder of business management consultancy Raw Signal, believes the pandemic has been a major driver of today’s changes in the way people think about work. “Overnight, many of our deeply held assumptions about work — from where it happens to when and how — were overturned,” he told CTVNews.ca in an email Wednesday. “It’s no surprise that as many employers try to get workers back into the office, their employees want to consider assumptions about what this new phase of work will look like.” See how Stepanian, Nightingale and her husband, Raw Signal co-founder Johnathan Nightingale, break down quiet cutting, quiet baking and quiet management.

QUIET OBSERVATION

Stepanian views silent resignation as workers being pushed into environments where they are expected to take on additional duties not stipulated in their contracts or work outside of their scheduled shifts, without recognition or compensation from employers. Instead of condemning workers who refuse to put in extra work for free, he said employers should adopt a positive mindset. “You reward people who go above and beyond, but you don’t punish people who don’t,” he said. When workers can’t set healthy boundaries with their employers, Melissa Nightingale said, it’s easy for a 40-hour work week to slip into a 50-plus hour work week. “As managers, it’s our job to deal with workload and resources,” he said. “And if… you’ve assumed that your people would ignore the clock and continue to go far beyond their own markers for exhaustion, that’s your workforce saying they’ll go that far, but no further.” In a situation where an employee is late completing tasks they should reasonably be able to complete within their scheduled shifts, Stepanian said supportive managers should help figure out if their workflow can be improved for the better Results. “If the employer or the manager is able to raise a reasonable point of improvement starting from a positive place, and there’s a real coaching element to it, that, to me, hopefully speaks to who the manager is,” he said.

SILENT FIRING

An informal online survey published by LinkedIn News on Aug. 25 found that 83 percent of more than 20,000 respondents had either experienced or witnessed silent layoffs at work. For Johnathan Nightingale, silent dismissal essentially describes a long-standing, persistent practice sometimes called “constructive dismissal,” in which a manager who wants to avoid formally firing or firing a worker makes his working conditions so toxic that the employee resigns. It’s “a new phrase for an old and awful practice,” Nightingale told CTVNews.ca in an email Wednesday. Managers guilty of this practice may reduce or remove an employee’s contractual duties, resulting in a drop in the employee’s position within the company. exclude an employee from decision-making processes in which they would have previously been involved; and significantly reduce an employee’s hours of work, as defined by the Government of Canada’s definition of constructive dismissal. Nightingale said a manager may justify constructive dismissal in terms of saving money on redundancy costs or avoiding lengthy red tape, “but the truth is they are making a really harmful and unjustified choice”. Constructive dismissal is prohibited under Canadian labor law. Nightingale said anyone who might be the victim of a silent or constructive dismissal should start keeping detailed notes about any changes made to their role, whether anyone else was affected and how conversations with management have progressed. “What was the management’s response when you raised concerns? Keep email. You’ll probably want your own legal advice, and when you do, they’ll immediately ask for a paper route,” Nightingale said. “HR can sometimes help here too…But some HR people enable this bad behavior, so it’s important to get outside legal advice if you can afford it. And if you’re in a union shop, talk to your manager about your concerns early.”

QUIET MANAGEMENT

Stepanian said he takes a supportive approach that could be called “quiet management” in managing his Peninsula Canada team. It doesn’t look over workers’ shoulders, manage their shift start and end times, or dictate all the tasks they work during the day. Stepanian described his team as efficient and highly skilled at solving problems, and said that when established early and supported by clear communication, the calm management style can be effective. “It requires a sort of reinforcement of ‘I’m here.’ I’m the head of this team, but I trust each of you to do whatever you do with a certain high standard and that I don’t need to pander to you. I trust you,” he said. However, there are risks to this management style that employers should be aware of, warns Melissa Nightingale. While a more trust-based management style can provide benefits to both managers and employees, Nightingale said it’s important for managers to ensure that individual employee preferences are met without negatively impacting other employees. “The management challenge is figuring out how to set policies and expectations across your team while still understanding and meeting the needs of individuals,” he said. “That’s often what makes it a hard job to do well.” Regardless of the label used to describe it, Stepanian and Nightingale said that any successful management style is based on regular and positive communication. In fact, Stepanian said communication – or the lack of it – is the thread that connects quiet management, quiet firing and quiet disruption. “It all comes down to clearly communicating expectations as early as possible, and sometimes often, so that everyone is on the same page,” he said. “It’s about setting expectations up front.”