Dear Valued Employee
Dear Valued Employee,
We’re worried about you. And when we say we’re worried about you, we mean we’re worried about us.
You haven’t been yourself lately. We’ve noticed you setting boundaries around your time, only working when you’re actually getting paid, and not doing your job plus 75% of another position that we keep saying we’re going to fill. We understand that the extra duties are cumbersome and impossible long term, but we’ve been telling you for the last four and a half years that the situation is only temporary.
We’ll be candid. We generally think you’re acting like this because you’re one of those millennials (please don’t ask us what that actually means). You’re young and entitled, as you’ve heard us mention several times before in very targeted comments about participation trophies. You seem to think that you can come in here and just do your job reasonably well and collect a paycheck. We’ve also overheard you saying things like “I’m just here to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” and other similar insubordinations. This attitude is also reflected in your email and text message logs that we secretly asked IT to pull for us while you were out on PTO last week for a “family situation.” HR has asked us not to convey our annoyance with you for taking the time off in writing, so it’s best not to be long winded.
To return to our original point, this simply isn’t what we were expecting from you. It’s almost like you’ve decided that your job isn’t the entire reason you exist. Our business model depends heavily on people like you having their identity so wrapped up in their work that we can exploit their desire to make something of themselves. We at least need you to retain some hope that we’ll eventually reward you for your extra work and loyalty at a future date when it’s convenient for us.
We’ve had a difficult time figuring out what to do with you, and we have decided to stick with a tried and true tactic. We know that if we give a catchy sounding name to this thing you’re doing, we can brand it as something negative. Believe us when we say we know what we’re doing, or we’ll make fun of you for drinking pricy coffee and eating avocado toast. We’ve decided to call what you’re doing “Quiet Quitting.”
Please respond so we can ignore everything you say. We will, however, store a copy of this whole interaction in your file to use against you at a later date for an unrelated issue.
Sincerely,
The People In Charge
Dear People In Charge,
My apologies for taking so long to get back to you, your letter sparked a craving for an expensive latte and an eccentric snack, so I visited the café on the corner for lunch before drafting my response.
I don’t think that my “quiet quitting” has been all that quiet. I’ve been quite upfront and vocal about it, really. Perhaps it’s felt quiet because you weren’t listening. That’s ok. I’ll say it one more time.
I gave extra for the first several years I worked here. I was happy to do it. I was told that if I worked hard to take care of the company, you would work hard to take care of me. You kept saying that if I just stuck with it, you would be able to promote me or give me a significant pay increase or hire someone to help me next quarter. Next quarter turned into next year, and eventually I realized that your primary goal was always to improve your short-term financials.
I’m not mad at you. You’re just looking out for the business, and I understand that better than you might think. But if we’re both looking out for you, and neither of us is looking out for me, that’s going to go badly for one of us in the long run. So to even the playing field, I decided that you and I should both play by the same rules and act in our own best interest.
I realize now that I need to do a little less soul searching and a little more job searching. I think I’ll head to the microbrewery after work today for a seasonal quadruple hopped local craft IPA and spend some time with my resume.
Yours truly,
Almost Former Employee