Talk of the so-called quiet smoking cessation is everywhere these days, and one expert says it’s a “profound opportunity” for Canadian companies to get it right with workers and improve the work landscape for the future. Melissa Nightingale, co-founder of management training firm Raw Signal Group, says smart organizations will take this moment to try to understand current workforce dynamics and meet people where they are. Although definitions vary, quietly interrupting essentially refers to showing up when expected, doing your assigned tasks, leaving on time, and not taking on extra work outside of your regular hours. This is not about slacking off at work, but about setting boundaries and preventing burnout and not taking on extra work for which the employee is not paid. In a tight labor market, attracting and retaining talent takes on increased importance as workers have more options. Job vacancies are at an all-time high after rising 3.2 percent in June from a month earlier as employers scrambled to fill more than a million positions for the third straight month. Nightingale says employers need to be upfront about their expectations from the start, while ensuring their employees are engaged, motivated and balanced. “You don’t want to be in a situation where you come in every day and your boss has something else on his mind, but he doesn’t tell you what it is. It’s not a good atmosphere,” he says. “You’re asking people to read your mind.” It’s also important to ensure employees have a clear sense of what success looks like in their roles, he explains. Most workers understand that the nature of the working world means that sometimes unexpected tasks pop up, or an important deadline means that a project that was supposed to be completed earlier in the day ends up at night. The problem is when these exceptions become an everyday thing that the employer didn’t clearly outline during the hiring process, or when an issue like chronic understaffing was never raised early on. “Then you have a job that is structured for burnout,” says Nightingale. Incidences of burnout are increasing in all sectors, especially in health care and education, and it is driving workers out of these jobs. Another part of the equation that pushes employees to quietly leave is the salary component. While wages were rising, they were not keeping pace with inflation. Average hourly earnings of workers rose 5.2 percent year-over-year in July, matching the rate of wage growth recorded in June, but that was still less than the rate of inflation. An additional variable in the current job market is the wave of layoffs in certain sectors such as technology, cannabis, and even the auto industry. Andrea Bartlett, director of human operations at HR software solutions company Humi, says this will add pressure on those remaining employees, possibly pushing some to burn out. “I really wonder if these organizations have spent time and focus on what kind of recognition and rewards they have for the people who are left, who have the same workload and now significantly less resources,” he says. He adds that “quiet resignation” puts the onus on the employee, not the employer, to pick up the ball on ways to improve the work environment. “If employers look out for their employees, the hope is that it will change the conversation for the better,” he says. Raw Signal’s Nightingale says the past two years have been “such a push” in terms of who has the power to redefine what work is, adding that many workers don’t want to go back to pre-pandemic standards. “The pulse of what they’re trying to say isn’t that they don’t want to work, it’s ‘We don’t want to work the same way we’ve always worked and we’re looking for something a little different,’” he says.
