‘Quiet quitters’ aren’t the problem. Save your ire for the ‘loud labourers’
In recent weeks, there has been an avalanche of discussion about “quiet quitters”. These are people who have grown disillusioned with their workplaces and given up putting in additional effort; no monitoring their emails during the weekend or working on a pressing project during the evening. Quiet quitters have retreated into their job description, trying to preserve their sanity by limiting what they do.
Yet the discussion about quiet quitters has entirely overlooked their noisier cousins: the “loud labourers”. If you have had a colleague who spends more time talking about work than actually doing it, then you have witnessed a loud labourer first-hand. These are employees who see their core task as telling everyone what they have done. For these individuals, the actual work is a distant afterthought. They graft for the ‘gram, toil for the tweets, and labour for the LinkedIn likes. Actually getting anything done is just an afterthought.
Loud labour is nothing new. If you give a group of people a task, there will always be those who sigh the loudest. Evolutionary psychologists will tell you that moaning, grunting and sighing is a way we signal our contribution in the hope of reaping rewards. The hunter who plays up the effort she made to catch the prey may hope for a greater share of her quarry, or at least more status within her group. The cook who talks about the extensive effort he has made to prepare the dish hopes for greater rewards – even if it is just praise. Even the grunting of professional tennis players has been interpreted as a kind of competitive signal they send out in the hope of getting an advantage over opponents.
As work has become increasingly complicated, so too have the tactics of the loud labourer.
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