Employers should adjust to ‘quiet quitting’ analyst says

CBS News Senior Business Analyst Jill Schlesinger said many businesses are not doing a good job of adjusting to the current cultural and technical business trends.

In an interview on Seattle’s Morning News with hosts Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien, Schlesinger said, “there are companies that are doing a really awful job. They are demanding that people get back in the office. They don’t care about what’s going on.”

Hybrid work is a strong model

Schlesinger told KIRO Newsradio’s Dave Ross, “the hybrid model looks like it’s here to stay. I think it is so ridiculous to complain about it. Just adapt to it and move on. The job market is adapting. The generational trends are adapting and technology is adapting. So let’s just do it better.”

She said there is still an upside to in-person work that companies are trying to get across, and the hybrid work model could be the best of both worlds.

“They want you to interact with each other. That’s good. There is something to be said for being back in person, right?” Schlesinger said. “You know, it is true that it’s good to interact with your co-workers, maybe not five days a week, but you know, some of them you might like, and you do have to show up physically if your fuddy-duddy boss cares about that.

“They also want you to get the corporate culture. They want more mentorship,” but she told Ross, there’s even a downside to that. “Some of that corporate culture was lousy, especially for women and people of color.”

‘Quiet Quitting’ is just a work-life balance

The trend of ‘quiet quitting’ isn’t as negative as many believe.

“Just to be clear, ‘quiet quitting’ does not mean that you quit, it just means that you are trying to create a balance between your work life and your home life, right?” Schlesinger said.

“Work-life balance is what we kids called it, back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s,” she went on. “Now they are really struggling because they are seeing their work life and home life blur before their eyes.”

Schlesinger said many companies are concerned about work output from employees. “They say we need more productivity, but people were very productive from home. The corporations made a ton of money during the pandemic.”

Job market changing

“The job market is shifting, and it’s happening in very interesting ways. So we have seen that the pace of job creation is tapering off,” Schlesinger said. “Last year, we had a monthly average of 562,000 jobs every single month for 2021. That helped us recoup a whole bunch of those 22 million jobs lost in the pandemic, then this year, we’ve been averaging 420,000 jobs a month. And now we got the September report 263,000.

US job openings sink as economy slows

“Job growth is tapering off at the same time, wages are increasing,” Schlesinger said. “And we have some big companies like Walmart and Amazon basically saying they’re either going to reduce or freeze their hiring in some parts of their businesses.

“So what does that tell us? It tells us that at a time when the economy is sort of confronting both inflation and higher interest rates, the hiring managers out there are saying, ‘Hmm, let’s rethink what we’re doing.’ And that’s an important piece of information for workers. If you think that a recession is coming, you should not make a lot of demands. And I think that this trend of ‘quiet quitting,’ could be part of that. Like, let’s be careful with that.”

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.