TikTok’s quiet quitting trend, which puts employee mental health above workplace burnout, has risen in prominence throughout the last month, leaving both UAE employees and employers rethinking their place in the work environment.
However, a new term has emerged – quiet firing, a reverse on the quiet quitting trend, when an employer subtly forces an employee to leave their job through a malicious activities.
The term quiet firing surfaced when TikTok influencer DeAndre Brown took to the short-form video app to say, “if this is happening to you, your company is taking advantage of you….”
Like Brown said in his video, there are several tell-tale signs, some of which include:
- Not being invited to social events, networking opportunities
- Poor performance reviews with no justifications
- Being denied a promotion, despite regular contribution to workflow
- Your boss reassigns or directs your projects, emails to your co-worker
- Increase in workload or given menial tasks
- Your boss avoids you or even pretends you don’t exist as part of the team
- You are asked to document everything
- No positive feedback
Quiet firing can often demoralise employees, and can trigger more than just a simple resignation in them, with the company more at fault than the employee.
This could be the result of changing work practices in the region, The Talent Enterprise’s founder and chief executive officer David B Jones told Arabian Business.
“What we are learning from our work with clients in the region and beyond is that employers and employees are struggling with navigating the ambiguity and disruption caused by rapid changes in work practices from March 2020 onwards,” Jones said.
Jones added: “HR policies, laborious market regulations and basics such as workplace insurance coverage have all been upended to some extent in most industries,” with human resource policies and practices “appearing increasingly anachronistic and inappropriate.”
This is because of organisations navigating the permanent implementation of hybrid working or mandating the return to physical workplaces, leaving the scope open for confusion and abuse of practices from leave calculations, personal productivity, quiet quitting and even quiet firing, he said.
“Legislators and people professionals are striving to keep pace with the reality of the labour market practices in 2022 and we predict more ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity and volatility in the emergent modus operandi of the evolving modern workplace,” Jones said adding workplace flexibility is the key to avoiding pitfalls such as quiet firing.
Some companies are slowly adapting to a solution to quiet firing through implementing technology and utilising digital performance management tools, experts said.
These tools are placed in organisations, so that bosses do not fail to communicate with their employees effectively about their performance.
Speaking to Arabian Business, human resources and payroll software Bayzat’s head of customer success Brian Habibi said digital management tools could help counter quiet firing, as this would enable efficient tracking of employee performance.
“[Digital management tools] track the progress of employees against KPIs and fully automates the raising of alerts and reminders for stakeholders,” Habibi said.
“Ideally, every employee should have clarity into exactly what is expected of them, how their performance is perceived by the organisation, and what their progression prospects are,” Habibi said.
While these tools can provide additional clarity, the use of their results can still lead to questions of fairness, Habibi explained.
He said: “Less than half of employees believe that the metrics and processes used to evaluate them are fair and transparent.”
This factor is especially pertinent as 72 percent of the UAE businesses either do not have a formal performance-management process in place or are yet to digitise it, according to data from Bayzat.
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