Several trends have recently gained traction in the workplace, and ‘quiet hiring’ is one of them. If you are unfamiliar with it, quiet hiring describes a company’s practice of filling job openings with current employees without publicizing any vacancy.

Additionally, this term is used when a company faces a workload increase, requiring employees to expand their roles, enhance their existing skills or assume new responsibilities, thus ‘hiring’ them beyond the original contract. It follows the trend of ‘quiet quitting’.

Can we do anything differently today to turn those quiet decisions, whether quitting or hiring, into positives? Is quiet hiring another way for employers to exploit employees? Will employees be compensated for their extra work? Worries go on.

Ultimately, quiet hiring and other ‘quiets’ can be seen as an opportunity for leaders who aspire to build a resilient organization, and for employees interested in thriving in the workplace.

From an organizational standpoint, there is nothing new about these ‘quiet’ trends, except the new labels.

It still calls for better management and there’s much that should come with it – better communication, more transparency, a positive coaching attitude and being proactive with more creative solutions for facing the new challenges of the workplace, especially with those entering into it.

Ultimately, quiet hiring and other ‘quiets’ can be seen as an opportunity for leaders who aspire to build a resilient organization, and for employees interested in thriving in the workplace.

Reframing the Challenge

The scarcity of face-to-face interactions, the rise of hybrid work as a new standard and the blurred boundaries between home and work have all contributed to fuel an alarming situation in employee engagement, which was at a low 22 percent in 2019. While the numbers have come up in 2023, according to Gallup, they are still around one-third of employees.

These numbers should compel leadership to actively reengage, rehire and recognize ‘quiet hiring’ as a significant aspect of their role.

Consider the case of Amanda, newly hired as the Head of Marketing at a Software-as-a-Service company. She inherited a team of a dozen. The company has a diverse workforce based in the United States, Europe and South America. It is on a growth trajectory, recruiting and investing in its people and being careful not to overspend on perks; every penny counts.

One of Amanda’s team members, Logan, was showing increasing signs of quiet quitting. He was answering emails late, making a few negative comments here and there, participating less, looking unhappy during meetings, taking an increasingly neutral attitude with colleagues and delivering the minimum just in time.

From an organizational standpoint, there is nothing new about these ‘quiet’ trends, except the new labels.

However, the workload for Amanda’s team continued to increase. It gained new clients, started more outreach initiatives and there were new assignments for the team members.

At the same time, generative AI was transforming everyone’s job. There was the opportunity for everyone to grow, learn new tasks and be ‘quietly hired’ for them.

Was Logan’s case too desperate to adjust his job’s assignment and discuss new tasks? What was happening with him anyway? What should Amanda have done? High costs associated with talent development have always made engaging and retaining the best employees challenging across all levels.

However, the crucial difference now is that talented individuals like Logan may progressively, quietly disengage from work without their leader even noticing. This can negatively affects the employee’s morale.

The ‘Quiet’ Space

As organizations and employees become more accustomed to grappling with this new phenomenon of quiet hiring and other quiets, the word ‘quiet’ is paramount. Let’s dig into what the word refers to in these expressions. ‘Quiet’ encapsulates what happens up there in our mind with our brain and circuitry, and how they are influenced by the environment.

How we are driven to think ‘under the hood’ shows up in how we act. We need to go back to the days of behavioral research in the 1940s, to read about the importance of covert and overt behaviors. After a few years of radical behaviorism, scientists were investigating our cognition and personal constructs in the 1950s, while personality research was progressively identifying a limited number of factors to describe our behaviors, either coming from within or being observed from outside.

For more than three decades, novel techniques in neuroscience have brought new insights into the complexity of our covert (internal) processes and how they relate to emotions.

With remote work and fewer face-to-face interactions, this ‘quiet data’ is even more relevant today to foster better-informed conversations between employees and their managers.

Emerging in the 1990s, the behavior-factor-based approach we use at Growth Resources Institute uncovers what drives us to act from within and from without. What are our intrinsic motivations and engagement from a behavioral standpoint? How do we build trust and perform as a team?

How do we communicate, make decisions and solve issues? With remote work and fewer face-to-face interactions, this ‘quiet data’ is even more relevant today to foster better-informed conversations between employees and their managers.

The ‘quiet’ space holds value in comprehending other organizational aspects that quietly happen as well, such as ‘quiet interviewing’, ‘quiet onboarding’, ‘quiet building trusted connections’, ‘quiet communicating’, ‘quiet building team’, ‘quiet motivation’ or ‘quiet coaching’.

Better Informed Discussions

An employee has many reasons to ‘quietly quit’. It’s easy to jump to conclusions and invoke incompetence or inappropriate attitudes, blame the previous manager, even the HR employee who participated in the recruiting, or a coach who intervened.

For Amanda, as a new manager, building trust and growing leadership took time. Making a faux pas is usual when managing situations such as Logan’s. A discussion with the Founder and the HR Director involved in hiring Logan revealed that when Logan started his job, his experience, attitudes and delivery were at par with the expectations.

He started to underperform before Amanda started, when everyone in marketing reported to the Founder, but his underperformance had accelerated since then. In any case, Amanda inherited the situation, and it was now part of her job to find a solution for Logan. This typically requires management to make the first move. Most employees work remotely in different time zones at this company. They rarely meet in person.

Once uncovered, this ‘quiet space’ invites managers and employees alike to improve their relationship.

After six months in her new job, Amanda organized an offsite for her team in Europe. Logan was the only one who didn’t attend. However, the organization was using the behavior-factor-based approach, which provided Amanda with the information she needed to power the conversation with Logan and shift gears from ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘quiet firing’ to ‘quiet hiring’.

When recruiting, you may not immediately see the value people hold and what could be done to unleash their potential. It happens similarly with ‘quiet hiring’. The challenge of reaching that ‘quiet place’ of covert behavior, where you find what makes your people tick, is the same. There is much there that triggers us to communicate, understand our relations at and outside work, rationalize, worry and more.

Once uncovered, this ‘quiet space’ invites managers and employees alike to improve their relationship. For Amanda and Logan, it helped to compare their styles and understand more objectively the individual needs and the needs of their organization. They discovered that there was a misalignment that could be solved.

Logan realized that he needed to reorganize his work from home, clarify the benefits of group discussions, and see Amanda as a resource rather than a competitor for a position he was not ready to take anyway. It all required space for dialogue and better-informed discussion from the quiet space, which clarified how the employee and management contract could be continued and enriched for better performance.

Quiet Learning

Turnover harms the business by losing people with strong knowledge and commitment. If you are short on talent, rather than letting ‘quiet quitting’ affect the company negatively, you are compelled to create greater effectiveness among your human resources.

This requires uncovering their hidden strengths and helping them flourish in their job by continuously ‘quiet hiring’ wisely, with attention to how it benefits both the employee and the organization. It may feel like there is never time to work on and learn about the interpersonal elements, and that is where you need actionable data about your people that shows how they are likely to be the most effective and engaged.

‘Quiet hiring’ is certainly not a new concept, but as the pace of change and upheaval in workplaces increase, and uncertainty and fear around automation ramps up, it becomes critical to make it a positive experience.

Yet, when you understand how well a person functions, you can put their preferences and abilities to the best use, while also making sure they feel appreciated, and making a difference. This is an ongoing process that needs to be accelerated and objectified.

‘Quiet hiring’ is certainly not a new concept, but as the pace of change and upheaval in workplaces increase, and uncertainty and fear around automation ramps up, it becomes critical to make it a positive experience if you want to keep your people engaged and thriving.

Once you know more about what quietly happens that you couldn’t see, hopefully, it prompts you to continue to think, learn and do something about it.