Nov 12, 2023

author of Chained to the Desk in a Hybrid World: A Guide to Balance. You'll be asked to sign into your Forbes account. Nov 12, 2023, Got it! getty There’s a lot of quiet action taking place under the radar in today’s business world. Quiet culture workplace trends—such as quiet firing , quiet quitting and quiet hiring —were intended to assuage the immediate and acute needs of businesses. Instead, they have backfired—creating suspicion, mistrust and low morale. Now, another controversial quiet trend is stirring up conversations in the corporate world. The practice of “quiet cutting” is an old practice with a new name. It involves employers reassigning workers to new roles in hopes they will eventually quit so the company saves the cost of severance. The Frequency Of ‘Quiet Cutting’ To dig deeper into this controversial approach to modern-day layoffs, the team at Zetwerk surveyed 1,015 business owners and employees across various industries—information technology (36%), engineering and manufacturing (27%), health care (11%), retail (eight percent) and education (eight percent). The generational breakdown among participants included millennials (52%), Gen X (24%), Gen Z (17%) and baby boomers (seven percent). The Zetwerk team discovered that nearly 24% of employers practice quiet cutting for reasons of performance management (73%), cost-savings (42%), reorganization (33%) and employee turnover (16%). Those companies that encourage quiet cutting, end up firing more than one in three of the employees that they reassign. Entry-level employees are the ones most often cut (53%), followed by mid-level (40%), management (5%) and senior level (2%). The percentage of employees quietly cut by industry include information technology (38%), retail (37%), education (30%), health care (25%) and engineering and manufacturing (24%). Additional key takeaways from the survey include the following: 56% of surveyed employees prefer straightforward termination. One in three employees have experienced quiet cutting, with nearly half knowing an affected colleague—50% of employees feel betrayed by this approach. 62% of those who were reassigned disliked their reassignment. Almost 40% of quietly cut employees eventually leave, with another 28% planning to do so—but not so quietly. Nearly 30% left a negative company review. I communicated by email with Madeline Weirman, creative strategist for Zetwerk, who told me that the most intriguing aspect of their research is the prevalence of quiet cutting in the business world, with nearly one in four business owners admitting to practicing it. “It's striking to see the impact on both employers and employees, shedding light on the complexities of this controversial practice,” Weirman says. “It’s also encouraging to note that approximately 70% of employers advocate for transparency, and 54% consider 'quiet cutting' as unethical. Furthermore, more than half of reassigned employees surveyed acquired new skills, 15% were promoted to higher positions and nearly one in 10 even received a raise, suggesting that quiet cutting often doesn’t achieve the employers' intended results.” MORE FOR YOU