- “Quiet thriving” is a workplace strategy that’s helping people take more control of their work.
- Lesley Alderman, a psychotherapist, said it’s a way to build resilience in a tough economy.
- She and another expert agreed that, by contrast, quiet quitting can disempower certain workers.
Quiet quitting may still be popular, as a recent Gallup survey found, but another career strategy, “quiet thriving,” is helping workers find joy in their jobs during a difficult economic climate.
The strategy is about “putting yourself more in control of your work,” rather than thinking of what a company can do for you, Lesley Alderman, a psychotherapist and journalist who coined the term in a December 2022 Washington Post article, told Insider.
“People feel best when they have a sense of agency,” Alderman said. “When people feel like they don’t have very much control, particularly at work, they tend to have less job satisfaction.”
This reflects the state of the modern workplace at a time when layoffs are rife and searching for a new job is a demoralizing slog.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic initially mobilized workers to quit unfulfilling jobs at record rates in a trend known as the Great Resignation, fears of a looming recession in 2022 forced many to backpedal and stay put.
As a result, some turned to quiet quitting to do the bare minimum at work. However, it’s not the strategy you should be focusing on, according to experts, including Alderman. She believes “quiet quitting is disempowering” and that workers instead need a resilient mindset to ride out a tough economy.
“Quiet thriving” includes incorporating small changes in your work life that “make you feel like the job is your own and it’s not just being dictated to you.”
Make intentional and subtle shifts
Alderman said the concept of “quiet thriving” emerged from her experiences with clients who were burnt out and resentful at work.
“They’d gotten into the mindset of there was only one way to do their job and that was to do it 110% or completely follow orders and they weren’t really thinking of it with a wide-angle lens,” she said.
Instead, making an “intentional” and “subtle” shift in your work patterns can make you feel more fulfilled, Alderman said.
This shift could include crafting your job to align with your interests and strengths and focusing on things that really matter to you. This can be anything from meeting for lunch with like-minded colleagues to forming a club. Every organization is different, but Alderman said that having a conversation with a manager is a way to start.
Ashton Wikstrom, who has been a publicist at Elle Communications for six years, used this strategy when she became pregnant with her first child in 2018.
She told Insider that motherhood caused “a cosmic shift in my priorities and needs,” and after spending her twenties diving into work, she told her manager she’d rather work part-time. She hasn’t looked back since.
Wikstrom said she changed her work hours to accommodate her needs as a mother but made sure to be transparent with her colleagues about when she would be online.
This also meant changing the kind of work she did. Previously, she’d worked directly with clients, but in a part-time role, she preferred media storytelling, which involved pitching to journalists on behalf of clients.
She said that, for her, thriving at work meant enjoying her tasks instead of grinding toward a more senior position.
“I don’t really want to be the boss. I don’t want to be the account lead. I want to do what I’m good at, which is pitching, and this role is what works for me. I’m not going to keep climbing the ladder if it doesn’t serve me,” Wikstrom said. Staying true to her work style helped her build resilience and get through tough situations, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
Minority workers don’t have the ‘luxury’ of quiet quitting
Brooks E. Scott, a career coach who has worked with clients ranging from interns to executives at companies including Meta, Cisco, Instagram, and Netflix, told Insider that “quiet thriving” is an empowering move for minority workers.
He said that quiet quitting is a “different experience for people from underrepresented groups and non-majority groups who may not have the luxury of just sitting back and flying under the radar.”
According to Scott, people who belong to those groups don’t have a chance to go to work and only do the bare minimum. “A lot of people in underrepresented groups are already working twice as hard and twice as long as people in majority groups have to do, and so the second that we kind of rest back, we’re going to be missing out on some potentially some good opportunities,” he said.
Given the many economic challenges workers are facing, we may hear much more about “quiet thriving” in the future. That’s because — as Alderman said — events that upend the economy, such as the pandemic, can leave people feeling disenchanted with work. And for those people, she added, “quiet thriving” is a method of asking, “How can I really own my job instead of feeling owned by it?”
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