“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”
—Aristotle
If only it were that easy today. While hybrid/remote work revolution brought many opportunities for a pleasing work environment, it also enabled a troubling phenomenon that’s quietly eroding teams across organizations: quiet quitting. Unlike traditional turnover, this silent disengagement is harder to detect and potentially more damaging to your organization’s culture and productivity.
From Intentional Tension: “If an employee does not attend meetings, does not log their time, or starts to fail to deliver on commitments, these are all indicators that the employee may be quietly quitting… disengaging from the team and the work.” These behaviors can fly under the radar for weeks or months, making early detection and intervention crucial for maintaining team integrity.
The impact of quiet quitting extends far beyond individual performance. When team members witness peers disengaging without consequence (“getting away with it”), it creates a domino effect of lowered expectations and reduced accountability. This erosion of standards can quickly transform high-performing teams into complacent groups that accept mediocrity as the norm.
A widespread nature of quiet quitting suggests deeper systemic issues. The primary culprit: leadership that hasn’t adapted to the demands of remote team management. Many leaders who excelled in traditional office environments find themselves ill-equipped to inspire, motivate, and monitor distributed teams. The casual conversations, visual cues, and spontaneous interactions that once facilitated engagement have disappeared, leaving a void that many leaders struggle to fill.
Effective leadership means distinguishing between productive tension that drives performance and unproductive stress that leads to burnout and disengagement. Productive tension emerges when teams have:
- Clear, measurable objectives
- Understood timelines and expectations
- Defined internal and external customers
- Transparent processes and accountability measures
- Shared purpose and common goals
The true measure of effective tension management isn’t how well your team performs while you’re actively leading them—it’s how they function in your absence. When you’ve successfully implemented intentional tension management, your team should maintain standards, support each other, and continue delivering results even when you’re not directly involved.
To combat quiet quitting and build resilient remote teams, we recommend implementing regular “sync time,” or virtual water cooler meetings, to maintain a team connection. The agenda of a sync time meeting can be as simple as addressing any open matters that don’t fit neatly into project calls or taking a moment to recognize a job well done.
Quiet quitting represents a significant challenge, but it’s not insurmountable. The solution lies in intentional leadership that creates the right balance of challenge and support, maintains human connection in digital environments, and adapts management approaches to meet the realities of modern work. When leaders commit to this intentional approach, they don’t just prevent quiet quitting; they put the pleasure back into the work.