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Quiet quitting, overemploying, doing the bare minimum, or 5 signs your employees might not actually be working.

Quiet quitting, overemploying, doing the bare minimum, or 5 signs your employees might not actually be working.

Quiet quitting, overemploying, doing the bare minimum, or 5 signs your employees might not actually be working

In 2022, TikTok blew up with trends like “doing the bare minimum” and “quiet quitting.” In videos racking up tens of millions of views, Millennials and Gen Z shared their approach to work: doing just enough to avoid getting fired.

TikTok trends on quite quitting

Soon, new trends joined the mix: overemployed — where people secretly juggle multiple jobs to boost their income — and angry quitting, which is all about dramatic, immediate, and often emotional exits.

The overemployed subreddit now boasts 377,000 members, with year-end threads full of financial recaps and tips on how to juggle multiple jobs without getting caught.

The dynamic between managers and employees is starting to feel more like a standoff, with trust eroding year by year.

On one side, there’s a growing number of searches like “how to sue my employer.”

Google Trends shows that more people over the years are searching for ways to sue their employers.

On the other hand, companies are pushing employees to return to the office, where they’re easier to monitor — even if it means adding an extra 1 or 2 hours of commuting each day, sparking widespread frustration.

In the end, everyone loses.

Here are 3 steps we recommend to resolve the conflict. These, in our opinion, can not only help address the growing tensions but also drive growth for everyone involved.

How to Solve the Employee-Employer Conflict

Step 1: Redefine the Social Contract Between Employees and Companies

In the pre-COVID era, the social contract went something like this: companies paid for employees’ time, knowledge, and effort. Being physically present in the office was the norm, and extreme loyalty was captured in moments like these:

Esther Crawford went viral in 2022 for a picture of her sleeping on the floor at the company's office to meet deadlines. (Twitter)

Life during the pandemic proved that with tools like Zoom, Slack, Miro, Deel, and more, it’s entirely possible to run a highly effective distributed workforce.

So, what’s the real point of going to the office — other than the fact that companies are paying for its rent? Many employees are starting to ask a valid question: is the real purpose of office attendance just about control?

For mediocre employees, this might not be an issue. But for top talent — the ones who have the freedom to choose where they work — it’s a major concern.

This is exactly the foundation of Spotify’s current HR strategy.

Spotify believes their employees are not children.

If you remove the need to control employees by tracking their office attendance and focus instead on the real goal—achieving business results — the root cause of the conflict disappears.

Takeaway: Rethink your priorities. Hire employees not to occupy office chairs but to deliver outcomes. With this mindset, your oversight will shift to a higher level, and it won’t matter where your team members are — as long as they’re hitting their targets.

And honestly, if they’re not delivering results, it won’t matter where they are, either.

Step 2: Hire the Best

The statement sounds simple: every company aims to hire the best. Or at least, the best of those willing to work for them.

Let’s break it down with an example. Say your goal is to increase sales, and you’re looking to hire a marketer to make that happen.

Here’s how most companies approach this:

  1. Post a job listing
  2. Conduct interviews
  3. Hire the best from the pool of applicants

What’s wrong with this process? Let’s dig deeper. Imagine your marketing strategy revolves around Facebook ads. Facebook ads operate in a hyper-competitive marketplace, where every company in the world is bidding for your target audience’s attention, and ad costs are determined by an auction system.

Here’s a key stat: only 4% of Facebook ad campaigns are profitable. Think about it — just 4% of marketers know how to run campaigns that deliver a positive ROI.

Now, what are the chances that someone from this 4% happened to apply for your job? If your company has a strong brand, raised significant funding, and has been featured in Forbes, your odds are good.

But if not, you’re facing an uphill battle.

How does this tie into overemployed, quiet quitting, and similar trends? It’s simple: when you hire top talent, there’s no need to micromanage or control them — they deliver results that drive business growth.

At Intch, we live by this philosophy. Here’s an example:

 

Intch Case Study: How We Grew 50x in 12 Months by Hiring the Right Expert

Step 3: How to Hire the Best

Let’s talk about how to actually hire top talent. It’s straightforward: the best professionals know their value. They understand the results they can deliver and are willing to sell their expertise — but only on their own terms.

Right now, those terms often mean part-time work. Here’s what that looks like:

  • You pay roughly ⅓ of a full-time salary
  • In return, you don’t pay for “office time” — you pay for business results

As we discussed earlier, what matters is the outcome, not the hours spent in a chair. The best employees deliver the best results, and it shouldn’t matter if they’re sitting at the next desk or working from halfway around the world. The priority is that the work gets done, and the results speak for themselves.

So, what’s the new social contract? It’s giving top professionals what they truly want:

  • The flexibility to work remotely and travel
  • The freedom to grow by working on multiple projects at once
  • The potential to earn more through multiple gigs or performance-based compensation

This is the future of work—one that benefits both employers and the best talent out there.

Intch in Numbers

And we’ve brought together 500,000 top professionals from 140+ countries, all with impressive backgrounds and ready for part-time opportunities — right here on Intch.

Intch connects 500.000 professionals from 140+ countries for part-time jobs

If you’re ready to start hiring top professionals for part-time roles, start today – intch.org/recruiter-performance

 

 

Yakov Filippenko

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