In 2022, the Collins Dictionary released its shortlist for its annual word of the year. The dictionary has been publishing new editions since 1819, and the tradition for releasing a list of words that have come to prominence in the previous 12 months began in 2013. That was the year that ‘twerking’, ‘Bitcoin’ and ‘Black Friday’ lost out to ‘geek’ and every year it’s a hotly contested prize.

The shortlist for 2022 included “vibe shift” and “Partygate” but was won by “permacrisis”, a term that sums up an extended period of instability and insecurity. However, there was another finalist for word of the year that I believe should have taken out the top spot, mainly due to its ongoing usage instead of peaking and falling away.

The term is “quiet quitting”, a phrase that’s now well and truly entered the lexicon of workplaces around the world. Despite its name, it doesn’t have anything to do with actually quitting your job, it’s the philosophy that instead of leaving, you should just do the bare minimum of work in your job.

It’s also been called “acting your wage” or “calibrated contributing”, and there was something about quiet quitting that took off in 2022, and hasn’t stopped since. In fact, Google Trends shows that interest in the term has only doubled in the past 12 months.

It’s for good reason too, as no matter which way you look at it, we are caring less about work. Research into workers in 155 countries by Gallup shows that almost two-thirds of us are emotionally detached at work, and only half of US workers said they were really satisfied with their jobs. In the aftermath of the pandemic, almost 40 per cent of people said the importance of work had diminished for them during the Covid years according to the Pew Research Centre.

This discontent with work has been rising for years. In 2013, a forum called r/antiwork began on Reddit as ‘a quiet corner of the internet to discuss radical leftist ideas about ending work’, complete with a tongue-in-cheek slogan: ‘Unemployment for all, not just the rich!’ By 2019 it had attracted around 13,000 members, a motley crew of contributors who mainly griped about their work and shared tips on how to avoid doing it. Then the pandemic hit in 2020, upending many people’s workplaces and forcing them to rethink their relationship with work. Over the next two years the number of users on the antiwork subreddit ballooned to over 2.7 million, an increase of over 20,000 per cent.

Instead of just hosting rants about how to not work, the forum became the focal point for a movement of people to discuss how to leave their jobs, complain about capitalism, or just feel a sense of community where they could share their growing discontent with work in general. In other words, this was ground zero for ‘quiet quitters’.

This year new ways of covertly expressing dissatisfaction with work have bubbled to the surface like ‘coffee badging’. This is what happens when an employee turns up to the office, swipes their badge so they are recorded in the system, and then they head out for coffee on the way back to working from home.

Yet another new trend joined the pile in 2024 – ‘quiet cutting’ – to refer to employers who were reassigning resources internally instead of just firing workforces. Some experts have said this signals the shift in workplace power back to employers.

All of these trends focus on blurring the lines of trust and transparency that exists in healthy workplaces. Most of the actions can be seen as ways of expressing discontent in indirect ways, and the message is finally being heard. Instead of going away, in 2025 good workplaces will acknowledge that the needs of workers have been neglected for too long and both sides need to re-engage on better ways of working.

So while it’s not time to completely quit on quiet quitting just yet, next year should see it evolve into a – hopefully – healthier way of communicating between all levels of an organisation.