We’ve all heard of quiet quitting by now. We might have even seen it. A colleague at work who has stopped flapping desperately against the current and has gently slipped under the tide. They’re still fulfilling their job description. They’re even firing “thumbs up” to suggestions on how to improve workflow in the team Slack. But spiritually they have given up on trying to get ahead or making the company a better place after being burned one too many times. At this point their goals are to leave on time and to try to retain 100 per cent ownership of their soul.
In a way these are people I can respect. They get the job done. They tend to know how everything works and who everyone is and usually are happy to share that knowledge. Especially if it helps finish a group task faster, aligning to their personal core mission of being out of their desk chair by 5.01pm.
Quiet quitters are unfairly maligned in a way, because there’s another group who are way worse. Loud workers. The term is an oxymoron, because these are people who are too busy trying to look like they do work to actually get anything useful done.
It’s lazy and cliched to say these people only exist in middle management or consultancies or quangos, although these are the kind of natural habitats loud workers thrive in. It’s harder to get away with loud working in a job where your output is a) immediate or b) visible.
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For example, firefighters have to turn up and put the fire out. There’s not much getting around that I’m afraid. They can’t stand around waffling on about “bandwidth” and “circling back” to the family watching their home succumb to the flames. This is also the case for less important and silly jobs like being a journalist. If I don’t write a column or film a news package there’s a great big hole in the paper and dead air in the bulletin. It’s a great shame for me and my ambitions of dossing.
I’ve seen loud workers though in almost all the weird and wonderful work environments I’ve been in over the years. They take different forms, but they seem to follow the same pattern:
Offering unhelpful help
And usually only when the bosses or people of influence are looking. This happens in a team-wide email chain. The boss will assign you a job, for example “please find the best strawberry seller on the side of the road in Wexford and buy three boxes”, before asking the rest of the team to assist you to get it done by the end of day. Instead of helping you hit the phones, or anything productive, you’ll get reply-all emails like this: “My grandad had a strawberry farm but he died in 1977” or “This is a screenshot of Wexford on Google Maps” and “Here’s a picture of a strawberry from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, happy to assist :)!” When it becomes quicker to just do it yourself without their “help”, it’s a sign you might be dealing with a loud worker.
Performative organising
They’re obsessed with creating shared calendars, Google drives, Slack channels and new WhatsApp groups. In the old days there were only so many ways you could reorganise filing systems and fanny around with Post-it notes, but new tech has given loud workers endless ways to waste time. Instead of performing work they can busy themselves in work-adjacent tasks. They’re looking after Trello boards. They’re colour co-ordinating. They’re sending out invites for meetings about nothing. They’re making Excel spreadsheets tracking everyone else’s work but not their own.
They’re involved in everything but responsible for nothing
They manage to get cc’d in on projects they didn’t contribute a jot of work to but feel entitled to give feedback on. That way they can claim ownership. They love a LinkedIn post congratulating “my team” on an achievement they didn’t contribute to other than holding the lift door open that one time. When they do get assigned tasks, they use their “time management skills” to “delegate”, ie fob it off to someone else.
They’re too busy minding everyone else’s business to complete any of their own
By unyoking themselves from the plough of real productivity, it gives loud workers time to focus on others. That’s how unselfish they are. No need to check the system, they know how many annual leave days you’ve had this year. They’ve been tracking them. Made a small spelling mistake in a draft shared document? Don’t worry, they’ll announce it in front of everyone. They’re getting ahead by pushing everyone else down, preferably under a bus. I often think of one old workmate like this with pity. It’s such a shame she chose an office job for her petty conquests when she would have really excelled in Stalin’s cabinet.
