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Quiet Quitting One of the World’s Top Corporations — This Is How It’s Done

This is going to be controversial — read at your own risk.

By Mona LazarPublished about a year ago 5 min read
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Quiet Quitting One of the World’s Top Corporations — This Is How It’s Done
Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

If you want an easy life, choose corporate.

If you ask me, corporate it’s one of the easiest things you can do.

A lot of people will tell you corporations are soul-sucking machines that use you up like a battery and abandon you as an empty shell with broken dreams and an empty heart.

Dramatic, isn’t it?

Well, the description can be quite accurate. They do that. But not to everybody.

They didn’t do it to me, although I spent almost 10 years of my life is a vital cog of corporate life. Just kidding, I wasn’t that vital. Just playing around with corporate lingo.

Corporations eat you up and spit you out if you let them.

But if you don’t, they’re the safest place you can be in.

Yes, believe it or not, you have to power to say “no” to their greedy soul-crushing ways. But it comes at a cost.

Most people are not willing to pay for it.

Here’s what I did to make it work:

I didn’t care about a career, status, or the money that comes with them. I would have cared about the money, I just didn’t want to put in the corporate-type effort necessary to make it, because I find it abhorring. No shade to anyone who did, it’s just not for me.

I quiet quit about 6 months into the job. Yes, you can do that, especially at lower levels. You’ll still get paid your usual salary, but you will work a 4-hour job at best. In my case, it was more of a 2-hour job on a daily basis, with some spikes of full-time once a month.

I was ok with the idea of never getting a promotion or a salary increase. Salary increases did happen, but the promotion usually comes with more work, so I steered clear of those.

I delegated almost all responsibility. If you think you can only do that if you’re somebody’s boss, think again. There will always be people who are dying to prove their worth to their superiors by taking on extra tasks. Let them use your tasks for that.

Make sure you make your job process so efficient that you almost have nothing to do. Decide what your main tasks are, and do those. Ace them! Delegate everything else. This way, you help yourself with your quiet quitting, and you help someone else with their career.

I’ve perfected quiet quitting (also known as passive-aggressive quitting, also known as slacking on the job) for almost 10 years in 2 different corporations, one of which was and still is one of the top global beauty companies.

So it can be done, even at those levels.

Is this ethical? As long as the work gets done, yes, it is.

As long as it gets done by somebody who wants to do it, yes, it is.

As long as someone uses it as a means to advance their career or whatever other reason that satisfies them, yes, it is.

But then again it’s for you to decide if it’s ok or not. I don’t hold the keys to morality.

You might find it my actions reprehensible and I’m absolutely ok with it. To each their own.

I figured out after a while that what I was bringing to the table was not the daily tasks that I was supposed to do as part of my job. Clearly, I wasn’t the one doing those.

What I did do and was highly appreciated was to treat my bosses like human beings. I understood what they needed and gave them that.

One of my bosses had a huge fear of confrontation, which I discovered by accident in a meeting. He just couldn’t bring himself to tell the representative of the cleaning company that the job they do is subpar and we need improvement.

So I took the lead and told her what needed to be told. From that point onward I was his main man.

Because in his view, what I did was far more important. I did what my boss couldn’t do. I was his safety net.

My other boss (a major plant GM) was a demon that everybody feared. People were leaving her office crying after every meeting.

Pretty much how I imagine employees leaving Elon’s office these days.

She was good at her job, but awful with people. She had a tendency to crush everybody who showed the slightest sign of fear. And she made sure people feared her, just to tower over their perceived incompetence.

Until she met me. I wasn’t afraid of her. And not because she wasn’t generally scary or because I’m some big shot. Not at all. Not tooting my own horn here.

I wasn’t afraid because I had nothing to lose.

I didn’t have kids to feed, I couldn’t care less about how others saw me, and I considered status as a ridiculous false construct that people invented to keep other people in imaginary social cages. So she had nothing on me.

Just my luck — she respected that! She liked people who were not afraid of her since there were so few of them.

I was one of the few who saw her as a human being. I was her moral support when things got tough and her protection against the outside world when her mask would crumble.

I don’t know if she knew I wasn’t really doing my job, but she never said a word about it. Which, coming from someone so hell-bent on having everything perfect, is quite something.

When I left, both my bosses begged me to stay. I have no idea if they were aware of my quiet quitting. But I do know they appreciated what I brought to the table regardless of it.

Quiet quitting is much easier when you realize that everybody is human. Your bosses, your colleagues, everyone. That we all have the same struggles, fears, and needs.

And if you manage to rise above your own, your life gets a million times better. Even in the soul-sucking corporate world.

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