The Top 5 workplace trends on TikTok could make you worry about employee-employer relations

TikTok users may skew young, but the concerns about work aired on the platform are nothing new. Bosses and employees have been squabbling over power and how to divide the profits at least since the first angry peasant picked up a pitchfork and stormed off toward the nearest castle. In the waning days of the Covid-19 pandemic, these squabbles apparently continue, digitally.

A recent analysis by project management software company Workamajig ranked the most popular work-related hashtags on the platform over the past year. Its findings suggest age-old battles between management and workers are being refought in a war of catchy hashtags and viral videos.

See if you can spot the pattern in the top five trends identified by Workamajig:

1. Quiet Quitting (746.7 million views)

You’d have to have been living under a rock to miss this one, which overtook the cultural conversation for a hot minute back in September. As I wrote at the time, #QuietQuitting may have just been a trendy new name for the age-old practice of treating your job as just a job rather than as a calling or source of personal fulfillment. But the catchy hashtag clearly came along at a moment when a tremendous number of fed-up workers were deciding to do just that.

2. Act Your Wage (438.7 million)

If quiet quitting didn’t convince you that a tremendous number of employees were sick of overinvesting in jobs that didn’t love them back, then the fact that #ActYourWage took second place on this list should confirm it. It’s basically another name for the same thing — putting in only as much effort as you’re actually paid for. Together, the two trends have racked up more than a billion views.

3. Quiet Firing (19.9 million views)

It’s not just employees who were getting their revenge for pandemic-era stress with a quiet-themed workplace trend. Quiet firing refers to employers stealthily nudging out employees by freezing them out of interesting projects or generally making work life uncomfortable. Another name for this is, of course, terrible management, and experts argue such poor leadership inevitably has knock-on effects among employees not targeted for quiet firing. Just because quiet firing was a hot topic there for a minute doesn’t make it a good idea.

4. Rage Applying (6 million views)

The percentage of folks viewing #RageApplying content on TikTok was tiny compared with the #QuietQuitting craze, but employees applying for a flurry of jobs as a way to discharge their frustration at their current gig is very much in line with the general trend of dissatisfaction and employee-employer conflict that runs through this list.

5. Quiet Hiring (5.3 million views)

If quiet quitting refers to employees stealthily improving their workplace bargain by phoning it in at the office, quiet hiring is the opposite — employers quietly improving theirs by squeezing more out of their teams without hiring new staff. Experts insist it’s likely to ramp up in the immediate future as executives and business owners prepare for possible rocky economic times ahead by hiring slowly and working more efficiently.

Different trends, same debate

Each of these trends may have had its own hashtag and moment of media chatter, but all are basically different sides of the same argument. Workers feel exploited and undervalued and go in for some #QuietQuitting or #RageApplying. Bosses, keen to claw back power and profit for themselves, respond with some #QuietHiring or #QuietFiring of their own.

I am not an organizational psychologist, but this doesn’t sound terribly healthy for anyone involved. It doesn’t take a therapist to see that trying to find a game or an angle that can pry concessions from “the other side” is a recipe for resentment, suspicion, misery, and burnout.

Business owners — fixing this isn’t easy, but it is on you (unless labor organizers defy the odds and beat you to it). Sure, sometimes workers misunderstand economic reality or ask for too much, but it’s still leaders’ responsibility to communicate openly with employees and arrive at a workplace bargain that, ideally, not only everyone can live with but also motivates people to do great work.

Gartner analyst Emily Rose McRae, who is credited with popularizing the #QuietHiring hashtag, said of that trend: “This is a really good chance for employees to sit down and say to their managers, their HR people, and to the company as a whole, ‘Yeah, I’m willing to do this. Let’s talk about what this means for my career.’”

Actually, that sounds like a necessary conversation in response to all of these trends.

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