QuitTok, Rage Quitting, and Other Viral Trends

Excerpt from the original article in Fast Company Magazine, by author and speaker Jennifer Moss:

BY JENNIFER MOSS - 9 MINUTE READ

I am on the cusp of being a millennial and a Gen Xer. I am part of a group that didn’t grow up online. While I have always been excited to use new communication platforms to connect globally, I am ultimately grateful I hadn’t grown up with my life on digital display.

In contrast, Gen Zers and younger millennials were raised to digitally vocalize their opinions, and oversharing online is the norm. Younger workers have an egalitarian mindset, a penchant for social activism, and expectations of two-way feedback. In many ways, younger generations are perfectly primed to use social media as a platform to discuss real and perceived injustice.

So it should come as no surprise that our youngest generation of workers are starting, and following, trends like #QuietQuitting, #RageApplying, #QuitTok, #QuietFiring, #BareMinimumMondays, and #ActYourWage to voice their concerns about work. Plus, hashtags like these are going viral, indicating that today, frustration is likely felt across all generations.

Leaders may want to dismiss these trends as fleeting and silly—or even a bit pesky—but that would be unwise. Today, labor force resistance doesn’t just look less like standing outside of buildings with picket signs or taking megaphones to the streets. Young workers are leveraging virtual town squares, reaching tens of millions of workers globally. Here’s how viral social trends are changing workers’ behaviors:

THE TIKTOK GENERATION

Younger workers have flocked to TikTok to discuss their work experiences. However, many leaders are completely missing the conversation. 

TikTok’s one billion users are primarily women and members of Gen Z, with 60% of users between the ages of 16 and 24. These younger users spend an average of 19 minutes per day on TikTok; and by 2025, 71.9% of Gen Z is expected to use TikTok. In contrast, only 11% of TikTok users are over 50 and their engagement is relatively low. Among Fortune 1000 CEOs, the average age is 59, and 93.6% are men. Because of this digital divide, only a fraction of leaders who make policies that impact the day-to-day experience of workers are listening in.

Many of the workplace trends on TikTok are a result of creators who feel lonely and are languishing at work. To connect with their community, many have started to document their daily experiences and are posting them on the platform. Content such as this has demonstrated what it was like to be isolated and working during a pandemic. And this content has tackled race, bias, and mental health at work—all topics that can be hard to discuss face-to-face.

People across the global workforce felt seen by the posts. Such TikTok hashtags as #CorporateTikTok gained more than three billion views and #WorkTok gained 1.4 billion views. According to Workamajig, the top 10 work-related trends on TikTok (such as #QuietQuitting and #ActYourWage) have collectively gotten more than a billion views.

TikTok is a data-rich environment where policy makers and leaders can track some of the most important topics impacting a large swath of the workforce. It’s an opportunity for leaders to strategically use data to bridge connections across the divides.

#QUITTOK

The hashtag #QuitTok is believed to be traced back to Marisa Jo (@itsmarisajo) who, in 2020, filmed quitting her corporate job. For me, it felt voyeuristic. A product of my generation, I could hear my 2000s-era guidance counselor shouting from the back of my brain, “This is not managing your online brand!”

But others loved it, and the post went viral. #QuitTok videos of people recording themselves quitting have already garnered over 43 million views and counting. Leaders should be paying close attention. The trend offers real-life case studies of why people quit. By tracking themes, leaders can start to analyze what the biggest pressures are for certain generations. Leaders gain enormous insights by tracking the journey of a person feeling frustrated and quitting. 

Take for example the TikToker, nicholelyn, teacher and content creator. In a post leading up to her resignation, she filmed her chest completely covered in hives because of a particularly anxiety-ridden day at school. Let me be clear: I am not recommending that leaders start tracking employees on TikTok. I want them to learn from the patterns and themes. For instance, they can learn from this TikTok that anxiety and burnout show up in the physical health of team members. Leaders need to know the signs, and learn how to offer support to someone before they hit a wall.

Here is my advice for how leaders can respond to the #QuitTok trend:

1. Listen and learn. Gather employee sentiment in an ongoing way to address problems before they gain momentum. Listen for online and in-person signs that your workers are not getting the support they need to do their best work. 

2. Radical acceptance. Instead of downplaying #QuitTok, try to understand it. The more data and insights leaders and managers can gather, the better. This doesn’t mean encouraging employees to live-quit their jobs, but rather knowing why quitting has become a last resort.

3. Increase psychological safety. QuitTok is a form of “loud quitting.” It is a way for someone to shout to the world, “I’m unhappy at work!” People wonder, why not just talk to your boss? The answer is that many do not feel psychologically safe enough to. According to Harvard professor Amy Edmundson, “Psychological safety is greater when people feel authentically seen. As a result, employees tend to feel less stress and strain. It also fosters a sense of inclusivity, particularly for workers who have been historically marginalized in the workplace.”

Tactics to build psychological safety at work can include: avoiding blame, encouraging feedback, celebrating others, admitting when you don’t know something, including others, and quashing negative gossip. 

To be sure, only a small percentage of workers are filming themselves quitting. The real lesson is not about how many people are loud quitting, but why it’s happening at all. 

#RAGEAPPLYING

In December 2022, a TikTok creator, redweez, went viral when she posted, “I got mad at work and I rage applied to 15 jobs.” After she landed a job that came with a $25,000 raise, the #RageApplying trend blew up.

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This is not a new phenomenon. Disengaged workers have been blasting résumés from their desks for decades. The major difference is the power of social media to amplify a message. And that message from this trend is clear: “Leave your job if you want a raise.”

Research backs up this sentiment. One Pew study found that 60% of workers who changed employers in 2021 and 2022 saw their earnings increase. Meanwhile, “the median worker who stayed in place saw a loss during the April 2021 to March 2022 period.”

The persistent messaging that changing jobs has a financial upside has emboldened already disengaged workers to take the leap.

When I spoke with Sima Sajjadiani, an assistant professor at UBC Sauder School of Business in Vancouver, she shared that quitting can be contagious. Her research has found that for every five employees who quit, another employee would follow suit. To stop high performers from #RageApplying and quitting, leaders should gather upstream data to stop a hemorrhaging of talent before it begins.

If your team is already experiencing talent loss, one tactic to consider is to conduct “stay interviews.” Similar to an exit interview, stay interviews are check-ins with active employees to see if there is anything you can proactively do to retain them and make them more productive. 

Some of the questions leaders can ask during a stay interview, include: 

• What do you like/dislike about your day-to-day experience at work?

• Do you feel recognized at work for your contributions? If not, what would you like to see change?

• Does your work/life feel in harmony? If not, what do you think would help?

• What has been your worst/best day on the job?

• Throughout your whole career, when were you happiest?

• If you could craft this role to fit your future goals, what would change and what would stay the same?

Perhaps the most effective part of this tactic is the response. Don’t waste time conducting a stay interview if you can’t take action afterwards. You don’t need to be able to respond to every employee’s requests, but you should try to do what’s in your power to make incremental improvements and to make people’s experience at work better over time.

What is often the most rewarding part of stay interviews is how easy the problems raised most often are to fix. Leaders become afraid of gathering data because they assume it’s going to take a complete overhaul to get their corporate culture back on track. And yet, in many cases it’s the little issues that could be fixed before they snowball out of control. 

LISTENING TO VIRAL SOCIAL TRENDS

I strongly believe leaders need to listen to viral social trends such as these to promote a positive work environment. Maintaining healthy cultures requires empathy, inclusion, and listening. When leaders ignore the needs—and cries for help—of certain groups, they risk losing them to an organization that cares more. Currently, many leaders are doing just that. 

A recent World Economic Forum report found 73% of all employees want to have flexibility when it comes to where they work. And yet, Microsoft has found that 50% of employers are requiring employees to be back in the office full time.

Viral social media trends have shown us that Gen Z workers are willing to leave a job if they don’t get what they ask for. A Deloitte study of over 22,000 global employees confirms this—finding that 77% of Gen Z workers would look for another job if their employer asked them to be on site full time.

This is just one example of the delta between what employers are demanding and what employees want. As the Gen Z workforce grows, it will inevitably force change. Employers onboard with this shift by actively listening to what this group needs to be successful will gain a competitive advantage. 

According to one study, “74% of managers say Gen Z is the most challenging generation to work with, 49% say it’s difficult to work with Gen Z all or most of the time, and 65% say they more commonly need to fire Gen Zers than employees of other generations.”

By 2025, Gen Z is estimated to make up 27% of the workforce and one-third of the Earth’s population. Companies that don’t accept this global shift in the way Gen Z wants to work will struggle to survive.

Jen Fisher, chief well-being officer and best-selling author, tells me that when it comes to the future of work, companies will either choose to opt-in to the necessary changes—or be forced in. When it comes to the Gen Z workforce, Fisher says it’s just “good boundary settings” and suggests throwing out the way it’s always been done. “The younger workforce wants to be involved in trying and failing. They want to be heard. We may not be able to action everything they’ve suggested but the action is listening.”

And for leaders, Fisher warns, “Be very careful about saying the Great Resignation is over; a disengaged and disillusioned workforce is far worse.” 

Teams that accept that with new generations come new ways to communicate and connect gain an advantage. With workplace trends proliferating via social media, we have more data and listening power than we’ve ever had in history. I believe we can make our workplaces better, healthier, more harmonious while increasing profitability, productivity, and engagement. Often it’s the fear of embracing new things that keeps us stuck in the past. And no great leader wants that.