2023 ushered in a new workplace vernacular.
Suddenly, people were adopting "Bare Minimum Mondays" to stave off burnout, "coffee badging" to circumvent return-to-office mandates, and "rage applying" to new roles after getting passed over for promotions or pay raises at work.
These viral phrases were born online, coined by career coaches, HR professionals and young employees — many of them either millennials or Gen Z — to explain some of the tumultuous changes happening in workplaces across the U.S., including record-high levels of employee burnout and the proliferation of return-to-office mandates.
"At their core, these trends mark a shift away from hustle culture and are really just about having better guardrails around our mental health and well-being at work to create better balance," LinkedIn career expert Andrew McCaskill tells CNBC Make It.
They can also straddle a line between being helpful and harmful, McCaskill adds. "It really depends on how they're being used," he says.
While people freely share tips for landing a "lazy girl job" or how to "act your wage" at work on TikTok and LinkedIn, bosses and companies have been relatively quiet — at least on the internet — about these trends.
It's hard to tell if these trends are happening in a vacuum online or instigating meaningful change in workplaces. Some people, however, say their bosses or companies have embraced such trends, and it's changed their workplaces for the better.
Bosses embrace Bare Minimum Mondays
Alexa, a marketing writer based in Los Angeles, almost fell out of her chair the first time her manager wished her a "Happy Bare Minimum Monday."
The 27-year-old, who declined to share her last name and the name of her employer so she could speak freely about her employment situation, works remotely for a national retail chain.
She had been quietly practicing Bare Minimum Mondays for months after learning about it on TikTok, and was surprised to hear that it was a trend her boss was not only aware of but encouraged.
"They've actually apologized to me a couple of times on busier Mondays, and have said to me, 'Sorry you're not getting the true Bare Minimum Monday experience today,'" she says.
For Alexa, a Bare Minimum Monday looks like choosing 3-5 tasks to prioritize that day, saving more time-intensive work and longer meetings for later in the week. "It's just giving myself permission to let those days be slow, so I'm not using up all of my energy at the top of the week and depleted by Wednesday," she says.
Alexa adds that having her manager's support has made her more confident and consistent in practicing Bare Minimum Mondays which, in turn, has made her happier and more productive at work. "It's a win-win situation," she says.
Marisa Jo Mayes, a self-employed digital creator and startup founder who coined the Bare Minimum Mondays trend on TikTok in 2022 before it went viral earlier this year says she's received "hundreds" of messages recounting similar stories as Alexa's, of bosses and their employees quietly adopting Bare Minimum Mondays as a team agreement.
And yet, despite the trend's perceived benefits, "people are really apprehensive to attach themselves to any kind of philosophy that insinuates they don't want to work hard," the 29-year-old says.
"But that's obviously not the point of Bare Minimum Mondays — the point is to get really clear on the things that actually matter at work, so you can relieve some of the pressure you might feel to get everything done and finish your work more effectively."
HR leaders get ahead of quiet quitting
Julie Kantor, the CEO of Twomentor, an HR and leadership consulting firm based in Boca Raton, first heard murmurings about quiet quitting at an HR conference earlier this year.
Almost immediately, the 54-year-old recalls, some of the HR leaders and executives she advises were calling her to ask what quiet quitting was, and how to know if their employees were doing it.
Quiet quitting first gained traction in late 2022 after Brian Creely, a corporate recruiter turned career coach, used it in a TikTok video to explain why people choose to "coast" at their jobs instead of resigning. But according to Kantor, it took a few months for business leaders to realize the trend was popular enough to take seriously.
Although many bosses didn't explicitly mention quiet quitting in their conversations with employees, Kantor notes, many took specific steps to either address or prevent the trend from happening in their workplaces.
"Even managers at major Fortune 500 companies, who are widely known as one of the happier places to work, are approaching me and expressing genuine concern about how stressed their employees seem, and asking which signs they should watch out for that might signal someone is quiet quitting," she says.
Some of the steps bosses are taking to get ahead of quiet quitting, Kantor has noticed, include saving space at the top of each meeting to check in with each employee, increasing the number of stay interviews with high-performing employees to gauge how they're genuinely doing, and in general, being proactive with support and regularly asking their teams if there's anything else they can do to guide or help them.
Such tactics have helped improve retention at these companies, at least for now, Kantor says. "The organizations that will survive and thrive in the long run are the ones that are truly invested in their employees' well-being and development," she says. "And that includes paying attention to these online trends, even if they seem silly at first."
DON'T MISS: Want to be smarter and more successful with your money, work & life? Sign up for our new newsletter!
Check out:
Workers are the unhappiest they've been in 3 years—and it can cost the global economy $8.8 trillion
