Everything you need to know about ‘Silent Firing’, the new reality in the workplace

Last updated:Oct 30, 2024 7:42 PM IST

Silent firing is a workplace practice in which employers deliberately make jobs more difficult to force employees to resign.

Many employers are now resorting to ‘silent firing’. (Photo credits: Shutterstock)

As concerns about job security in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) continue to grow, experts say the impact is already being felt on the workforce. Instead of allowing their employees to ‘quietly quit’, employers are increasingly resorting to ‘silent dismissal’. For those unfamiliar with the term, silent quits became more popular during the pandemic, as workers began doing only the bare minimum — or even less — with the goal of securing an easy paycheck or hoping to get fired with a severance payment.

George Kailas, CEO of Prospero.Ai, elaborates on the concept of silent firing in his column at Fast Company, stating: “Silent firing is where companies make jobs harder in the hopes that workers will quit so their jobs can be automated .” He asserted that Amazon is a prime example of this emerging trend, noting that the company is pushing for a five-day work week in the office despite significant staff dissatisfaction with its return-to-office policy.

As a result, 73% of employees considered quitting, according to one survey, as reported by The New York Post.

Kailas claims that while there is substantial evidence that remote work improves productivity, Amazon is engaging in “silent shooting by making the workplace inhospitable.”

“Because the best way to reduce headcount while saving on severance payments would be to eliminate remote work,” Kailas wrote in his column.

Kailas pointed out that, outside of the fields of AI and emerging startups, the technology hiring landscape is quite stagnant. He added that this is “even more alarming that we haven’t even scratched the surface of the AI ​​adoption curve yet.”

Economist and MIT professor Daron Acemoglu argues that only 5% of jobs will be replaced or supported by AI in the next decade. “A lot of money is going to be lost. You won’t get an economic revolution from that 5%,” Acemoglu told Bloomberg.

Acemoglu believes that AI is not yet reliable enough to perform tasks typically performed by humans, and predicts that the technology will not make significant progress in the near future.

“You need very reliable information or the ability of these models to faithfully implement certain steps that employees previously did. In a few places they can do that with some human supervision, but in most places they can’t,” Acemoglu said.

As concerns about job losses due to AI grow, another trend known as the “great disengagement” is emerging among Generation Z. This term, related to ‘quietly quitting’ and ‘quietly going on holiday’, describes a decline in employee engagement due to employee dissatisfaction.