In India, this sector has the highest rate of quiet quitters: Slack report

Representative image

A Slack study on Indian knowledge workers has found that defence and government had the highest number of quiet quitters. Quiet quitting – a trend which picked up in the last year – refers to employees doing the bare minimum expected of them without taking on extra work.

Of the 2,000 knowledge workers surveyed for Slack’s ‘Leadership and the War for Talent’ study, 12% of Indian government workers said they engaged in quiet quitting. This is almost double the percentage in other sectors like IT – the industry most commonly associated with the term ‘quiet quitting’.

“Civil servants and government knowledge workers in India are among the more likely to have felt burned out in the past year, with 58% saying they’ve felt overloaded,” the Slack study also reported.

In the banking and financial sector, quiet quitting stood at 6% and 5% respectively. In the IT and communications sector, 4% of workers admitted to quiet quitting.

Lack of good leadership, a feeling of burnout or exhaustion and lack of motivation emerged as the primary reasons for employees quiet quitting. These factors were common across sectors.

The Slack report also looked at communication between employees and their employers or senior team members. The tech sector topped the list here, with IT employees giving the highest scores to their manager for communication skills.

On the other hand, government employees spoke of a clear disconnect in communication with employers or managers.