NEW YORK, Aug 30 — After massive hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic, several American companies have announced the elimination of hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs. Others are restructuring, leading some employees to be reassigned internally. This strategy is sometimes described as “quiet cutting” by those concerned.
We’ve already seen “quiet quitting” and “quiet firing,” now the work world is also talking about “quiet cutting,” This expression, recently coined by the, refers to what is essentially downsizing but which isn’t labelled as such. The idea is for managers or the HR department to offer a different position to an employee in a context of mass departures with the secret hope that this new assignment will provide new impetus for the employee to excel... or, on the contrary, to leave the company.
In recent months, a number of US firms, including Adidas, Adobe, IBM and Salesforce, have reorganised their payrolls instead of laying off large numbers of staff, according to the Wall Street Journal.
These are some of the complexities involved in restructuring: the process involves making a radical change in the working environment, which can profoundly destabilise the remaining employees. Add to this the fear that this strategy is, in reality, an insidious form of “quiet cutting,” and you end up with a reduced and demoralised workforce. But it’s important to bear in mind that not every reclassification masks an employer’s desire to force employees to resign.