Workamajig looked at the most viral work-related expressions on TikTok. — Photography Bojan89/Getty Images/AFP Relaxnews
People under 35 don't have the same relationship with work as their elders, as evidenced by the many videos they post on TikTok on the subject. The Chinese social network has become a hotbed of work-related trends. Some, however, are more popular than others.
The software firm Workamajig looked at the most viral work-related expressions on TikTok. It used the number of views generated by the associated hashtags to establish a ranking, as relayed by Business Insider.
Unsurprisingly, quiet quitting is the most popular business trend among TikTok users. The hashtag #quietquitting has clocked up over 776 million views on the platform, at the time of writing. This is hardly surprising, since the concept first saw the light of day on the social network in July 2022. The term has since been widely adopted, and has given rise to numerous reports examining the reasons why quiet quitters do the bare minimum at work, instead of striving for professional advancement.
The expressions acting your wage and quiet firing are also among the top three most viral employment-related trends on TikTok, with 459.3 and 20 million respective views on the app. The idea of acting your wage is not unlike that of quiet quitting, except that its proponents see it as having a more positive connotation. They don't claim to be distancing themselves from what they've been hired to do, but rather investing themselves in their work to the level of their salary. The distinction is subtle, but it shifts the emphasis more onto remuneration than professional commitment. For its part, the concept of quiet firing directly echoes quiet quitting. It refers to the act of covertly pushing an employee to resign by making them understand that they no longer have a place in the company. It's a TikTok version of being sidelined at work.
New workplace lingo
The rage applying, quiet hiring and bare minimum Monday trends are also reflected in the Workamajig ranking. Rage applying refers to applying en masse to job offers in reaction to a disappointment at work or professional setback. Quiet hiring, meanwhile, refers to hiring that isn't really hiring at all. In other words, it's when companies give more responsibilities to their employees without giving them a raise or a promotion, in order to make up for a shortage of labor. These managerial excesses are what the bare minimum Monday campaign is all about, encouraging workers to do only whatever is strictly necessary on the first day of each week.
Workamajig's top 10 list ends with the relatively unknown concept of shift shock. This expression refers to the disappointment some employees feel when they realize that their new job doesn't live up to their expectations. It has just 15,000 views on TikTok. The emergence of all these job-related trends shows just how demanding the younger generations are of the world of work. They speak much more freely about their professional aspirations than their elders, giving rise to a whole new workplace lexicon. – AFP Relaxnews
