'Quiet cutting' | A new trend sees employers reassigning staff to new jobs - are you guilty of it?

You’ve probably heard of 'quiet quitting', where workers fulfil their job requirements but have mentally ‘checked out’, and you might have even heard of 'quiet firing', when managers purposefully fail to provide coaching and career development in hopes an employee will leave. But there is a new trend emerging in the workplace.

'Quiet cutting' is characterised by employers reassigning workers to a new role – employees might receive an email saying their current role has been axed, but they have not been fired.

This new trend, which is gaining momentum particularly in the US, allows companies to cut jobs and reduce their expenditure without laying off staff. Research from Alphasense found that this type of restructuring more than tripled in the past year.

While fewer companies are letting go of staff altogether, companies such as Adobe, Adidas, IBM and Salesforce are all amongst those ‘quiet cutting’ in a bid to restructure their workforce.