On "Quiet Hiring," Burnout, and Cutesy Names for Harmful Things

From CNBC:

"A new year is here, and with it, a new workplace phenomenon that bosses and employees should prepare for: quiet hiring.

Quiet hiring is when an organization acquires new skills without actually hiring new full-time employees, says Emily Rose McRae, who has led Gartner's future of work research team since its 2019 inception, focusing on HR practices.

Sometimes, it means hiring short-term contractors. Other times, it means encouraging current employees to temporarily move into new roles within the organization, McRae says.

...Hiring usually falls into one of three categories: backfilling old roles, creating new ones to help the company grow or addressing an acute, immediate need.

Quiet hiring is all about that third category, even if it doesn't technically involve any new hiring at all. The idea is to prioritize the most crucial business functions at a given time, which could mean temporarily mixing up the roles of current employees."

SIGH.

Listen to me closely: THIS IS NOT A HIRING TREND TO LOOK OUT FOR.

Could white supremacist workplace culture leadership do me a favor and stop giving things new names? Y'all did this last year with "quiet quitting" *cough* doing your job and only your job, then going home on time *cough*. And now you want HR to happily push employees to do jobs outside their job description - outside of the job you hired them to do - and give it a "cute" name? That's not a new thing. Quit acting like this is a new workforce tactic. "Quiet hiring" is something companies have been doing for years. Companies have been making employees take on the roles of multiple people "just for a little while" for decades. You know, "just until we end the hiring freeze" or "until we get through this recession." Who are y'all trying to fool? Y'all realize we all know the reasoning behind the line "other duties as assigned" being added to job descriptions, right? Your workers aren't stupid. Give your employees credit for knowing when they're being used with nothing more than a paycheck with no pay increase in return. Stop using HR to weaponize policies that lead to overworking people and push them to either be burnt out or quit.

There's nothing quiet about burning people out and overworking them with an overwhelming workload with no end in sight "for the good of the company."

That's a loud and clear message y'all have been sending for eons.