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When I first heard the term "quiet quitting," it brought me back to my days as a college baseball player. It could be the bottom of the ninth inning, down by more runs than we'd ever come back from, yet the desire to quit never surfaced. I was in it to win it.
My days as a baseball player are long over, but the lessons learned about discipline, resilience, respect, compassion, teamwork, and leadership have remained. As the president of one of the largest physician recruitment firms in the U.S., it's troubling to me to think that under certain conditions, any of our associates would quietly quit. I believe we've created an environment where people can express their needs and be heard.
But when I think about quiet quitting in terms of the healthcare industry that we serve, it is potentially devastating.
By now, we recognize that quiet quitting is just a new name for an old problem. There have always been disengaged, dissatisfied and burned-out employees who choose to stay in their current roles rather than leave for something better, and for whom there is no path toward resolution with their existing employer. The problem, of course, is that no one does their best work in this mindset. For some industries, this might mean missed sales targets or decreased customer satisfaction. However, in healthcare, physicians who have quietly quit could impact the quality of care, patient and workplace safety, and patient satisfaction.
Despite a majority of physicians saying they feel a calling to practice medicine, physicians are prone to high levels of burnout simply due to the nature of the job. Add the effects of a worsening physician shortage, rapid changes in the business of healthcare and a traumatizing pandemic, and it's little surprise that some physicians are disengaged and desperate for change.
A 2021 survey from my organization found that 69% of physicians rated themselves as actively disengaged. Another survey of ours found that 61% of physicians are currently experiencing burnout, and when asked about the cause, 62% of physicians blamed their current employer. Beyond the risk that unhappy physicians might resign (something we saw many physicians considering in 2021), there's also a potential risk to patients.
A study from 2017 reported that when the care team is suffering from disengagement, hospital-acquired conditions are 13% higher, patient safety falls by 15% and healthcare workers themselves report that they're only able to provide top-quality service 23.3% of the time. This can result in a real business cost to healthcare organizations in the form of fines, lawsuits, or lost patient revenue.
Solving for Quiet Quitting in Healthcare
Quiet quitting requires a multi-faceted approach to employee re-engagement that starts with building lasting relationships based on mutual trust. It's not uncommon for physicians to feel that administrators don't understand the challenges of practicing medicine. Some doctors feel like a cog in the wheel whose job is to meet very high productivity standards, ensuring revenue goals are met at the cost of the doctor-patient relationship. Conversely, administrators have to create financially sustainable healthcare organizations, and some think that physicians don't understand their challenges. When trust is absent, there's a lot of blame, and it sounds like "It's not me, it's you." The solution depends on open minds and mutual accountability.
While trust takes time to build, opening the lines of communication and seeking to first understand each other's roles can be a strong start. Rather than asking, "How can we better communicate our mission and objectives to our physicians?" administrators might instead ask, "How can we better listen to our physicians?" This creates a psychologically safe space where physicians are more likely to speak freely.
The burnout crisis is harder to address because it relies on administrators making hard calls about compensation and quality of life concerns that are consistently among physicians' chief complaints. We're seeing physicians' wanting higher compensation, improved work-life balance, and more flexibility in their work schedules. In addition to needing more time away, physicians benefit from reasonable productivity targets, reduced administrative burdens, participatory decision-making, more autonomy, equitable division of call time, and additional clinical support.
We know that taking strides to mitigate burnout also improves the overall sense of satisfaction that physicians crave. No doctor goes into medicine thinking it's an 8 to 5 job — they commit more than a decade of their lives to education, often finding themselves drowning in $250,000 (or more) of student loan debt. And in the face of an emergency, they can't clock out at the precise moment their shift ends. It's both rewarding and grueling work.
Perhaps Steve Jobs got it right when he said, "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it."
It's not just good advice for physicians, and for the administrators who have the power to make their lives better (and their jobs more fulfilling), it's great advice for all of us.