What is a “quiet holiday?” A new trend at work raises the ire of bosses

It’s the latest Work around it.

Go beyond quiet quitting. Millennials have created a new way to play stealthily in the workplace – taking a quiet vacation.

That’s right, 30-something office workers are increasingly taking vacations under the guise of remote work — a breakthrough facilitated by the uptick in work-from-home arrangements after the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to a recent Harris poll 1,170 adult employees in the United States37% of millennial workers said they took time off without informing their bosses.

“There’s a giant workaround culture,” said Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at The Harris Poll, as she described the quiet holiday trend. CNBC reported. “They will figure out how to achieve the right work-life balance, but that happens behind the scenes.”

This trend does not stem from challenge either. Rodney points out that millennials — who make up 40% of the workforce — are reluctant to ask for vacation time because they feel it makes them look like they’re lazy and slacking off in an increasingly harsh office environment.

According to the Harris Poll, nearly half of survey respondents, including 61% of Millennials and 58% of Gen Z, said they feel anxious about requesting PTO.

Meanwhile, 80% of employees in the U.S. don’t take all of their personal time off (PTO) with Gen Z and Millennial employees making up the lion’s share, according to the survey.

So they take breaks, they do it stealthily. “Instead of facing it head-on and worrying about whether you’ll upset your boss during a tight economic quarter, millennials are just doing what they have to do for their vacation,” Rodney Fortune said.

Pretending to work from home isn’t the only “office space” that conjures up a tactic used by millennials who work remotely to game the system. Others include shaking their mouse to show they’re in Slack — even though they’re already off — or sending messages after clocking out to make it look like they’re working overtime.

Fortunately, Rodney says employers can curb the “quiet vacation” trend by supporting and even requiring people to take a certain number of PTO days every quarter, as well as requesting time off for themselves to show that this is cool.

Millennials aren’t the only ones rebelling against management in unusual ways. Our younger cohorts, Generation Z—arguably the hardest generation to work with—are increasingly turning to killing companies with kindness.

One Zoomer on TikTok described how she would give customers unauthorized 50% discounts in order to challenge her company’s overlords.