Seventy-one percent of Australian workers prefer hybrid work arrangements over other options, and 62% say they are more productive when working from home, the research said.

Quiet quitting involves only doing the minimum required to complete your job, and not engaging any more than is required, or going above and beyond in ways such as volunteering for projects or tasks.

While the survey was predominantly designed to track how Australia's work landscape has shifted post-pandemic, and workers attitudes towards that shift, the most surprising finding from the research was the prevalence of “quiet quitting” amongst the survey group.

“One of the biggest concerns for business post-pandemic was the concept of the ‘great resignation,’ but it never reached the scale expected and this fear now seems largely unfounded. We found that only 9% of workers are actively planning to leave their jobs,” said RingCentral area vice president Peter Hughes.

“However, there is this largely hidden issue of ‘quiet quitting’ that needs to be addressed. In addition to the high rate of workers overall saying they have quiet quit, it's even higher for full-time remote and hybrid workers, at 43%. That’s a really jarring statistic when you line this up against the higher satisfaction levels of both hybrid and remote workers, and also how productive workers feel when they are working from home. That poses some challenging questions for organisations considering future working models,” Hughes continued.

The majority (78%) of Australian workers believe they are more productive when they have the ability to decide their work location.

Fully remote and hybrid workers are more satisfied (67%) with their current work arrangements than in-person workers at 51%.

If the issue isn’t how satisfied or productive workers feel, what is causing the problem?

In RingCentral’s current study, hybrid and remote workers feel that challenges of working remotely are staying motivated (27%), worrying about being perceived as not working as hard as colleagues who go to an office (24%), feeling disconnected from colleagues (21%), too many distractions (21%), and feeling less creative (12%).

The answer seems to lie in how well connected these workers are when working remotely.

Earlier research from RingCentral pinpointed that employees working for companies that foster a “connected culture” are twice as likely to be productive when working from anywhere.

“Organisations that want to prevent quiet quitting and increase the contribution from their top talent should do what they can to encourage open communication and connectedness at all levels – business decision-makers also rated very high in the quiet quitting stakes. It doesn’t necessarily take that much; just a concerted effort to increase the opportunities for collaboration and casual interactions with their colleagues and teams in a virtual way to build that connected culture in a hybrid working environment. For many individuals and teams there are significant benefits to be gained in returning to the office. In product development, for example, when employees are together they can build faster and work directly with engineers so less bugs come out of the process However, with the right collaboration tools, it is possible to connect and empower your workforce and build highly productive teams, all the while giving employees the flexibility to manage work around other commitments,” said Hughes.