John Ngo

The quit stay is someone who started a job with enthusiasm but somewhere along the line had the challenge or fun sucked out of their role. Reasons include poor manager, too much job task repetition, absence of challenge, too many changes in the organisation, a lack of recognition and or no access to promotion. I remember seeing organisational psychologist David Peake speak some years ago at a Recruitment & Consulting Services Association conference about this topic. He says workers are either “volunteers”, “whingers”, “survivors” (who I call “quit stays”) or prisoners. He said the first phase people go through is volunteer - they are happy and willing to work hard. However, if things go wrong, next comes “whinger” – they try to fix things but at some point they give up and wander down the path of indifference to their desk each day where they just go through the motions - hence the quit stay. You can recognise this person by the fact he or she turns up five minutes before the boss and leaves three minutes after. They are beyond whinging and they don’t see the point in trying to fix anything. It’s too late. The quit stay does just enough work to avoid getting fired but not enough to get on management’s radar. According to Peake if you don’t break free from being a “quit stay” the phase that waits is dire - you become a “prisoner”.