One in ten Croatian workers plans to look for a job abroad over the next year, one in five is seeking another job to change the working environment, and a quarter of them are planning to do so within the next year, the Vecernji List daily reported in its Tuesday edition.

This was revealed in a survey carried out by the Psychology Department of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Studies in Zagreb last year, the aim of which was to find out if Croatia had been hit by a wave of mass resignations from work following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The answer is affirmative, perhaps not on such a large scale as suggested by the small sample of 500 respondents, but certainly large enough that no employer can sleep peacefully any more, Vecernji List said.

Western labour markets are gripped by another fever, the trend of the so-called “quiet quitting”, with workers abandoning the culture of burnout and performing only the minimum of their duties. “No overtime, no personal initiative, no helping others out,” the newspaper said.

“Are Croatians also joining this fashionable trend from social media and quietly doing only what they have to, guided by a philosophy that is well known here: the employer cannot pay me as little as I can work?”

Professor Zvonimir Galic said that there has been no specific research into this phenomenon, adding that last year’s survey revealed similar thinking among Croatian workers to that in the United States. “It showed that thinking about changing one’s job, and even one’s country, is not an isolated, but a mass phenomenon in this country as well,” he said.

Young people and people earning less than €1,300 a month are more inclined to look for another job, but the main reason why people want a new job is the poor quality of the one they have at present, Vecernji List concluded.