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Before employees engage in “quiet quitting,” first come signs of “quiet cracking.”
“Quiet quitting” refers to the idea of an employee doing the bare minimum at work, according to ResumeBuilder.
Meanwhile, “quiet cracking” is a “persistent feeling of workplace unhappiness that leads to disengagement, poor performance, and an increased desire to quit,” according to a new report from cloud learning platform TalentLMS, which coined the term. While they are both different responses to burnout and stress, quiet cracking could lead to quiet quitting in some cases, experts say.
“Unlike burnout, it doesn’t always manifest in exhaustion. Unlike quiet quitting, it doesn’t show up in performance metrics immediately. But it is just as dangerous,” the report notes.
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More than half, 54%, of surveyed employees say they experience some level of quiet cracking, according to the TalentLMS report. About 47% said they rarely or never feel that way.
The survey polled 1,000 employees in the U.S. across industries in March.
Frank Giampietro, chief wellbeing officer at the Americas offices of EY, a professional services and accounting firm, said via email that quiet cracking and quiet quitting are “two sides of the same coin.”
“Both are responses to burnout in the workplace, and both can be an issue for organizations, if unaddressed,” he said.
‘They feel detached, but they also feel stuck’
Terms like quiet cracking, quiet quitting and the so-called great resignation all showcase underlying trends in the broader labor market, said Cory Stahle, a senior economist at Indeed, a job search site.
“If we look at the great resignation, a lot of that was about people jumping jobs,” he said. “And that really mirrors what we saw in the underlying data.”
But now, the job market isn’t so good — more people are staying put in current roles, and there’s not an easy outlet to remedy the experience of quiet cracking.
Quiet cracking is another way of describing employee detachment, where workers feel “less connected, less satisfied with their employer, more likely to be looking for other work,” said Jim Harter, a workplace expert at Gallup.
“They feel detached, but they also feel stuck, and it’s not good for employers,” he said.
The cost of disengagement in the U.S. is approximately $2 trillion in lost productivity, according to an August report from Gallup.
‘People have been less encouraged to switch jobs’
In late 2021 and throughout 2022, at the height of the great resignation, if a worker felt like it was time for them to move on from a current role, there were plenty of job opportunities to choose from, said Stahle. At the same time, wages were rising at a fast pace, so many individuals engaged in job-hopping.
Such conditions “encouraged people to resign,” said Stahle.
About 60% of workers who switched jobs from April 2021 to March 2022 saw an increase in their real earnings over the same month the year prior, according to a 2022 report by the Pew Research Center. Among workers who stayed at their current roles, 47% experienced wage growth.
They feel detached, but they also feel stuck.
However, the economy has slowed down since then. Due to growing economic uncertainty fewer workers have been quitting their jobs and companies have slowed down hiring, experts say.
The idea of job switching to grow your income has also flipped — since February, wages for job stayers have outpaced the earnings of job switchers, according to Federal Reserve data.
“As job postings have become less plentiful, as wages have slowed down, people have been less encouraged to switch jobs,” said Stahle.
A ‘two-way street’
Several factors can cause worker disengagement and burnout, such as a lack of clear goals, the workload and poor relationships at work, experts say.
There are ways workers can reclaim a sense of agency in the situation, said Harter. Workers who feel disengaged and frustrated need to reach out to their manager, express what they’re experiencing and perhaps ask for guidance, he said.
However, it should also be a “two-way street,” he said.
While organizations may be going through business challenges as well, Harter said leaders have the power to impact their organizational structure.
“Employers can do a lot about it if they’ve got great leadership and good management that are in touch with people,” said Harter.