Quiet quitting or quiet cracking?
Following the pandemic, the term quiet quitting entered the lexicon. Quiet quitting was meant to be an insult - an employee who does the bare minimum just to squeak by and lacks motivation. It’s key to point out that there is nothing wrong with doing what is expected of the job and being paid for it accordingly. That is exactly what an employment agreement is - payment for services. When a manager decides that a person should have more ambition, and then derails a career because of that decision, there is too much power imbalance. All people have different levels of motivation and ambition.
Most people managers are just plain bad at it. A 2023 poll from Gallup shows that managers even recognize they are bad at managing. Out of the top five management skills, four were self-identified as known weaknesses, and one was identified as a blind spot. The known weaknesses include providing team members with meaningful feedback in the last week, investing in team member development, actively working to help team members achieve their goals, and providing a discussion of each team member’s strengths in the past three months. The management blind spot was providing recognition for good work.
Where are ambition and drive coming from? Both are primarily internally motivated. However, many people choose to perform their job responsibilities and leave work within the hours they are paid for. Salaried employees are not paid overtime. Rather than continuing to outperform with the hopes of getting recognition, a raise, or more power, employees discovered during the pandemic that there is more to life than work.
Perhaps it was replacing commuting time with cooking dinner or performing bath duties for your kids. Perhaps it was that, as employees were made redundant and brought home a fairly hefty government check each week, the remaining employees took on a workload two to three times greater with no bump in pay.
There’s nothing Americans like more than labels, and one of the latest in the workplace vocab is “quiet cracking”. Quiet cracking is when an employee experiences a gradual decline in job satisfaction and engagement, often without noticeable outward signs like decreased performance. It's subtle and differs from quiet quitting, where one might intentionally reduce their effort. Quiet cracking can manifest as a general feeling of being unfulfilled, stuck, or undervalued, and it can lead to decreased well-being and even physical symptoms like headaches or sleep disturbances.
I experienced quiet cracking well before the term existed. Likely, most people have. It can coincide with internal organizational misalignments, when culture fades from awareness and leads you to be out of sync with what you’re conscious of in the organization. For example, employees who have been at a company for years may no longer be aware of the workplace culture because they have no outside perspective.
When I owned an association management business, I was running a local 5-day conference for one of my clients. I was 7 months pregnant, and thus the client footed the bill for me to stay at the hotel. On-site event management can run 15-16 hours per day. Providing a room meant I didn’t have to commute an additional 45-minutes each way for the multi-day event. I appreciated having the room.
On day 2, the president of the organization, who was also local and so was not staying at the hotel, asked for my room key so he could take a nap. I declined, saying I didn’t feel comfortable with that. He replied, “We’re paying the bill, and I want to take a nap. Give me the keys.”
After a few rounds of this circular conversation, I ended up conceding, but I dropped the client shortly thereafter. I spent the rest of the conference wondering if he had gone through my personal things and knowing he had slept on my bed. It was a king room after all. He was known for aggressive behavior and for getting angry when he didn’t get his way. When I mentioned it to other board members, they grimaced and said, “Ugh,” or raised their shoulders in a “we all have to deal with him” attitude. It's frightening what can come to be considered acceptable.
Quiet cracking happens when employees are mentally and emotionally drained, experiencing internal breakdowns that can manifest as stress, anxiety, loss of motivation, or even burnout.