A little over a year after "quiet quitting" entered the business vocabulary, workplace researchers have identified a quieter, harder-to-spot version of the same problem. TalentLMS's 2025 survey (opens in new tab) of 1,000 U.S. employees found that 54% experience some level of what the report calls "quiet cracking": a persistent state of workplace unhappiness that leads to disengagement, weaker performance, and a private search for the exit, long before anyone announces they're checking out. 20% said they experience it frequently or constantly. Unlike quiet quitting, which is a visible choice to scale back effort, quiet cracking often goes unnoticed by the person experiencing it and by the manager sitting across from them. That distinction matters for owners who assume a quiet team is a content one. Employees who are quietly cracking still show up, still hit deadlines, and still say the right things in a review. What they stop doing is volunteering ideas, flagging problems early, or believing the business has much room for them in it.
The same survey found that 82% of employees feel secure in their job today, but that number drops to 62% when the same employees are asked about their future with the company, and close to 1 in 6 aren't sure they have one. That's a different problem than burnout, and a different one than pay. A person can feel physically fine, be compensated fairly, and still be deciding the relationship has an expiration date. Small and mid-sized employers aren't exempt just because the survey skews toward larger companies. If anything, the gap is harder to hide on a team of fifteen than a team of fifteen thousand, because there's no HR department buffering the signal and no large enough sample size for one disengaged person to disappear into the average. A culture built on the assumption that no news is good news is exactly the kind of culture this data says to stop trusting.
It's the managers. They are more overwhelmed than we have ever seen before. And when managers lose their inspiration, it cascades downward.
— Jim Harter, Chief Scientist for Workplace Management and Wellbeing, Gallup
The gap between feeling secure today and doubting tomorrow traces back to two things employees consistently name: whether their manager actually listens, and whether they know what's expected of them. TalentLMS found that among employees experiencing quiet cracking, 47% say their manager doesn't listen to their concerns, compared with 20% company-wide. Gallup's own tracking (opens in new tab) shows the same erosion playing out at a national scale, in a completely separate body of research. In its most recent annual update of U.S. employee engagement, Gallup found that only 46% of employees clearly know what's expected of them at work, down from a high of 56% in March 2020. Just 39% feel strongly that someone at work cares about them as a person, down from 47% over the same period, and only 30% strongly agree that someone at work encourages their development, down from 36%. Three different measures, three different declines, and all three sit squarely inside what a direct manager controls day to day, not what an owner controls from the top of an org chart. Gallup's Jim Harter, who has spent decades studying workplace engagement, has pointed directly at that layer between ownership and the front line as the source of the slide, and at how little room most managers have been given to do it well.
of U.S. employees say they experience some level of "quiet cracking," a persistent state of workplace unhappiness distinct from burnout or quiet quitting that leads to disengagement and a quiet search for the exit. TalentLMS, "Quiet Cracking: A Hidden Workplace Crisis" →
None of this points to a hiring problem or a compensation problem, which is usually where owners look first when something feels off. It points to three manager habits, and whether they show up on purpose or only by accident. TalentLMS's data shows the pattern clearly: employees experiencing quiet cracking are 29% less likely to receive any training in a given year and 68% less likely to feel valued and recognized than employees who aren't. Training and recognition aren't perks in that data. They're two of the clearest signals an employee gets about whether the business still has a use for them going forward. The third signal, role clarity, is free and entirely within a manager's control: telling someone plainly what's expected of them this month, and confirming out loud that it landed, rather than assuming it did.
None of these fixes require new software or a bigger budget. They require an owner willing to hold managers accountable for the same three things every employee is being measured against: whether they're learning something, whether specific work gets named and seen, and whether they know what's expected of them next. Left to depend on which manager someone happens to report to, whether that person is naturally warm or naturally distant, the outcome stays a coin flip across the same company. Set as three specific expectations every manager has to meet, on a schedule an owner actually checks, it stops being a matter of personality. GH Group's Focus 90 engagement exists for exactly this gap: turning "everyone knows what matters" from an assumption owners make into something a team can confirm out loud, every quarter, before the distance between today and next year grows without anyone deciding to let it.
