If Your Co-Workers Are ‘Quiet Quitting,’ Here’s What That Means

chemgator · Jun 26, 2025

Forget Quiet Quitting--the new thing these days is Quiet Cracking. I'm not sure what cracking is all about. In the old days, it was dangerous to work around someone who had "cracked" under the pressure. And you generally do not want to be identified as a "cracker".

Now let's get cracking . . .

MSN

Business leaders have always had to be attentive to small but important shifts within the workplace that may affect employee performance—troubling trends that have increased since the pandemic. Now there’s another problematic development for leaders to monitor. In addition to rising burnout, disengagement, and intentional idleness from quiet quitting, researchers have identified a new office condition they’re calling “quiet cracking.”

According to learning management system company TalentLMS, quiet cracking is situated somewhere between burnout, suffered by some ambitious but overloaded workers, and the quiet quitters who are actively slacking their way out of jobs they no longer want. Instead, people quietly cracking gradually become mired in feeling both unappreciated by managers and closed off from career advancement while doing work they otherwise like. The resulting unhappiness and frustration slowly builds until demotivated employees have to force themselves through the workday, causing their attention and productivity to drop.

“Quiet Cracking is the erosion of workplace satisfaction from within,” said a recent TalentLMS survey on the new threat to worker happiness, and employer staffing stability and effectiveness. “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 reason, the study said, is that a large portion of the workforce is already experiencing the “persistent feeling of workplace unhappiness that leads to disengagement, poor performance, and an increased desire to quit” that quiet crackers deal with. TalentLMS’s survey of 1,000 U.S. employees found 54 percent saying they’d experienced one or several aspects of quiet cracking recently, with 20 percent saying they’d “frequently” or “constantly” battled these challenges.
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thomadm · Jun 27, 2025 at 10:54 AM

chemgator said: ↑

Forget Quiet Quitting--the new thing these days is Quiet Cracking. I'm not sure what cracking is all about. In the old days, it was dangerous to work around someone who had "cracked" under the pressure. And you generally do not want to be identified as a "cracker".

MSN
Click to expand...

The sad truth is about 75% of our jobs are meaningless and will be replaced by tech. Its making people miserable to show up to work everyday and push paper, emails and attend endless meetings that is busy work. Some have a social dynamic that makes them happy to be there, but after covid, that % has dropped tremendously.

Our economy is alot more efficient and we have more people all trying to do what we did 30 years ago... Thats the root cause of the quiet quitting, cracking, "insert next years term", etc...

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If Your Co-Workers Are ‘Quiet Quitting,’ Here’s What That Means

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