Is “Quiet Quitting” Actually a Bad Thing?

Vocabulary

Disengagement – a lack of interest, energy, or emotional connection to something, especially one’s job.

Example – Quiet quitting is often described as a quiet, hidden form of disengagement rather than actually leaving a job.

Boundary – a limit that separates what a person will and will not do, especially with their time or effort.

Example – Refusing to answer work emails after six in the evening is one way an employee might set a boundary.

Burnout – a state of physical and emotional exhaustion caused by long-term stress, often from work.

Example – Constant overtime without any recognition can quickly lead to burnout.

Erosion – a slow, gradual weakening or wearing away of something over time.

Example – Researchers describe “quiet cracking” as the gradual erosion of an employee’s motivation and performance.

Backlash – a strong negative reaction from a group of people, often toward a trend, idea, or decision.

Example – The phrase “quiet quitting” caused a mixed backlash online, with some people praising it and others calling it lazy.

Article

In the summer of 2022, a 24-year-old engineer named Zaid Khan posted a 17-second video on TikTok that would eventually reshape how millions of people talk about work. He described “quiet quitting” not as actually leaving your job, but as refusing to treat hustle culture as if it were a way of life: doing the job you are paid to do, and nothing more. The phrase spread rapidly, sparking praise from burned-out employees and sharp criticism from managers who saw it as a polite word for laziness. More than three years later, the debate has not gone away. If anything, the data suggests the underlying problem has only deepened.

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, global employee engagement fell to just 20 percent in 2025, its lowest level since 2020 and a decline for the second consecutive year, a first since Gallup began tracking the measure. Gallup sorts workers into three groups: the engaged, who feel genuinely invested in their work; the “not engaged,” a category that closely overlaps with quiet quitting, who do the minimum required and mentally check out; and the “actively disengaged,” sometimes called loud quitters, who are openly unhappy and vocal about it. By this measure, roughly six in ten employees worldwide currently fall into the not-engaged category. Gallup estimates the resulting drop in productivity costs the global economy close to 10 trillion dollars a year, equivalent to about 9 percent of the world’s entire economic output.

Critics of quiet quitting argue that this kind of disengagement is corrosive, even if it looks harmless on the surface. Teams depend on colleagues who go slightly beyond their job description: covering for a sick coworker, offering a new idea in a meeting, or simply caring whether a project succeeds. When large numbers of employees quietly withdraw that extra effort, momentum slows for everyone. Notably, Gallup’s data shows this disengagement is not limited to frontline workers. Manager engagement itself has fallen sharply, from 31 percent in 2022 to just 22 percent in 2025, suggesting that even the people responsible for motivating others are running low on motivation themselves.

Supporters of quiet quitting see the same numbers very differently. To them, refusing to answer emails at midnight or take on unpaid extra responsibilities is not laziness, but a reasonable boundary in response to years of understaffing, stagnant wages, and expanding workloads. From this perspective, the real story is not that workers suddenly became unmotivated, but that many jobs quietly began demanding more from employees without offering more in return. Seen this way, quiet quitting looks less like a personal failure and more like a predictable reaction to conditions employees did not create and cannot fully control.

By 2026, the conversation has splintered into several more specific ideas, each describing a slightly different flavor of workplace strain. “Quiet cracking” describes an unintentional erosion of morale and performance over time, distinct from quiet quitting’s more deliberate boundary-setting. “Quiet burnout” refers to a hidden, internalized exhaustion that researchers increasingly link to rising productivity expectations introduced by artificial intelligence tools, expectations that have often arrived without any corresponding increase in staffing or support. On the more dramatic end sits “revenge quitting,” sudden and visible resignations driven by accumulated resentment, the opposite of quiet quitting’s slow, low-profile withdrawal.

Employers, meanwhile, are not simply passive observers in this dynamic. Recent surveys suggest that 67 percent of employees report experiencing “quiet firing,” a pattern in which management gradually pushes someone out through neglect, reduced responsibilities, or being passed over, rather than addressing performance concerns directly. Troublingly, 41 percent of managers admit to using these tactics themselves. Taken together, these figures paint a picture of a workplace relationship breaking down quietly on both sides, with neither employees nor employers always willing to have the harder, more direct conversation.

So, is quiet quitting actually a bad thing? Most workplace researchers resist giving a simple yes-or-no answer. Doing exactly what your job requires is not inherently a problem; contracts and job descriptions exist for a reason. The deeper issue, most experts argue, lies less with individual employees and more with organizations that manage retention reactively, offer little meaningful feedback, and rarely design workloads that are sustainable in the first place. Whether quiet quitting looks like a healthy boundary or a warning sign of disengagement may depend less on the employee doing it, and more on why they felt they needed to in the first place.

Discussion

Have you or someone you know ever practiced “quiet quitting” at work or school? What did that actually look like day to day?

Where do you personally think the line is between setting a healthy boundary and simply not caring about your job anymore?

Why do you think employee engagement has been falling globally for the past few years, according to this article?

How much responsibility do managers and companies have for preventing burnout, compared to the responsibility of individual employees?

Do you think “quiet firing,” where a company pushes someone out indirectly, is worse than being direct and honest? Why or why not?

How does work culture in your own country compare to what this article describes? Is working long hours seen as normal, or even admirable?

If you were a manager, what would you do differently to keep your team engaged without demanding unpaid extra effort?

Sources

Gallup: State of the Global Workplace 2026

Eastern Connecticut State University: Quiet Quitting Is Old News — Here’s What Replaced It in 2026

NPR Planet Money: The Economics Behind “Quiet Quitting” — and What We Should Call It Instead