quiet cracking
quiet cracking noun: the decline in an employee's sense of well-being and motivation in a job.
Noun
quiet cracking (uncountable)
- The decline in an employee's sense of well-being and motivation in a job.
- TalentLMS, a leading employee training platform, released a study of 1,000 U.S. employees that uncovers a silent crisis in the workplace that's going largely undetected — a phenomenon its researchers have coined "Quiet Cracking."2025 April 9, “New TalentLMS Research Reveals 'Quiet Cracking' as a Hidden Crisis in the U.S. Workplace”, in PR Newswire
- Unlike "quiet quitting," where employees deliberately set boundaries by doing the minimum required, quiet cracking represents persistent workplace unhappiness that gradually leads to decreased performance, diminished productivity, and resignation.2025 Caroline Castrillon, "7 ‘Quiet Cracking’ Behaviors That Are Killing Productivity," Forbes, 18 May 2025; updated 25 May 2025.
Origin of quiet cracking
quiet + cracking, on the model of quiet quitting.
Questions about quiet cracking
- What does quiet cracking mean?
- Quiet cracking means the decline in an employee's sense of well-being and motivation in a job.
- What part of speech is quiet cracking?
- Quiet cracking is a noun.
Words near quiet cracking in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: quiet cracking (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-quiet cracking.wav.
Cite this entry: “quiet cracking.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/quiet_cracking. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.