On July 25, a New York software engineer posting on TikTok as @zaidleppelin uploaded a short video. "I recently learned about this term called quiet quitting," he said, "where you're not outright quitting your job, but you're quitting the idea of going above and beyond." Work, he said, is not your life, and your worth as a person is not defined by your labour. The video was viewed millions of times in a few weeks, and by late August "quiet quitting" was everywhere: on news sites, in op-eds, on LinkedIn and in executive meetings.

Then came the data:

  • On September 6, Gallup reported that at least half of the US workforce could be described as quiet quitters: people who do what their job requires but are not psychologically engaged. Only 32 percent of employees were engaged, and 18 percent were actively disengaged.
  • On September 22, Microsoft published a survey of 20,000 people in 11 countries. 87 percent of employees said they were productive at work. 85 percent of leaders said the shift to hybrid work made it hard to be confident that employees were productive. Microsoft called this gap "productivity paranoia".

Two very different stories are being told about the same phenomenon. In one, employees are lazy or entitled and need to be pushed. In the other, employees are reasonably refusing to burn themselves out for employers who do not reward extra effort. This post argues that both miss the main point. Quiet quitting is mostly a symptom of how teams are managed, and the fixes are well understood.

1. What the term actually describes

"Quiet quitting" is a misleading name. Nobody is quitting. The term covers several different things, and it helps to separate them.

Behaviour What it is Is it a problem?
Setting boundaries Working contracted hours, not answering messages at midnight No. This is healthy and sustainable
Doing only the job description Meeting requirements but not volunteering for extra work Depends. It may signal low engagement, or a job description that is honest
Psychological withdrawal Not caring about outcomes, not sharing ideas, not helping colleagues Yes. This hurts the team and usually the person too
Active disengagement Resentment, undermining others, spreading discontent Yes, seriously

Much of the online debate mixes up the first and third rows. Rejecting "hustle culture" is not the same as not caring. Plenty of people work reasonable hours and are deeply engaged. Plenty of people work long hours and have mentally checked out.

The thing leaders should worry about is not people going home at 6 pm. It is people who no longer believe that their effort makes a difference.

2. What the data says

Gallup has been measuring employee engagement in the US for more than two decades, so its numbers are useful precisely because they can be compared over time.

Measure Finding
Engaged employees (US, survey in June 2022) 32%, down from 36% in 2020
Actively disengaged employees 18%, up from 14% in 2020
When the decline started Second half of 2021, as the Great Resignation was peaking
Who declined most Employees under 35, especially on feeling cared about and having chances to learn and grow
Global engagement (June 2022 report) 21% of employees worldwide are engaged; 44% experienced a lot of stress the previous day, a record high

According to Gallup, the items that fell most were basic ones: clarity about what is expected, feeling that someone at work cares about you, having opportunities to learn and grow, and feeling connected to the organisation's mission. Gallup's own conclusion was that quiet quitting is a symptom of poor management.

That diagnosis fits what we already knew from the Great Resignation. People leave, or withdraw, when they feel disrespected, unrecognised and stuck. In a tight labour market, many left. Those who stayed and still felt that way became, in the new vocabulary, quiet quitters.

3. The productivity paranoia problem

Microsoft's findings add a second layer. In hybrid and remote work, managers lose many of the informal signals they used to rely on: seeing people at their desks, overhearing conversations, noticing who stays late. Many respond by looking for visible activity instead: more status meetings, more messages, more monitoring.

This creates a vicious circle:

  1. Leaders cannot see the work, so they doubt it is happening.
  2. They respond with more check-ins and tracking.
  3. Employees spend more time performing visibility, in meetings and quick message replies, and less on focused work.
  4. Employees feel distrusted, which lowers their motivation.
  5. Real productivity and engagement fall, which seems to confirm the leaders' doubts.

Microsoft's own data on Teams use shows meetings and after-hours work rising since the start of the pandemic. Monitoring software sales have grown too. None of this measures what matters, which is outcomes.

The motivation research is clear on this point. Feeling controlled undermines intrinsic motivation. Surveillance tells people that they are not trusted, and people who are not trusted rarely go above and beyond.

4. What drives team performance

If the question is how to get people to care and do their best work, there is a solid body of research to draw on. Three findings stand out.

Psychological safety. The Harvard professor Amy Edmondson defined it in 1999 as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking: that you can ask a question, admit a mistake or propose an idea without being punished or humiliated. When Google studied 180 of its teams in its Project Aristotle research, psychological safety was the most important of five factors that distinguished effective teams. The others were dependability, structure and clarity, meaning of work, and impact of work.

Progress in meaningful work. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer analysed nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from knowledge workers. The single most important factor in a good workday was making progress on meaningful work, even small progress. Setbacks had an even larger negative effect. This is the "progress principle", and it suggests that one of a manager's most important jobs is removing obstacles.

Basic psychological needs. Self-determination theory, the most extensively tested framework on motivation, holds that people need autonomy, competence and relatedness. Surveillance attacks autonomy. Unclear expectations undermine competence. Isolation in remote work, and managers who do not seem to care, undermine relatedness. The three needs line up closely with the items Gallup found to be declining.

What the research says What quiet quitting looks like when it is missing
Psychological safety People stop speaking up, sharing ideas or admitting problems
Clarity and structure People do the minimum because they do not know what "more" would mean
Progress on meaningful work People stop caring because their effort seems not to change anything
Autonomy People do exactly what they are told and no more
Relatedness People do not help colleagues they barely know

5. What managers can do

The good news is that most of these factors are under a direct manager's control. Here are practices with good evidence behind them.

Make expectations explicit

  • Agree with each person what success looks like this quarter, in terms of outcomes, not hours.
  • Write it down and revisit it monthly.
  • Say clearly what is not expected. If late-night replies are not required, say so.

Manage outcomes, not activity

  • Replace status meetings with short written updates where possible.
  • Judge work by results and quality, not by visible busyness.
  • Avoid monitoring software. If you do not trust someone to work unsupervised, that is a conversation to have directly.

Have regular one-to-ones

  • Meet each team member for at least 30 minutes every week or two.
  • Make the time about them: their progress, obstacles and development, not just a project update.
  • Ask, "What is getting in your way?" and then act on the answer.

Build psychological safety

  • When something goes wrong, ask what happened and what we can learn, not who is to blame.
  • Admit your own mistakes openly.
  • Thank people for raising problems, especially uncomfortable ones.

Protect focus and recovery

  • Set team norms for meeting-free time and response times.
  • Do not send messages at night that seem to expect a reply. Schedule them.
  • Treat sustained overwork as a planning problem to fix, not a sign of commitment.

6. A warning about the backlash

Some leaders have responded to the quiet quitting debate by tightening up: return-to-office mandates without explanation, stricter performance management, more tracking. Some commentators have started using the phrase "quiet firing" for managers who push people out by withholding raises, interesting work or feedback.

Both responses risk making things worse. Pressure may produce more visible effort for a while, but it erodes the trust that discretionary effort depends on. People go above and beyond for managers and teams they believe in, not for ones that watch them.

None of this means expectations should be low. High-performing teams usually have high standards. The difference is that those standards are clear, fair and paired with support, and that people are treated as adults who can be trusted to meet them.

7. A checklist for leaders

For managers

  • [ ] Each person on your team can say in one sentence what success looks like for them this quarter.
  • [ ] You have had a one-to-one with each person in the past two weeks.
  • [ ] You know what is getting in each person's way, and you are working on at least one obstacle.
  • [ ] Your team has agreed norms on response times and meeting-free time.
  • [ ] You have recognised a specific contribution from someone this week.

For senior leaders

  • [ ] Your managers have time and training for coaching, not only delivery.
  • [ ] Performance is judged on outcomes, not hours or visibility.
  • [ ] Office attendance policies come with a clear reason and team-level flexibility.
  • [ ] You measure engagement regularly and act on the results by team.
  • [ ] Your own behaviour, such as late-night emails, matches the norms you want.

Why this matters

  • Disengagement is expensive. Gallup estimates that low engagement costs the global economy trillions of dollars a year in lost productivity.
  • It is mostly fixable. The drivers, such as unclear expectations, lack of care and lack of growth, are within managers' control.
  • Pressure backfires. Surveillance and unexplained mandates undermine the trust that extra effort depends on.
  • Boundaries are not the enemy. Teams that sustain high performance over years are the ones that do not burn their people out.

Final Thoughts

"Quiet quitting" will probably fade as a phrase, like most viral terms. The underlying pattern will not. When people feel that their work does not matter, that nobody notices their effort and that they are not trusted, they protect themselves by caring less. That has always been true. Hybrid work and two years of pandemic stress have made it more visible.

The fix is not to make people care through pressure. It is to create the conditions in which caring makes sense: clear goals, real progress, fair recognition, a manager who pays attention and a team where it is safe to speak up. None of these are new ideas. They are just harder to practise than they are to describe.

If half the workforce really is quietly quitting, the most useful question for any leader is not "what is wrong with them?" It is "what would make it worth their while to care again?"

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