In recent years, the term burnout has dominated organizational discussions about employees’ mental state. Exhaustion and all related terms have become the dominant lens through which we try to understand employee fatigue, reduced commitment, and declining performance. However, more and more data indicate that this lens distorts our view. It does not explain what is really happening in organizations today, especially with the advent of AI, continuous digital acceleration, and hybrid work models.
People are no longer “burning out” as they used to. They remain functional, show up for work, do their jobs effectively, respond, deliver results, and very often, productivity indicators remain stable if not improved. However, beneath this functionality, a radical change has taken place: their emotional connection to work has entered a mode of silent withdrawal.
Gallup, in its global survey, reports that 59% of employees now say they are “quiet quitting,” not in the sense of passive resistance, but in the form of psychological disengagement. Employees show up for work, but internally, they are disconnected and distanced from their jobs. An additional 18% say they are actively disengaged. The striking element here is not the percentage, but that this disconnection does not occur in a state of visible performance collapse. The system is functioning effectively, while the people who make it up have begun to emotionally withdraw from it.
The terms “burnout” or “disengagement” do not adequately describe the phenomenon. On the one hand, burnout implies excessive activation, emotional exhaustion, and often physical symptoms. On the other hand, disengagement, as traditionally measured, implies a decline in motivation and performance. What we see today, however, is different: a state of emotional “disengagement” without any external collapse. Like a crack that, although silent, is deepening.
I call this quiet cracking, and it describes the condition in which employees continue to function and perform, while quietly withdrawing their emotional presence and sense of meaning from their work.
Fatigue is not energetic; it is meaningful
A major misconception about today’s work fatigue is the belief that it is caused by workload. In reality, it stems from a loss of meaning and emerges when employees say not only that they are “tired,” but that they no longer have the mental space to invest emotionally in what they do.
According to a Microsoft survey, 64% of employees report that they no longer have the time or energy to complete their work effectively, and that is not the most concerning finding. The most concerning one is that these employees are 3.5 times more likely to report difficulties with strategic thinking, creativity, and innovation. In other words, fatigue undermines thinking before it undermines performance.
Instead of freeing up mental space, artificial intelligence more often acts as a multiplier of cognitive noise. We now have greater speed, but at the same time, more inputs, more dashboards, more options, and much less time for introspection and internal processing. What emerges can resemble exhaustion, but it is more accurately described as a form of workplace anhedonia. Not a clinical condition, but a functional one: a gradual withdrawal of emotional investment as a way to cope with continuous stimulation and pressure. People keep working, but they stop feeling connected to what the work represents.
This is not resistance. It is self-preservation.
The leadership gap and the illusion of listening
The withdrawal of emotional investment does not occur in a vacuum, but within a context in which employees feel their daily experiences are not truly understood by leadership. Microsoft itself reports that a significant 54% of managers believe that senior management is out of touch with the real needs of employees. Even more worrying, 74% of managers say they lack the influence or resources needed to effectively support their teams.
This creates a double gap: on the one hand, employees who feel that they are not being heard, and on the other, managers who feel that they are not empowered to act. In between them, engagement surveys, pulse checks, and sentiment analysis attempt to bridge the gap but often fail because they were designed to assess the intensity of mental distress rather than its silence, symptoms that escalate, rather than meaning that quietly withdraws.
As if that weren’t enough, only 32% of employees strongly agree that engagement surveys accurately reflect how they really feel. Seven out of ten participate and respond, but ultimately do not recognize themselves in the results. The measurement continues, the experience slips away.
Quiet cracking is not a failure of individual resilience. It is a failure of the system to understand it.
What breaks when everything seems to be working
The most critical and perhaps most dangerous aspect of quiet cracking is that it does not cause immediate alarm. There is no crisis, mass exodus, or dramatic drop in KPIs. However, there is a slow, silent erosion of the employee’s relationship with their work.
When employees withdraw emotionally, they remain functional but ultimately cease to be present. Work becomes a simple transaction, creativity is limited to the minimum safe level, risk-taking is significantly reduced, and initiative eventually disappears. Along with it, the organization’s ability to truly evolve is also extinguished, because quiet cracking does not mean that people will leave tomorrow. It means they have already emotionally left.
Instead of a conclusion: the question that cannot be measured
The critical question organizations face today is not how to increase employee engagement scores, but something far more uncomfortable: Where exactly is the meaning being lost from the daily work experience? As long as this question remains unaddressed, systems will continue to function effectively, while people quietly withdraw from them. Quiet cracking does not announce itself through crises or collapses, but gestates beneath the surface, in organizations that appear stable, productive, and under control.
And that is precisely what makes it so difficult to detect and, at the same time, so dangerous to ignore.
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