“Quiet quitting” grabbed headlines in recent years. But a more insidious trend is spreading across workplaces: quiet cracking.
Quiet cracking isn’t coasting. It’s worse. It’s when your people (and often, you) are still showing up but silently falling apart inside. The energy is gone. Focus is fractured. The work gets done, but at half speed, half quality, and with twice the stress.
Recent surveys confirm it’s not rare. According to a 2025 TalentLMS Survey, 20% of U.S. professionals experience this feeling constantly, and another 34% report that it’s creeping in. That means over half the workforce is cracking under the surface. And founders? They feel it more than anyone.
Why? Because when you’re running a business, it’s easy to mistake overwhelm for “just the grind.” Until one day, the grind cracks you—and your business with it.
What Quiet Cracking Is (and Isn’t)
Quiet cracking is persistent unhappiness and disengagement that erodes performance, even as people remain in their roles. It’s distinct from:
- Quiet quitting: a conscious choice to scale back.
- Clinical burnout: a diagnosable state. Quiet cracking can precede or mask burnout, making it harder to see until damage is done.
The term emerged in that same TalentLMS survey and was amplified by Fortune and Business Insider. The mainstream press treats it as a cultural trend. But beneath the buzz is a deeper truth: it’s a design problem.
Why It’s Rising Now
This isn’t just bad luck or “kids these days.” Quiet cracking is fueled by structural and economic shifts:
- Job insecurity and flat promotions: Layoffs, AI anxiety, and stalled career paths push employees to disengage.
- Lack of training: Employees without upskilling are 140% more likely to feel insecure about the future.
- Manager disengagement: Gallup reports global engagement slipped again in 2024, with manager engagement falling hardest. Since managers account for approximately 70% of team engagement, their cracks spread fast.
In short, systems built for certainty are rare. Most organizations run on spikes and adrenaline.
The Science Behind the Cracks
Quiet cracking isn’t just emotional—it’s physiological.
- Chronic stress: The WHO estimates 12 billion working days are lost annually due to depression and anxiety, costing $1 trillion in productivity.
- JD-R model: When job demands outpace resources—clarity, support, autonomy—strain turns into burnout.
- Allostatic load: Sustained stress rewires the body, creating wear-and-tear that shows up in fatigue, mistakes, and health breakdowns.
- Financial stress: The American Psychological Association’s 2024 Stress in America survey again identified the economy and money as the top stressors.
And here’s the kicker: money stress doesn’t stop at home. Tax chaos, messy cash flow, and unclear financials add hidden cognitive load that accelerates cracking—for employees and especially for founders.
The Business Cost
You may not see quiet cracking in turnover numbers. That’s the danger.
Instead, you see it in:
- Projects slowing down.
- Decisions taking longer.
- Error rates creeping higher.
- Energy draining out of meetings.
Gallup pegs the 2024 global cost of disengagement at $438 billion. Historically, it is estimated that disengagement eats up nearly 9% of global GDP. That’s not an HR problem. That’s a solvency problem.
Why Founders Crack First
Owners and leaders aren’t immune—they’re often the first to crack.
Why?
- Decision fatigue from constant firefighting.
- Variable cash cycles create stress and false confidence.
- Lack of systems that anchor decisions in reality instead of spikes.
This is where I’ve seen businesses implode. Not because they didn’t have good products. Not because they didn’t have access to credit. But because leaders built their commitments on outliers—one good month, one hot quarter—only to crack when the baseline returned.
How to Stop Cracking with Certainty
Quiet cracking thrives in environments of noise, chaos, and constant decision fatigue. The antidote isn’t more hustle or surface-level perks—it’s building systems and practices that convert noise into clarity and create a foundation of certainty.
At its core, this means designing your business to be resilient in both good and bad months. Leaders who anchor decisions to consistent patterns (not temporary spikes) avoid the trap of overcommitting during highs and panicking during lows. Certainty is about building rules you can live with in any season, so the baseline, not the outlier, dictates your choices.
It also means shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive design. Instead of operating on adrenaline, create structures that reduce mental load and give you margin to think clearly. That includes how you manage your finances, how you interact with your team, and how you establish expectations. Predictability in these areas reduces stress, improves focus, and gives people confidence to perform at their best.
Ultimately, certainty is as much a cultural as an operational concept. When employees feel supported, trained, and trusted, they are far less likely to crack under pressure. When managers consistently check in and clarify roles, small stressors don’t escalate into chronic disengagement. And when leaders treat training and development as investments rather than expenses, they replace insecurity with growth and momentum.
Conclusion
Quiet cracking thrives in noisy systems. It’s not just about employee wellbeing, but about solvency, focus, and the long-term health of your business. Founders who continually chase adrenaline will eventually crack. Founders who build certainty into their systems, starting with cash and tax, rig the game in their favor. Because the real secret to resilience isn’t more hustle. It’s rules you can live with in any month.
Sources
TalentLMS Survey via PR Newswire
American Psychological Association
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