Latest / Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions / Why Your Best Employees Are Quietly Quitting Right Now
Transcript
- Lucas: So let's talk about the employee who's still at your company, still collecting a paycheck, still doing the work — but they've checked out. Not loudly. No dramatic resignation. Just a slow fade inside the job. Luna: The quiet quitter. Not the viral TikTok version from a few years ago, but the real, measurable phenomenon that HR teams are only now starting to take seriously. Lucas: Exactly. Let's get the definition right. Quiet quitting isn't about doing the bare minimum to avoid being fired. It's about a previously engaged employee consciously withdrawing their discretionary effort. They stop volunteering for projects, they stop contributing ideas in meetings, they stop going the extra mile. Luna: And according to Gallup's most recent workforce survey from late 2025, 57 percent of employees under the age of 35 are in that category right now. That's up from 48 percent in 2023. Lucas: Those numbers are staggering. And it's not just young workers. Gallup found that overall, about a third of the full-time US workforce is quietly quitting. That's roughly 50 million people. Luna: And here's the part that gets me — companies often don't even notice until the person leaves. Because quiet quitters are still hitting their metrics. They're just not doing anything beyond the job description. Lucas: Right. And that's the tricky part. Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index actually found that in companies with high quiet quitting rates, productivity metrics — measured by things like emails sent, meetings attended, tasks completed — actually rose by 12 percent. Luna: Wait — so quiet quitting made productivity go up? That sounds backwards. Lucas: It does, but the explanation is fascinating. What Microsoft observed was that managers in those companies started using AI tools — Copilot, automated workflows, smart scheduling — to compensate for the lost discretionary effort. They were literally automating around the disengagement. Luna: So the manager is covering for the quiet quitter with technology, and the quiet quitter is coasting, and the company thinks everything is fine because the numbers look good. That's a ticking time bomb. Lucas: It is. And I think the biggest risk is the talent you're losing — not the quiet quitter themselves, but the high performers around them who see that mediocrity is tolerated. That's when you get a cascading effect. Luna: Let's talk about the signs. How do you spot a quiet quitter before they fully disengage? Lucas: There are three telltale signals I've seen consistently. First, declining meeting contributions. The person who used to speak up, challenge ideas, offer alternatives — they now sit silently. They might even stop turning their camera on. Luna: Second is vanishing from informal channels. They used to be active on Slack or Teams, sending GIFs, asking questions, joining water-cooler threads. Now they're strictly messaging about work tasks only. Lucas: And third, the 'just the task' mindset. They stop asking 'why' or 'what if.' They just execute. Their calendar is clear of any optional meetings. They decline invitations with a polite 'no bandwidth.' Luna: I had an employee who did exactly this. She was one of our best analysts, but over six months she went from being the first person to raise her hand for a stretch assignment to being someone who would literally only do the tasks in her job description. I thought she was just busy. Then she quit without notice. Lucas: That's the classic failure mode. And it's why exit interviews are almost useless here. By the time someone quits, they've already mentally left months ago. The exit interview just captures rationalizations. Luna: So what should managers be doing instead? How do you catch quiet quitting in real time? Lucas: I think the answer is the performance check-in — but not the typical quarterly review where you go over goals and metrics. I mean a conversation designed specifically to probe discretionary effort. Luna: Can you give us a framework? Lucas: Sure. I'd ask three questions. First: 'What part of your work energizes you the most right now?' If they struggle to answer, that's a red flag. Second: 'Is there something you used to enjoy doing that you've stopped doing? Why?' And third: 'If you could change one thing about your role without changing the company, what would it be?' Luna: Those are good because they're open-ended and non-accusatory. They invite honesty rather than defensiveness. Lucas: Exactly. The goal isn't to catch them slacking — it's to understand what's draining their engagement. Sometimes it's a bad manager, sometimes it's burnout, sometimes it's simply that the role no longer fits their growth trajectory. Luna: And if you discover it's a bad manager, you have a different problem entirely. But at least you know where to focus. Lucas: Let me bring in a data point here. Gallup also found that 70 percent of the variance in team engagement is explained by the manager. That means quiet quitting is often a management failure, not a hiring failure. Luna: That's a sobering number. It means we can't just blame the employee or the labor market. The fix is in how we lead. Lucas: And speaking of fixes — if you're finding these conversations useful, and if they've helped you think differently about how you manage your team or run your hiring process, we'd love for you to support the show. We deliberately don't run ads on these. If you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to keep this ad-free and focused on the stuff that actually matters for people building careers and companies. No pressure at all. Lucas: Alright, back to the quiet quitting problem. So we know management is a big lever. But there's also a structural issue: many companies have flattened their hierarchies so much that there's no career ladder for individual contributors. Luna: You mean people quit quietly because they don't see a path forward? Lucas: Exactly. If you're a senior IC and there's no promotion track that doesn't force you into management, you might feel stuck. And stuck employees often disengage. Luna: Some companies have created 'principal' or 'fellow' tracks to solve this. But it's still rare. Lucas: It is. And the irony is that quiet quitting often happens among your best people — because they're the ones who care enough to be frustrated by lack of growth. The truly checked-out employee never had high engagement to begin with. Luna: So the signal is actually a positive one: someone is quiet quitting because they wanted more. That's a fixable problem. Lucas: Right. And the fix starts with those check-in conversations. But it also requires a culture where managers are held accountable for engagement, not just output. Luna: What about the role of compensation? Is quiet quitting about money? Lucas: Sometimes. But Gallup's data shows that compensation is actually lower on the list of drivers for quiet quitters. The top reasons are: lack of recognition, lack of meaningful work, and poor management. Money matters, but it's rarely the primary cause. Luna: So paying people more won't necessarily re-engage them. Lucas: It might stop them from leaving, but it won't make them go the extra mile. Engagement is emotional. It's about feeling valued and seeing impact. Luna: Let's talk about what happens when you ignore quiet quitting. What's the cost? Lucas: Beyond the obvious loss of talent when they eventually leave, there's a cultural contagion. Other team members see that someone is phoning it in and getting away with it. That normalizes mediocrity. Over time, your entire team's performance baseline drops. Luna: I've seen that happen. It's like a slow rot that you don't notice until suddenly your best people are disillusioned. Lucas: And there's a financial cost too. Gallup estimates that quiet quitting costs the global economy $8.8 trillion in lost productivity. That's not a typo — trillion. Luna: That's mind-boggling. And yet most companies still don't have a systematic way to measure engagement beyond annual surveys. Lucas: Which is why I'd argue that the most important tool a manager has is the weekly one-on-one. Not a status update meeting — a real conversation about how the person is doing, what they're excited about, what's draining them. Luna: And if you're a listener who manages people, here's a practical takeaway: look at your calendar for next week. How many of your one-on-ones are actually focused on the person, not the work? Lucas: That's the real litmus test. If most of your one-on-ones are project updates, you're not managing engagement. You're just managing tasks. Luna: And your quiet quitters will remain invisible until they're gone. Lucas: So here's my challenge for this episode: pick one person on your team this week and have a real check-in conversation. Ask them what energizes them. Ask them what they'd change. See what you learn. Luna: I think that's a great action item. And if you do it, we'd love to hear how it went. Lucas: Yeah, reach out to us. We're on LinkedIn, or you can drop us a note through the show page. Luna: Alright, that's all for this episode of Hiring & Firing. Thanks for listening.