The quiet resignation

There is a kind of leaving that does not show up in your attrition reports. The employee is still at their desk. They are still answering their emails, attending their meetings, and submitting their reports on time. On paper, they have not gone anywhere.

But they have. Internally, quietly, without drama or announcement they have checked out. This is what researchers now call quiet quitting, though the term undersells the gravity of what it represents. It is not employees being lazy. It is employees who have decided, for a reason that feels entirely rational to them, that giving more than the minimum is no longer worth it.

The Disengagement Epidemic

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report has found that only 23 per cent of employees worldwide are engaged at work. That means 77 per cent, the overwhelming majority of every workforce on the planet, are either not engaged or actively disengaged. In Southeast Asia and South Asia, those numbers tend to be even lower. McKinsey research shows that employees experiencing wellbeing challenges are four times more likely to want to leave their organisation. And 85 per cent of companies report that wellness programmes directly support employee engagement.

Here is what makes this so costly: disengaged employees do not perform up to their potential. They produce enough to keep their jobs and not enough to drive your business forward. They do not innovate. They do not go beyond the brief. They do not bring the discretionary effort, the extra thought, the creative leap, the generous contribution that separates good organisations from exceptional ones.

What Disengagement Actually Costs

A disengaged employee costs an organisation an estimated 34 per cent of their annual salary in lost productivity. For a workforce of 200 people with even modest average salaries, this is a significant and largely invisible drag on performance. And then there is the moment quiet quitting becomes actual quitting because the research consistently shows that disengaged employees are far more likely to leave, and to leave for organisations they believe care more about them.

Companies with effective wellness initiatives show 25 per cent lower employee turnover compared to those without programmes. The causal mechanism is well-documented: when people feel that their organisation invests in their health and flourishing, they reciprocate with loyalty, effort, and pride. This is not idealism. It is organisational psychology.

What Re-engagement Looks Like

The antidote to quiet quitting is not surveillance or performance management. It is culture and culture is built through choices that signal to your people what you actually value. When a company builds movement into the working day, it signals that the body matters. When it creates space for mindfulness and recovery, it signals that mental health matters. When it invests in retreats and shared experiences that build genuine human connection, it signals that the community matters.

These are not soft interventions. They are the signals that tell your best people the ones who have options, who are watching carefully, who are making decisions about where to invest their careers that this organisation is worth staying for.

Your best people are the hardest to replace and the easiest to lose. They are not waiting for a dramatic sign. They are reading small signals every day, asking a quiet question: does this place see me as a human being?

Make sure your answer is yes.

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