With over 17 years of experience in recruitment, HR consulting, and career transitions, Jillian MacKellar brings a strategic and human-centered approach to talent and organizational growth.

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You can feel it before you can prove it.

The energy shift in a meeting. The silence that sits just a little heavier on Zoom. The once-engaged team member who now only speaks in emojis.

No one’s storming out. No one’s rage-posting on LinkedIn. But something’s off, and you know it.

This isn’t quiet quitting anymore. This is something else entirely. It’s called quiet cracking.

Quiet cracking doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a slow emotional split that starts with “I’ll just get through this week” and ends with “I don’t even recognize myself in this job anymore.”

People aren’t necessarily unhappy. They’re just done pretending to be inspired. They’re clocking in, meeting deadlines, answering emails, but the light’s gone out behind their eyes.

And the scariest part? They’re not saying a word about it.

One of my clients described it perfectly:

“It’s like my team’s still here, but the spirit of the team packed up and left.”

That’s quiet cracking. It’s not disengagement you can easily measure. It’s emotional erosion you can feel.

Let’s be real. Work hasn’t felt the same since 2020. Everyone re-evaluated what matters, and most of us are still somewhere between survival mode and a long nap we haven’t had time to take.

According to Gallup, global employee engagement dropped to 21% in 2024, the second-lowest level in years. In the U.S., Gallup’s headline “U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low” reported that just 31% of employees are engaged — the lowest in a decade.

Hybrid work was supposed to fix it, but for many people, it just blurred the line between burnout and boredom. There’s no ritual anymore. No commute to reset, no office buzz to feed off, no clear separation between “I worked hard today” and “I just existed.”

And now we’ve hit the point where people aren’t even rebelling against it. They’re just dissolving into the routine.

Consider this: one research site reports that only 23% of employees worldwide are actively engaged, meaning about 77% are not. When the adrenaline fades and the “new normal” becomes the same old, that’s when the cracks start to show.

The middle layer — the people supposed to be holding everyone together — are quietly unraveling.

Managers are under intense strain. Top Workplaces found that two-thirds of managers say they struggle with heavy workloads and endless meetings. Engagement numbers of managers mirror the broader dip: globally, their engagement fell from 30% to 27% in 2024.

They’re trying to coach while coping, motivate while exhausted, and keep culture alive through a screen. They’re being pulled from every direction: leadership asking for metrics, employees asking for meaning.

One manager told me, “I used to love one-on-ones. Now I feel like I’m holding therapy sessions I’m not trained for.”

They’re not wrong. Many managers aren’t burned out from workload — they’re burned out from emotional load.

When your managers crack, it spreads. Teams mirror the energy they see, and suddenly you’ve got an organization full of people who are technically working but emotionally absent.

Every company wants to measure engagement, but most are just measuring noise. Pulse surveys, engagement tools, feedback dashboards — they’re all great until they start replacing actual conversation.

You don’t need another data set. You need dialogue.

Data backs this up. According to Paycor, 42% of employees who voluntarily left their organization said their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving. That means nearly half of those people didn’t feel anyone asked them, “Hey, how are things going?”

The easiest way to spot a quiet crack forming is to stop talking about “morale” and start asking real questions:

• What part of your day feels the hardest right now?
• What’s something you wish we’d stop doing?
• When was the last time you felt proud of your work?

Then — and this part matters — listen like you plan to do something with the answer.

Because employees can tell when feedback is a formality.

You don’t fix a crack by covering it up. You repair it by strengthening what’s underneath. Here’s a framework I use: SEE (Spot → Engage → Evolve).

Spot the early signs of cracks before they become breaks.

Use informal check-ins, manager reflections, and pulse-style questions that dig beyond “Are you satisfied?” to “Are you still connected?”

Engage with real human conversation.

Stop relying on one-and-done surveys. As research from Effectory shows, strong leadership support can boost engagement by 24%. Reach out: “Hey, I noticed your energy seems off. What’s changed for you?”

Evolve the role or environment to match the person, not just the job description.

Engagement and retention data show that when employees believe their manager sees their future, the risk of departure drops.

In practice, this might look like a 15-minute recalibration chat at month six, a small stretch assignment at month eight, and a transparent “what we’ve changed based on your input” note at month ten. Over the year, performance stabilizes, turnover drops by 25%, and engagement rises by double digits.

The truth is that cracks aren’t bad. They’re signals. They show you where something needs care before it breaks completely.

The companies that are thriving right now aren’t the ones with perfect engagement scores. They’re the ones who notice small shifts and lean into them early.

In 2025, nearly 89% of HR leaders say retention is a top priority, yet 47% of organizations still lack a formal retention strategy. That gap is where quiet cracking lives.

We’re entering a new retention era where you can’t fix morale with another benefit or slogan. You fix it by paying attention, by building trust that goes both ways, and by creating a culture where people can admit, “Hey, I’m not okay,” without fearing it’ll be used against them.

Because most of the time, people don’t want to leave — they just want to stop pretending they’re fine.

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