Quiet Quitting: Why Are Employees Withdrawing?

What is quiet quitting, why is it spreading and what does it cost a business? Read about the signs, psychological causes and concrete steps managers can take.

Do you have people on your team who still do their job properly but no longer volunteer for anything, say nothing in meetings, switch off their computer the minute the working day ends and say "it's not in my job description" more and more often? In recent years this picture has been given the name quiet quitting (in Turkish, "sessiz istifa"). The employee hasn't handed in a resignation letter, but mentally and emotionally they have already left the job. In this article, for business owners, factory managers, and HR and OHS specialists, I look from a psychological perspective at what quiet quitting is, why it is spreading, what it costs a business and what an organisation can do about it.

What Is Quiet Quitting and What Isn't It?

Quiet quitting is when an employee reduces their involvement to a minimum without leaving the job altogether. The tasks in the job description get done, but extra effort, initiative, creativity and emotional investment in the organisation are withdrawn. The term became popular on social media, but the situation it describes is not new: organisational psychology has long talked about a lack of engagement and about keeping a mental distance from work.

An important distinction needs to be made here. Keeping to working hours, setting reasonable boundaries or not replying to work messages in the evening is not, on its own, quiet quitting. These are often signs of a healthy work-life balance. The problem is the employee losing their sense of meaning at work, being gripped by the feeling that "it makes no difference what I do" and quietly withdrawing as a result. In other words, the issue is not the hours but the broken bond.

Another distinction concerns burnout. The World Health Organization defines burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed; one of its dimensions is increased mental distance from one's job (WHO, 2019). So some situations that look like quiet quitting may actually be an early stage of burnout. Putting the label "unmotivated employee" on someone without making this distinction leads to the wrong intervention. My article on preventing employee burnout, where I cover the subject in detail, can complement this one.

What Are the Signs of Quiet Quitting?

This withdrawal makes no noise; by the time it is noticed, months have usually passed. Some signs managers can watch for are:

• Loss of volunteering: Participation in new projects, training and improvement suggestions drops noticeably.
• Silence in meetings: Agreeing, or not speaking at all, is preferred to putting forward ideas.
• "Not my job" language: Task boundaries are drawn rigidly and help for teammates decreases.
• Emotional flatness: Not reacting to success or failure, and indifference to work-related matters.
• Avoiding development conversations: The answer to a question about career goals is "I don't know, I have no such plan".
• A subtle decline in quality: Work is delivered but never goes beyond the "adequate" level; checking of details drops.

One or two of these signs alone may mean nothing. Everyone has periods of withdrawal from time to time. What matters is when the change becomes persistent and spreads across the team.

Why Does Quiet Quitting Happen? Psychological and Organisational Causes

This is often not an individual matter of "laziness"; it is a form of adaptation that the employee develops to protect themselves. When a person feels they are not getting back what they put in, that their voice is not heard or that their effort changes nothing, they try to protect themselves from disappointment by reducing their emotional investment. A process close to this in psychology is known as "learned helplessness": the more a person believes their behaviour does not affect the outcome, the more they stop trying.

The main factors feeding this withdrawal are:

• Excessive workload and time pressure: In a large survey in Europe, 46% of employees reported severe time pressure or excessive workload (EU-OSHA, 2022). A person constantly working in "catch-up" mode cuts extra effort first in order to conserve energy.
• Lack of autonomy: In the same survey, 18% of employees reported a lack of autonomy (EU-OSHA, 2022). An employee with no say in how they work finds it hard to take ownership of the job.
• Poor communication: The proportion reporting poor communication or cooperation within the organisation is 26% (EU-OSHA, 2022). An employee who does not know the reasons for decisions feels outside the process.
• Perceptions of recognition and fairness: In environments where effort goes unseen and promotion and pay decisions are not seen as fair, the question "why should I do more?" is unavoidable.
• The relationship with the manager: A person's direct manager does more than anything else to shape their day-to-day experience. If the manager is struggling too, this carries over to the team. According to Gallup data, managers' engagement has fallen globally to 22%, down 9 points since 2022 (Gallup, 2026).
• Economic uncertainty: The cost of living and anxiety about finding a job can push a person towards "staying and withdrawing" rather than leaving. According to Gallup's 2026 report, only 23% of people in Turkey say it is "a good time to find a quality job" (Gallup, 2026, 2025 data). When resigning looks risky, quietly withdrawing becomes a middle path.

Quiet quitting is often not a character problem but an organisational signal that the employee has concluded "my effort changes nothing".

The Picture in Turkey: Why Is Engagement So Low?

Data from Turkey show how widespread the issue is. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, only 8% of employees in Turkey are truly engaged in their work, against a world average of 20%. 68% of employees fall into the "not engaged" group and 24% into the "actively disengaged" group (Gallup, 2026, 2025 data). Roughly speaking, the "not engaged" group forms the broadest ground for withdrawal: they do their jobs, but no emotional bond remains between them and the work.

In the same report, 66% of employees in Turkey say they spent much of the previous day under stress and 36% say they experienced anger daily (Gallup, 2026). These rates are clearly above the global averages. Working days spent in intense stress and anger make it understandable that employees reduce their emotional investment to protect themselves.

The economic cost is not small either. Gallup estimates that low employee engagement costs the world economy around 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity, which is 9% of global GDP (Gallup, 2026). In a factory this picture shows up in concrete consequences: fewer improvement suggestions, lapses of attention in quality control, near misses going unreported and nobody volunteering to train new employees.

Say an experienced operator on a production line sees that a small adjustment they have suggested for years has never been put into practice. After a while they stop voicing suggestions, stop guiding new arrivals and do only the work at their own station. On paper there is nothing wrong with their performance, but the team has quietly lost the knowledge and observation of its most experienced member. This loss appears in no report, but it builds up over time as errors, delays and missed opportunities for improvement. Because in many businesses in Anatolia the passing on of craft knowledge from generation to generation depends on this kind of voluntary contribution, the cost of withdrawal can be even heavier there.

The Effect of Quiet Quitting on the Business

Withdrawal does not appear as a direct line in production figures, so its cost is easily underestimated. Yet its effects are cumulative:

• Productivity and quality: In teams working at the "bare minimum" level, error detection and process improvement decline.
• Occupational safety: A withdrawn employee may not bother to report a risk they see. A drop in near-miss reports means losing an early warning of later accidents.
• Imbalance of load within the team: Engaged employees fill the gap left by those who withdraw. This pushes your most valuable employees towards burnout and towards leaving.
• Contagion: When withdrawal becomes normal in a team, newcomers quickly adopt this culture too.
• Delayed resignation: Quiet withdrawal is often the early stage of a real resignation. When the job market opens up, employees whose bond has broken are the first to leave.

What Can Managers and HR Do About Quiet Quitting?

Tackling this problem is not about "persuading the employee to work harder". The aim is to change the conditions that lead to withdrawal and to rebuild the bond with the employee. Practical steps can be listed as follows:

1. Listen first, then find solutions

Have a conversation with the employee you think has withdrawn, with curiosity and without blame. An open question such as "I've seen you looking more tired lately; is something at work weighing on you?" brings much more information than the sentence "your performance has dropped". The aim is not to put them on the defensive but to understand the situation.

2. Review the workload realistically

Clarify the team's workload and priorities together. In an environment where everything is "urgent", nothing is a priority. Talking openly about what can be dropped and what can be postponed gives the employee a sense of control back.

3. Give a voice and autonomy

Involve employees in decisions about how the work is done. Asking for their views on matters such as shift planning, process improvement or equipment selection increases ownership. Also give feedback on whether suggestions were taken into account; otherwise the feeling of "we spoke up but nothing changed" deepens withdrawal.

4. Make recognition visible and concrete

Recognition should be part of daily work, not only the annual review. Saying specifically who did what well ("The way you stopped the line quickly during yesterday's breakdown prevented a major risk") is far more effective than general praise.

5. Support managers

A direct manager shapes the team's experience more than anyone else, but managers are often caught in the middle and struggle too. Equipping managers with the skill to notice an employee who is struggling and to talk to them is the best-evidenced recommendation in the WHO's guidelines on mental health at work (WHO, 2022). I covered this topic in detail in my article on mental health training for managers.

6. Strengthen psychological safety

Employees believing they will not be punished when they raise a mistake, a risk or an objection is one of the basic conditions of engagement. In a classic study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company, team psychological safety was found to be related to learning behaviour (Edmondson, 1999). Withdrawal is fed partly by the belief that "speaking up has a price".

7. Open a path for development and meaning

Where a career path cannot be seen, employees stop investing in their current jobs too. Even small-scale additions of responsibility, rotation, craftsmanship titles or training opportunities feed the feeling "I have a future here".

How to Get Started in Your Organisation

Effectively tackling quiet quitting is possible not with a one-off motivational seminar but with a systematic approach. Research also shows that the effect of one-off resilience training is small and fades over time (Vanhove et al., 2016). The framework I propose has three stages:

1. Needs analysis: Start with an anonymous employee survey, focus group discussions and a review of existing indicators such as absenteeism, turnover and use of the suggestion system. An intervention made without seeing in which units and for what reasons withdrawal is happening will miss the mark. You can find out how such an analysis can be set up on the corporate services page.
2. Programme: Based on the findings, manager training, adjustments to workload and role clarity, better practices of recognition and feedback and, where needed, individual psychological support should be planned together. The International Labour Organization also stresses that individual measures should complement organisational ones, not replace them (ILO, 2026).
3. Measurement: Repeat the same survey at set intervals; monitor indicators such as absenteeism, turnover and the number of suggestions. You can't manage a change you don't measure.

To build a roadmap suited to the scale and needs of your organisation, you can explore the options on the corporate services page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does warning or punishing an employee who is quietly quitting work?

Generally not; it can even deepen the withdrawal. This behaviour is often fed by the feeling that "my effort isn't seen" or "my voice isn't heard". Punishment confirms that feeling. Of course, where the tasks in the job description are not being done, the performance process is applied; but first holding a conversation aimed at understanding the cause gives much more productive results.

Is every employee who keeps to working hours and takes on no extra work quietly quitting?

No. Setting reasonable boundaries is healthy behaviour and prevents burnout in the long term. Quiet quitting has less to do with setting boundaries than with a broken bond of meaning with the work. An employee who does their job carefully and generates ideas but goes home at the end of the working day is an engaged employee.

What is the difference between quiet quitting and burnout?

The two can overlap. In burnout, exhaustion, cynicism towards the job and a sense of inefficacy come to the fore; the WHO defines it as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress (WHO, 2019). Quiet quitting is a behavioural pattern and can be a result of burnout, but it can also arise from a perception of unfairness or a lack of development opportunities. Making the distinction is important for choosing the right intervention.

Can quiet quitting happen in a small business too?

Yes. In fact, in small businesses even one employee withdrawing can noticeably affect the workflow. Your advantage is closeness: in small teams, the manager talking one to one with the employee, adjusting the workload and making recognition visible can bring results much faster.

• #quiet quitting
• #employee engagement
• #human resources
• #workplace psychology

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Eda Erkan Alapala

Klinik Psikolog. İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Klinik Psikoloji Tezli Yüksek Lisans mezunu; bilişsel davranışçı terapi, çocuk merkezli oyun terapisi ve çocuk-ergen psikoterapisi alanlarında eğitimlerini tamamlamıştır.

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