Creeping stagflation and a sour job market have workers clinging to their jobs — whether they like it or not.

Because workers are stuck in jobs they don't want, they are "quiet cracking," a damaging new turn in the employee-employer relationship that is creating even greater strain on the companies that are allowing these cracks to grow.

Like quiet quitting before it, the trend of quiet cracking stems from dissatisfied and disengaged employees who revert to doing the bare minimum to collect a paycheck.

Holiday Gift Sale!

Just $107.88 $19.95 for Kiplinger Personal Finance

FREE gift card sent to recipients to announce your gift. You save 83% on each gift.

Kiplinger's Adviser Intel, formerly known as Building Wealth, is a curated network of trusted financial professionals who share expert insights on wealth building and preservation. Contributors, including fiduciary financial planners, wealth managers, CEOs and attorneys, provide actionable advice about retirement planning, estate planning, tax strategies and more. Experts are invited to contribute and do not pay to be included, so you can trust their advice is honest and valuable.

However, whereas quiet quitting tended to be a finite phenomenon — a disgruntled employee would eventually find a position at another company and leave — today's economy means that jumping ship is no longer an option.

Wage growth is slowing, unemployment is likely rising, and employees aren't willing to leave the job they have — even if it is making them miserable.

The result is quiet cracking, with employees burning out from stress and disengagement with their jobs. Work quality, team morale and trust all tank when employees feel this way, and it can spread like a disease from person to person.

One person starts turning in subpar work, and it begins to grate on their team members, who see firsthand what the bare minimum accomplishes.

Left to pick up the slack, these otherwise healthy team members burn out and begin to suffer from their own cracks.

It's an insidious cycle that can tank even the strongest of corporate cultures.

Hiring is more difficult, too

The issue for many companies is that the solution isn't as simple as weeding out the one rotten apple. As tough as it is for employees to find another job, it's nearly just as difficult for a company looking to hire.

Hiring managers are being inundated with AI-generated applications, making it challenging to find qualified candidates — that is, if there is even a talent pool to look through.

In already talent-crunched industries like manufacturing and accounting, the problem of hiring is even worse. Ninety percent of accounting firms report struggling to fill vacant positions, while experts estimate that there are 20 vacant roles for every one qualified applicant in manufacturing.

Companies can't hire, and employees can't leave. The reality of the economy is that it's created a stalemate between employers and employees, as both wait to see who will break first. It's a toxic environment for all that's dragging productivity down across the economy.

Some managers are in the dark

The issue for companies dealing with employees quietly cracking is that unless managers have their fingers on the pulse of the company culture, they oftentimes don't know what they're up against.

Measurements designed to assess satisfaction and engagement often fail to capture what's more critical and pertinent today: alignment, especially as it relates to company goals and impact.

Satisfaction and engagement used to be significant components of corporate cultural health — something we saw reflected in the hiring trends of the times.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, for example, companies began to take employee health seriously, driven by a strong economy and a competitive job market.

To attract quality employees, who had more power to be selective in who they worked with, companies began offering workplace perks like in-office gyms and espresso bars. These were drivers of employee satisfaction — perks that made employees happier.

And then we had a crash

The financial crash changed things. Employees lost the upper hand, and austerity measures meant companies could offer less. Rather than satisfaction, engagement became the metric that could assess team functionality.

Now, spurred by remote work during the pandemic and the Great Resignation, companies have begun to look at mission alignment to assess the health of a workforce they can't always see.

With a power balance that's more evenly split between employers and employees, the question of how to maintain mission alignment and help employees feel connected to something bigger than themselves has become an ongoing dialogue.

Employers need to check in regularly

Frequent assessment is a way for companies to start creating that dialogue by understanding how their employees are feeling and trying to discern any patterns that emerge as a result.

Perhaps midlevel managers are satisfied, but entry-level workers aren't; maybe customer-facing employees understand their role in the company's broader mission, while backend employees don't.

The explosion of data centres across Virginia is sparking debate amongst residents, who now live with near constant reminders of artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) impact on both communities and their environment. While AI is being hailed by businesses for its transformative potential on industry, the communities on the front line of the AI boom may be more concerned with the technology’s environmental footprint and legacy.

Amid fresh inflation data, rising interest rates and renewed tariff battles, small business owners are under siege. From higher input costs to shifting consumer demand to new regulatory fees, the financial pressure is mounting on multiple fronts. Confidence among small businesses has dropped to its lowest point since the 2008 financial crisis, underscoring how fragile survival feels in today’s volatile economy. Against this backdrop, the difference between businesses that flourish and those that falter will come down to one thing: adapting and implementing strategies that turn challenges into opportunities for resilience and growth.

Publishing high-authority thought leadership has been a key tactic for marketers struggling to create AI answer engine visibility for their knowledge-driven companies. But in the eyes of the AI authority frameworks that determine what experts appear in AI query responses, where a thought leadership article is published appears to be more important than the quality of the piece.

As strategies unravel and survival mode sets in, the true crisis isn't just financial — it's emotional. And it's a threat to the leadership structures for small businesses if left unmanaged.

The delayed-again Gordie Howe International Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, is North America’s latest infrastructure boondoggle. Built on the Canadian government’s tab but involving U.S. oversight, the bridge had a budget at project launch in 2017 of $4.4 billion.

After decades of pursuing web-optimization strategies that encouraged high-volume content generation, many businesses are now feeling that their content-marketing strategies might be backfiring.

The so-called silver tsunami is upon us, with millions of business owners set to retire, leading many to sell the businesses they spent their lives building. The aggregate amount of wealth to be transferred is staggering, and the financial services industry has been positioning for this event for decades.

But a dive into generative AI's authority frameworks — the technical mechanisms and conceptual approaches that large language models (LLMs) use to determine the credibility of information and sources — suggests all that posting effort is more of a placebo for visibility-hungry marketers.

As companies look to successfully achieve a corporate turnaround, success or failure depends on the speed of their actions and the depth of commitment from leadership. Without aligned governance and adequate funding, even well-intentioned change efforts can stall before delivering results.

Black women are leaving the workforce at historic rates, with more than 300,000 exiting in 2025 alone; at the same time, they’re flooding into entrepreneurship at rates that, in recent years, have far outpaced any other demographic. It’s a wake-up call for corporate America, which is losing some of its most valuable talent — and a chance for economic transformation, if these new businesses get the support they need.

Amidst strong economic headwinds and the demonstrated potential of AI, business leaders face growing pressure to preserve margins and demonstrate financial discipline — a goal they're increasingly accomplishing through workforce reductions. One in five major U.S. companies currently employs fewer people than they did a decade ago.

The most significant wealth transfer in history, an estimated $84 trillion, is underway as Baby Boomers pass on their fortunes to their Gen X and Millennial heirs. But most families aren't ready, and the cultural divide between generations may make it more complicated than ever to preserve that legacy.

The United States has experienced a significant wave of job losses. As of May, at least 12% of the 2.4 million civilian federal workforce have been affected.

The U.S. Senate has a rejected a 10-year ban on artificial intelligence regulation, now states and others can step up to build regulatory AI frameworks for engineering

U.S. tariff policies are shifting so fast that American manufacturers are struggling to keep up — and the costs can be staggering. A shipment budgeted at $60,000 can balloon to more than $90,000 to $100,000 by the time it arrives at port. 

The state of America’s crumbling infrastructure continues to be a perennial concern as the scale of the problem continually outpaces both the funding and the human resources needed to solve it. Engineers have the solution — AI systems that offer unprecedented speed and potential cost savings — but to leverage its full potential, engineers need to take on a new role — and potentially a new business model. 

Market uncertainty has roiled American businesses, whose bottom lines have been damaged by the economic whiplash that has come to define the last several months. It's an environment that's got both companies and their employees flailing, risking the well-being of even the most successful businesses — which is why business leaders need to hone in on corporate culture if they want to thrive or even survive during these uncertain times.