Hi, this is Elisa Likt, and this is Leave Your Mark the podcast, where I brew fresh

career advice with some of my most inspiring and successful friends.

It's professional advice that you can action immediately, whether you're just starting out

in your career or well on your way.

With a massive to-do list and a large cup of coffee, I promise that you can get it all done and still

have time to post about it. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Leave Your Mark. I'm your host,

Elisa Lict. And today we're talking about a new buzzword, quiet cracking, one of the newest

and most concerning workplace buzzwords of 2025.

This goes beyond quiet quitting. Quiet cracking is when employees are silently unraveling,

feeling demotivated, fatigued, and emotionally drained, yet choosing to stay in their roles, often because of

financial pressure or job insecurity. It's part of what's now being called the big stay,

which is the opposite of the great resignation we saw several years ago. And the term comes out of

new research from Talent LMS, an e-learning platform that

serves more than 70,000 organizations worldwide. Their survey put data behind what many of us are

sensing, something's breaking beneath the surface at work. As one worker told business insider, quote, I just go in every day

and try really hard not to break by lunchtime. That, my friends, is quiet cracking in action.

So today we're going to explore what quiet cracking is, why it matters, and most importantly,

what employees and managers can do about it. But first, how did we get here? It helps to understand how we arrived at this moment,

because in 2021, headlines were dominated by the Great Resignation. Millions of people voluntarily

left their jobs, empowered by remote work, new opportunities,

and shifting priorities after the pandemic.

By 2022, the conversation shifted to quiet quitting.

...