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HR Brew

Employee Experience

Mikaela Cohen

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A new buzzword has hit the collective consciousness.

“Quiet cracking” describes the feeling of increased disengagement and unhappiness among employees who, amid a weakened labor market, feel stuck at work, Business Insider 

. More than half of employees feel unhappy at work either frequently (20%) or occasionally (34%), 

 from learning management system company TalentLMS found.

While employee dissatisfaction isn’t new, economic turmoil, AI uncertainty, and return-to-office mandates have pushed the workforce into this new era, according to Rishad Tobaccowala, futurist, business leader, and author of 

“Right now, [employees] are basically saying, ‘This sucks, but there’s nothing I can do about it,’ so that’s why you have this quiet cracking going on,” Tobaccowala told HR Brew.

Employees are in “a diametrically opposite position” from where they were during the Great Resignation, Tobaccowala said. They went from commuting to the office five days a week pre-Covid, to having flexibility and autonomy during the pandemic, to now being expected to return to the 2019 workplace, and it’s giving them whiplash, he added.

“Three years ago, we were re-imagining work…We were thinking about how we fit work into life,” Tobaccowala said. “Two years later, we find ourselves in this ‘incredible’ world where it’s gone back to, ‘You will come back to work, whether you like it. If you don’t, we will kick you out of your job.’”

Employees are also experiencing whiplash when it comes to their mobility. Many companies went on hiring sprees around 2021, only to revert to layoffs by 2023, he said.

“In every way, the control has gone back to the company…We have much less, far less flexibility, because you have to deal with high prices, high real estate costs, high food costs,” he said. “In 2021, you thought there was a new world of work, and, in 2025, it’s worse than 2019.”

 HR professionals, Tobaccowala said, should remember the pendulum will eventually swing back in the favor of employees.

“[Employees] are basically saying we are locked, because we don’t like what’s happening, but we need to buy some time. We have to figure out how to save some money. We need to figure out how to build our networks. We need to figure out how to leverage technology,” he said. “We need to figure out how we show up, and work, and do things on the side, and then when we’re ready, we’re ready to go.”

In anticipation, Tobaccowala recommended people leaders focus on offering flexibility and personalization at work.

“While in-person interaction is important, you don’t need to basically have it three days a week. You can get away with three days a month, or even 10 days a quarter,” he said. “Younger people may need to be more at work for training or to be with each other. Middle-aged people with parents to look after and kids to look after have to move far away for better schools and affordable housing…You talk about being agile and flexible, but you don’t do that with your talent?”

Employees are disengaged and biding their time until they can quit

…as evident by the latest (alarming) workplace trend, “quiet cracking.”

The majority (64%) of US adults plan to avoid using AI for “as long as possible,” according to a 

. AI experts think 79% of US adults already use AI “constantly or several times a day,” the 

 found in April, but only 27% of respondents said they use AI to that extent.

There could be an educational or “misunderstanding gap,” said Todd Blaskowitz, senior client partner on the AI strategy and transformation team at consulting firm Korn Ferry.

“You’re probably using an AI or a generative AI solution, day in and day out, that you may not even be aware of,” Blaskowitz told HR Brew. “[It’s] a misunderstanding gap with individuals around these tools, and how they are starting to present themselves in your daily lives, and how you accomplish a daily task, or even your work within your job.”

Many people don’t realize they’re already using AI, said Lydia Saad, director of US social research at Gallup. For instance, she said, Netflix uses AI to recommend users content based on their viewing history. And Google uses it to aggregate information for search results.

“There’s a lot of people who don’t know what all the different variations of AI are,” Saad told HR Brew. This could cause resistance.

Saad highlighted another piece of Gallup data, which found the more people use AI tools, the more likely they are to see it as a tech advancement, rather than a threat. Some 71% of US adults who use genAI daily see it as innovative, compared to 35% of those who’ve never used it.

“As people get more familiar with using it, they’ll get more comfortable with understanding how they can use it without it doing harm to them or their livelihood,” she said.

Before introducing AI tools in the workplace, Blaskowitz recommended providing education, as well as clarity and transparency around how it fits in their company’s strategy.

“If people just hear, ‘Oh, we’re doing all this AI stuff at work. Oh, we just got Copilot or ChatGPT, but if they don’t have clarity on how that fits into the overall, bigger picture, that’s going to cause resistance in the organization,” he said. “If you don’t hear that narrative or understand it, you’re going to create your own.”

Then, people leaders, Blaskowitz said, can start encouraging employees to embrace an AI mindset.

“Help your people rethink their work, rethink the outcomes that they’re trying to do with a mindset of, ‘How might AI improve this?’” he said. “How might AI enhance the overall experience, the overall quality, my overall productivity?”

In offering encouragement, however, Blaskowitz said he advises leaders not to ignore workers’ fears. “[Be] a human, showing empathy, and addressing the fears that people bring into the workplace,” he said.

Employees are avoiding AI—HR can help them embrace it

“As people get more familiar with using it, they’ll get more comfortable with understanding how they can use it without it doing harm to them or their livelihood,” Lydia Saad, director of US social research at Gallup, told HR Brew.

Employee engagement strategies have long been a talking point for companies, but might be more useless than you think.

That’s because many companies are implementing strategies to gauge employee engagement in the wrong way, according to Mark C. Crowley, author of 

The Power of Employee Well-Being: Move Beyond Engagement to Build Flourishing Teams

, which will be published in late September. In his book, Crowley suggests how HR teams can reframe their attention to improving employee well-being instead.

“It’s time to stop talking about engagement,” Crowley told HR Brew. “Like nobody’s calling it out, and we still go through the exercise of focusing on engagement, talking about engagement, and there’s just no reason to continue to do that.”

Crowley shared more insights from his book in an interview with HR Brew.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What will HR pros learn after reading your book?

Measuring engagement has always been really super complicated, because there’s 

 has always asked. So, if you get bad scores, you have to isolate one of 12 different things. So, you could say, “Well, we don’t know whether people feel that they have a friend at work, or we don’t know whether people feel that they have clarity on what the job expectations are. We don’t know that people feel valued.” So, it’s Whac-a-Mole…[Engagement] simply boils down to how people feel at work, and you don’t have to ask them 12 different questions.

You just have to ask them, “How do you feel at work this week?” And, you can ask them some specific questions, like how do you feel about your benefits, or do you feel that you work for a manager who cares about you and supports your growth? You could ask those narrow questions in pulse surveys, and you can get that feedback immediately.

Why are employee engagement strategies not working?

No one’s ever taken it sincerely. Wall Street never took it sincerely. CEOs never took it sincerely. It’s always been a check-the-box activity. You do surveys once or twice a year. By the time the feedback gets out, it’s stale. 

Employees feel that it’s insincere, so they think engagement is a joke. And on top of that, no one’s ever been held accountable for it ever. So, most managers just think, “Oh, this is just an HR activity.” So, if you’ve got a toxic manager, or somebody’s not caring about their people and supporting them and doing the things that we know are highly effective for…[representing] highly effective leaders, then what you end up with is…an act of disrespect.

You’re asking people, “Tell me how we can make things better,” and then you never do anything with the feedback, and people end up really resenting that. So with pulse surveys, you can ask people specifically, “How do you feel?” And, then management can get together and say, “Hey, is this just a rough period right now, or do we need to make some adjustments?” Because the evidence is clear that how people feel at work drives their, no pun intended, their engagement, their commitment, their loyalty, their productivity, and it’s just this enormous win-win for organizations.

When we’ve always focused on engagement, that’s only something that companies cared about. Like, I’m an employee of a company, and they’re like, “We’re trying to elevate engagement.” It’s like, “I don’t care. There’s no win for me in that.” Whereas, if you’re focusing on well-being, you’re going to have people who are thriving, and we know that when people are thriving, organizations thrive at the same time.

Should HR pros avoid using the term employee engagement and focus on terms like well-being, productivity, etc.?

To be fair to some organizations that have really taken this seriously, I’m not criticizing that. I think that’s fine. If you have high engagement in your organization and you’ve committed to it, people validate it. In other words, employees say, “This is a really great place for me to work,” nobody should be changing. I’m not advocating for that.

A lot of times what organizations do is that they blend the four and the five scores. So, for example…on a scale of one to five, how caring and supportive is your manager to you personally? 

Well, there’s a big difference between a four and a five. If you give it a five, it’s like you’ve got a fantastic manager who genuinely cares about you. If you give it a four, you have some hesitation. There’s something missing there. It’s not a perfect score, but what happens is: a lot of cases that managers or companies that are putting these surveys together, they’ll take the fours and the fives and they’ll go, “Wow. 90% of our people are engaged.” That’s not really the case.

We know that well-being is something that’s really important to employees, whereas engagement has never been important to them. There’s no reason for them to be concerned about engagement. So, if you have something that is proven to have a direct correlation to organizational success, i.e. employee well-being, why wouldn’t you just focus on that? It’s simpler, and it’s a win-win for people.

Two hands holding on opened book with text highlighted

An interview with Mark C. Crowley, author of ‘The Power of Employee Well-Being’

“If you’re focusing on well-being, you’re going to have people who are thriving, and we know that when people are thriving, organizations thrive at the same time.”

Why HR should ditch employee engagement strategies

Telling employees that they matter can feel stuffy.

But it’s become a crucial talent strategy to train leaders and managers on the skills that help employees feel like they matter, according to Zach Mercurio, leadership researcher and author of 

The Power of Mattering: How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance

Mercurio chatted with HR Brew about his book and why a mattering strategy 

 last year. What new ideas did you bring into this book?

My first book was about the power of purpose, which is our contribution and knowing our use and usefulness, but it’s very difficult for someone to see their contribution if they don’t first believe they’re worthy of contributing, so I almost see this book, 

This is a book about how do you create an environment where the people around you actually feel worthy of contributing, and making sure that people feel valued, and then know how they add value, that they feel seen, and that they feel heard, and that they feel needed…In psychology, that name of that feeling…is called mattering, and it’s a distinct concept that can only be generated through interpersonal interactions.

There are several things that are happening that all point to a mattering deficit. One of those things is this idea of disengagement. As 

 in January of this year, engagement is at its lowest rate in a decade, and that’s despite millions of dollars being spent on engagement over the last decade….Almost 40% of people in that sample from Gallup indicated they didn’t think anybody at work cared for them as a person.

Another symptom of this mattering deficit is workplace loneliness. Almost eight out of 10 people indicate that they feel 

, but this is, again, despite connecting more...We’re actually communicating more than ever, but we’re still lonely. One of the things that we’re missing is that, when you look at the research on loneliness, it’s not the quantity of interaction that matters, it’s the quality…It’s feeling seen, and heard, valued, and needed, feeling that we matter.

What we’re seeing is not a disengagement crisis, not a loneliness epidemic, it’s really at its core a mattering deficit. People feel insignificant in their daily interactions, and you can’t solve that through more programs, perks, or platforms. You can only solve that through equipping people and leaders with the skills to show the person across from them how they’re significant to them.

What I would encourage HR leaders to do first is actually to do an audit of the skills that leaders are developing and being evaluated on that create the daily experience of feeling valued…For example, to pay attention and see a person, to conduct a meaningful check in, to actually create an environment where people feel that they can speak up, to listen deeply. Are [leaders] evaluated on and prepared to affirm people and show them the difference that they make and spot their strengths and cultivate those strengths?

These skills have been labeled as “soft”…When we see something as soft or simple, we tend to approach it with less rigor. So, if you think in an HR function, the rigor at which you approach compliance to certain policies and procedures, are you approaching the human skills and scaling the human skills so leaders can see, hear, value, and show people how they’re needed with the same rigor as you’re approaching compliance?

An interview Zach Mercurio, author of ‘The Power of Mattering’

Why a mattering strategy matters to HR.

Do I matter? Your manager should make you feel like it

Millennials might’ve been promised a more stable future and workplace than will exist for them.

Gen Xers and Baby Boomers likely remember a time when a one-company tenure was the norm. Gen Z workers shudder at the thought of that. Older generations also know what it’s like to buy a house for a fraction of its current market value, while many younger professionals probably don’t put home ownership on their vision boards anymore. So, where does that leave millennials? Perhaps, stuck somewhere between the promise of what their parents had and the reality that their kids are born into.

This pressure could be causing higher rates of burnout, as 66% of millennials say they feel “moderate” or “high” levels of burnout compared to 60% of Gen Xers, 56% of Gen Zers, and 39% of Baby Boomers, according to a recent 

Millennials are going through “a perfect storm of professional and personal stress,” said Leah Phifer Buck, an employee engagement consultant and founder of consulting firm WhyWork. These employees, those roughly between 29 and 44 years old, are commonly slammed with caregiving responsibilities for kids and/or aging parents while navigating the growing demands of their careers, Buck told HR Brew, which can exacerbate stress and increase their likelihood of burnout.

Millennials might be asking themselves the same question. This generation has gone through multiple economic recessions before even reaching a mid-life crisis. From the dot-com bubble bust in 2001, the Great Recession in 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic, and now the current administration’s foreign tariff policies, millennials could be wrapped into yet another chilling economic downturn.

“We might never achieve the level of economic stability that the Baby Boomer generation, our parents, did, but I think that a lot of millennials are starting to reconcile with that,” Buck said. “As they make peace with the economic reality that they face, they’re starting to lean into, ‘How can I still do what I love? How can I still do things that light me up and find joy in my job?’

Matthew Owenby, chief strategy officer and corporate services executive at Aflac, agrees that millennials have gone through many unstable times, and it could have taken away the workplace they had hoped to be working in. But he told HR Brew that another big contributor to their higher rates of burnout is the lack of work-life balance exhibited by many company executives.

“Leaders need to be aware that they’re controlling the pace of the work for their workforce,” he said. “A lot of this burnout [and] a lot of the experience that employees are having, millennial and otherwise, are directly related to leadership or the lack thereof.”

 As a millennial herself, Buck said there’s a desire among her generation to “improve the system,” which increases pressure to do better and be better workers, leaders, parents, etc. Sometimes millennials “beat our heads against a wall,” she said, trying to help everyone else so much that they’ve burned themselves out. She suggests a solution lies somewhere between companies making structural changes and employees taking on responsibility.

Starting with mental healthcare coverage, Buck noted, it’s important for HR to effectively communicate available benefits and resources for tackling burnout, but it then becomes incumbent on employees to utilize them.

“I work with clients all the time who say, ‘We don’t know why our employees are so stressed or burned out, because we offer this great mental healthcare coverage.’ But then when I dig deeper and I ask them, ‘Well, how are you communicating the coverage to employees?’” Buck said. “That’s often where the disconnect lies. It’s not that the employers aren’t offering these things, it’s that maybe employees don’t know about it or aren’t taking advantage of it.”

Helping millennial employees tackle burnout boils down to basic communications, expectation setting, and leadership modeling work-life balance, Owenby said.

“It’s fun to talk about work-life balance. It’s another thing to achieve it, and then it’s another thing to encourage it, and encourage leaders to encourage that,” he said. “There has to be a higher standard when it comes to educating leaders, and I think there has to be specific programs in place within corporations to deal with the nuances that the millennial generation is experiencing.”

Buck said she has hope that Gen Z and younger generations will be better about avoiding burnout and mitigating its symptoms when they arise.

“While they may not have all the answers, the fact that they’re surfacing these conversations, and a lot of these discussions are being led by millennials and really pushed by Gen Z, I see as a really promising step forward in this discussion,” she said.

Man resting his head on his work desk, stressed and tired

Millennials are the most likely generation to experience burnout

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Explore how AVON reimagined the employee experience through a unified Zendesk-powered platform—driving efficiency, breaking down silos, and delivering seamless support across its global workforce.

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Employees aren’t all vibing with the idea of becoming someone else’s boss.

Only one-third of individual contributors in the US want to be a people manager, according to a 

. And, some companies are rethinking how they handle promotions, so people management isn’t the only option for employees. Shopify, Google, and BP, for instance, started dual-track or two-track promotions, 

, where employees choose to advance either as a people manager or as a higher-level individual contributor within a company.

Kyle M.K., a talent strategy advisor at Indeed, heard about dual-track promotions in 2017, but they’ve only recently gained “popularity,” he told HR Brew, as companies started looking for creative retention strategies post-pandemic. M.K. said dual-track promotions are often more helpful than traditional promotions, because if employees don’t have the desire or skills to lead people, they can’t be effective managers.

When employees become managers, but lack the people skills to be a good manager, it can create retention issues, workplace strategist and author Jennifer Moss told HR Brew.

“Teams suffer because [employees can be] really good at being individual contributors, but terrible at being managers,” Moss said, adding ineffective leaders cause frustration within their entire team.

“It ends up that you lose two or more people. You lose, first of all, that incredible engineer [or] developer that could put a lot of innovation into your product, and then you also lose the members of their team who hate working for them because they’re a terrible manager,” she said.

 as companies reduced their workforces and expected them to produce more with fewer resources, Moss said, and that can make employees feel “punished” for becoming a manager.

 already don’t want to be managers, M.K. said, and there aren’t many opportunities for career growth without leading people, it pushes employees to leave.

“The things that hold them back from staying with a company is that they start to plateau in terms of their compensation, or their ownership, or influence over the business, or their team,” M.K. said. “If we hit that stage psychologically with the job that we currently have, and there’s no more challenges, then we start to look elsewhere.”

When considering dual-track promotions, M.K. said HR teams need guidelines on what’s expected to become a people manager and higher-level contributor. For instance, potential people managers need some “essential skills,” Moss said, like being empathetic, engaging in active listening, and measuring employee job satisfaction. Most companies already have a management training “deficit,” M.K. said, so every new and existing people manager needs emotional intelligence skills training.

For manager promotions, M.K. recommends that HR look for the “Ted Lassos” in their company—based on the Apple TV+ series where a US football coach with no experience coaching soccer leads a European soccer team. These employees may not be the highest performer or the best contributor, he said, but they typically keep morale up and inspire peers to do their best work.

Higher-level contributor promotions, M.K. said, should be for employees who want more “ownership or influence” over a product, service, or area of the business without having direct reports.

HR can slowly introduce dual-track promotions through test pilots within certain departments, Moss recommends. Start small and see how it impacts job satisfaction among employees, she said, then HR can use results to advocate for organizational change.

Dual-track promotions are “one of the best things” HR can do for employees, M.K. said, especially in tandem with a skills-first hiring approach. These promotions consider employees from a variety of skills and potential levels outside of their current role, he said, which helps improve retention.

“It is all centered around keeping that institutional knowledge, institutional, within the four walls of the business. It’s there to attract a lot of talent, saying, ‘Hey, whenever you start here, we’ve got lots of different opportunities,’” he said. “This really will help a lot of employers keep some of the best talent that they’ve got who are looking for those new challenges, new ways to influence, and new things to own.”

Two business women standing on a large-scale staircase with ladders leading up to a large-scale mug. (Credit: Illustration: Anna Kim)