What is quiet firing: A new workplace trend or a serious phenomenon?
The silence in a workplace can sometimes say more than a formal warning letter ever could. When emails go unanswered, meetings move ahead without you, and your role begins to shrink without explanation, it may not be a coincidence. Increasingly, it is being recognised as something more deliberate, quiet firing.At first glance, the term sounds like another addition to the growing lexicon of workplace buzzwords. But beneath the phrasing lies a practice that is neither new nor harmless. Quiet firing reflects a deeper shift in how organisations manage exits, accountability, and discomfort, often at the cost of employee dignity.
Understanding quiet firing
Quiet firing refers to a managerial practice where an employee is not directly terminated but is gradually pushed out of the organisation. Instead of formal performance conversations or clear decisions, managers withdraw responsibility, opportunity, support, and visibility until the job becomes untenable. The employee, drained and demoralised, eventually resigns.
Unlike layoffs or firings, quiet firing operates in the shadows. There is no clear moment of rupture, no written explanation, and no closure. The ambiguity is the strategy.This approach has gained renewed attention in recent years, particularly as organisations navigate economic uncertainty, remote work, and legal complexity. Direct terminations involve severance, documentation, and risk. Quiet firing avoids all three.
Why is it becoming more visible now
Workplace disengagement has created fertile ground for this phenomenon. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report (June 2024), a significant share of employees worldwide report feeling unsupported, disconnected, and emotionally detached from their organisations. Quiet firing does not just exploit this disengagement; it actively produces it.As work becomes more distributed and communication more asynchronous, it is easier for managers to disengage without appearing overtly hostile. Silence replaces confrontation. Inaction replaces leadership. This is why quiet firing often goes unnamed until the damage is done.
What quiet firing looks like in practice
Quiet firing is rarely about a single act. It is a pattern built over time. Feedback stops, both positive and corrective. Career conversations vanish. Access to key projects, meetings, or decision-making is quietly withdrawn. Resources dry up. Responsibilities are reassigned without explanation, and pay stagnates. Basically, the company continues to pay the employee, but the latter has no real role or function. The message is not directly stated, but it is absolutely clear: your existence is tolerated, not appreciated. As a leader, this is undoubtedly a failure to handle performance in an open and honest way. Leaders who can’t be bothered to set expectations or confront issues directly resort to using ambiguity as a way of exerting pressure.
Trend or tactic?
Calling quiet firing a “trend” risks understating its seriousness. While the term itself may be new, the behaviour is not. What has changed is its scale and normalisation.In earlier workplace cultures, avoidance was often limited by physical proximity and hierarchical clarity. Today, remote teams, matrix structures, and platform-based communication allow exclusion to happen quietly and systematically.The danger lies in how easily quiet firing can be rationalised, as pragmatism, cost control, or managerial discretion when it is, in effect, a way to transfer organisational discomfort onto individuals.The human costFor employees, quiet firing is psychologically destabilising. The lack of clarity makes it difficult to respond, improve, or even defend oneself. Confidence erodes, self-doubt replaces certainty. Many begin to internalise the silence as personal failure.Unlike formal termination, which at least offers finality, quiet firing prolongs uncertainty. It keeps employees suspended between hope and rejection, often for months.Teams notice too. When colleagues see someone slowly erased without explanation, trust weakens. Silence becomes instructive. Speaking up feels risky.
Why organisations should be concerned
While quiet firing may appear convenient in the short term, it carries long-term consequences. It undermines psychological safety, damages employer reputation, and signals a lack of ethical leadership.More critically, it reveals a deeper organisational problem: an inability to handle difficult conversations. Healthy workplaces do not avoid discomfort; they manage it. Performance issues, role mismatches, and changing priorities require clarity, not quiet withdrawal.
So, what is quiet firing really?
Quiet firing is not just a passing workplace trend. It is a persistent organisational behaviour that has serious implications. It shows underlying issues with accountability, power, and risk. Quiet firing is a symptom of a lack of leadership and the presence of ambiguity, in which no one seems to make decisions. While employee well-being, transparency, and ethical management become more and more topics of discussion, quiet firing is still there, as a contradiction, silent, strategic, and deeply consequential. The question, in fact, should not be whether quiet firing exists. Why so many workplaces still find it easier to be silent than to be honest is the real issue.
