Quiet Quitting: What It Is and Where the Term Comes From

What it means in practice

Quiet quitting is doing exactly what a role requires, and nothing more: keeping to your hours, finishing assigned tasks, and not volunteering for unpaid overtime or requests that fall outside the job description. It isn’t a change of contract or a public announcement — it’s a way of staying inside the job you already have.

Real-world example: instead of answering work emails at night or applying for every unpaid extra project, someone shuts their laptop at the scheduled time and limits their contribution to what the job description actually says. The work gets done, but nothing beyond it.

Where the term came from

The phrase went viral in July 2022, when Zaid Khan posted a 17-second TikTok video describing the idea of “quitting the idea of going above and beyond.” In his own words, the concept has nothing to do with leaving a job: “You’re still performing your duties, but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it’s not. And your worth as a person is not defined by your labor.”

How Gallup measures it

Gallup, the research firm behind the annual State of the Global Workplace report, also uses “quiet quitting” as a technical stand-in for a category it has tracked for years under the name “not engaged”: workers who carry out their duties without active involvement. In 2022 that category covered 59% of workers worldwide. Alongside it, Gallup counted 23% of workers as “engaged” and 18% in “loud quitting,” the category for open, active disengagement. Gallup’s global engagement tracking began in 2009, when the engaged share stood at 12%: the 23% recorded in 2022 marks an 11-point gain over thirteen years, with a temporary dip in 2020.

In Gallup’s usage, “quiet quitting” is a label applied after the fact to a measurement category, not a name workers give to their own choice. It’s a technical use of the term, distinct from the colloquial one born on TikTok, even though it points at the same underlying behavior — doing the minimum required, with no extra emotional investment.

What academic research says

A paper published in PLoS One in 2025 offers a more precise definition, useful for separating quiet quitting both from plain “slacking off” and from the total disengagement Gallup calls loud quitting. The authors describe it as “the execution of work-related tasks at a minimum level of compliance, coupled with feelings of comfort — even a principled right — to engage at work with this minimal level of contribution.” Their model has two dimensions: a behavioral component, the actual contribution kept just above the threshold that would trigger dismissal; and an emotional component, the satisfaction felt at staying at that level, paired with a negative reaction to doing more.

The academic definition treats quiet quitting as an intentional, self-regulated behavior — a choice about where to draw a line — not an involuntary withdrawal caused by low motivation or inability.

Europe and Italy, with a caveat

In Gallup’s most recent report (State of the Global Workplace, published in April 2026 on 2025 data), Europe comes out as the least engaged world region for the sixth year running: only 12% of European workers were classified as “engaged,” one point down from the year before. For Italy, the same report puts engagement at 11% in 2025, the highest level in a decade but still low by regional and global standards. The same report shows global engagement also slipping, to 20% in 2025 — its lowest level since 2020 — with 64% of workers in the “not engaged” category (the same one the 2023 report labeled “quiet quitting”) and 16% “actively disengaged”: a decline from the 23%/59%/18% split in 2022 cited above.

Italy’s 11% only measures the “engaged” share: it isn’t the complement of a quiet-quitting figure, because Gallup distinguishes three categories — engaged, not engaged and actively disengaged — and the Italy release reports only the first. Claiming “89% of Italians are quiet quitting” by subtracting 11% from 100% would collapse two different categories (not engaged and actively disengaged) into one — an error the available data can’t correct, since the full breakdown for Italy hasn’t been published.

A single worker’s decision to limit their effort is a matter between them and their employer. The aggregate trend in engagement across an entire country belongs instead to macroeconomics, the branch that looks at economic phenomena at national scale. Gallup’s 2023 report estimated that disengaged workers worldwide represent an $8.8 trillion untapped productivity opportunity in 2022, a figure of the same order of magnitude as the GDP of major economies.