Quiet Quitting – or Just a Different Working Style?

• Why “low enthusiasm” is one of the least reliable signs of disengagement

• The four behaviors managers misread most often – and who they misread them in

• The one signal that matters most when determining disengagement

• A simple observation exercise that costs you nothing and might save you a good employee

You’re forty minutes into the Monday team meeting when you catch yourself doing it: scanning. Marcus hasn’t said a word. His camera is angled so that he looks vaguely like he’s posing for a hostage photo. And somewhere in the back of your mind, an alarm starts ringing – is he checked out?

Maybe.

Or maybe Marcus is having the most productive meeting of anyone on the call, and you’re about to make a mistake that will cost you one of your best people.

Welcome to Day 1 of the Managing Employee Disengagement Challenge.

Over the next five days, we’ll move from spotting disengagement to understanding it to actually doing something about it. But today we start where every manager should start – and where most of us skip ahead: making sure the thing you’re seeing is disengagement in the first place.

Before we dive in, here’s an overview of what we’ll cover together throughout this challenge:

• Day 1: Quiet Quitting – or Just a Different Working Style? (You Are Here)

• Day 2: Why High-Performing Employees Stop Going Above and Beyond

• Day 3: Why Good Employees Lose Motivation at Work

• Day 4: How to Talk to a Disengaged Employee

• Day 5: Can a Disengaged Employee Be Reengaged?

With quiet quitting in the air, managers are primed to spot disengagement everywhere. But suspicion has a cost. When you decide an engaged employee has checked out, they can tell – and being misread could make a good employee start checking out for real.

That’s why this challenge starts with recognition. Before you can fix disengagement, you have to be sure you’re actually seeing it. And it doesn’t look the same for everyone.

Understanding what “normal” looks like for each of the 16 personality types is where accurate reading starts. If you haven’t taken our free personality test, begin there – with your own baseline.

Here are the four behaviors managers misread most often – and why each one is usually a working style, not a warning sign.

Introverted personality types tend to process their thoughts internally, which means silence in a meeting is not necessarily absence. It may be where their best thinking is happening.

Meetings can be high-pressure environments, and when we surveyed more than 14,000 people about what they perform worst at under pressure, every Introverted personality type was more likely than every Extraverted type to name communication.

So the colleague who says little during a 40-minute meeting but sends a sharp, considered email the next morning may not have been disengaged at all. They may simply have needed time outside the pressure of the room to fully process and express what they were thinking.

Some people share their weekend plans, their kid’s soccer scores, their opinions about the office coffee. Others just share their work. Your personality type plays a role in where you fall here.

When we asked more than 21,000 people whether they consider themselves a private person, 97% of INTJs said yes, compared to just 41% of ESFPs.

Keeping a personal life personal isn’t withdrawing from the team – it’s drawing the circle in a different place than you would.

Logging off at five. Declining the optional Friday social. Saying no to a project when their plate is full. It’s tempting to read boundaries as the first stage of leaving, but more often they’re the reason someone can stay.

Sustainable pacing looks suspiciously like reduced enthusiasm if you’re only measuring hours and visible hustle.

Some people cheer. Some people nod. For plenty of Thinking or Assertive personality types, “this seems reasonable” is a rave review.

If you’re waiting for visible excitement as proof of engagement, you’ll miss the people who show it through the quality of what they hand you.

For many people, these four behaviors are simply how they work – a style, not a symptom. Any one of them becomes worth your attention only when it’s new for that person.

Engagement does not look the same in everyone. What matters is not whether someone seems quiet, energetic, enthusiastic, or reserved. It is whether they seem different from their usual self.

An employee who has never said much in meetings is not necessarily withdrawing. That may simply be how they work. But if someone who used to think out loud in every planning session has barely spoken for six weeks, that is worth noticing. The signal is not the silence itself. It is the change.

The same principle works in the other direction. Sometimes disengagement is hidden behind consistently strong performance. A dependable employee may still meet every deadline, help every colleague, and do everything expected of them long after they have stopped feeling connected to the work. Because they keep delivering, no one realizes that something has changed beneath the surface.

This is why generic disengagement checklists can be so misleading. They may mistake a healthy, naturally quiet employee for someone who has checked out, while completely missing the high performer who is running on habit and obligation.

It is also important to remember that the person you see at work may already be a more filtered version of who they are elsewhere. In our “Work Personality” survey of more than 14,000 people, 73% of INFPs and 68% of INTPs said that the way they express their personality changes significantly at work. ENTJs were the only personality type for whom even half said they feel more like themselves at work than outside it.

That means you cannot rely on a general impression of what engagement is supposed to look like. You need to understand each person’s normal patterns: how they communicate, what they volunteer for, where their energy tends to show up, and how they usually respond when things are going well. That is what helps you notice when something has shifted.

Of course, learning the normal patterns of several different people takes time. Our Team Assessments can give you a useful head start by showing how your team’s personality makeup shapes the way they communicate, collaborate, and approach their work – so you can better understand what is normal for each person before assuming something is wrong.

Spotting a change is only the first step. The harder part is resisting the urge to immediately decide what it means.

She is burned out.

He is looking for another job.

They are angry about the reorganization.

These explanations may feel plausible, but once you settle on one, it becomes very easy to see everything that follows as proof. You stop observing the person in front of you and start confirming the story you have already told yourself. And if that story is wrong – as it often will be – you may enter the next conversation with a conclusion when what you really need is curiosity.

For today, your job is simply to notice. Write down what has changed, but leave the explanation blank.

Think of one employee whose behavior has made you wonder whether something is wrong.

Write down one observable change from their usual pattern. Not a general description like “She is quiet,” but something specific: “She used to volunteer ideas in planning meetings, but she has barely contributed since March.”

Do not add a cause. Do not attach a label. Just describe the change as clearly as you can.

And if you cannot identify an actual change, pay attention to that too. You may have been interpreting someone’s normal working style as a warning sign – which means this exercise may have just saved you from a very awkward conversation.

Tomorrow: We turn to the employee no one is worried about: the high performer whose work is still excellent and whose deadlines are still being met. That consistency can make disengagement easy to miss. But when someone starts checking out, the quality of their work is rarely the first thing to disappear.

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