You've noticed the shift. The employee who used to stay late is now gone at 5:01. The one who volunteered for every project now does exactly what's required and nothing more. The enthusiasm has evaporated. The spark is gone.

Welcome to quiet quitting.

Here's the thing: this isn't necessarily a crisis. Sometimes it's a signal. And how you respond to that signal will determine whether you're facing a wrongful termination lawsuit or facilitating a dignified transition that protects everyone involved.

Quiet quitting has become a buzzword, but the concept is as old as employment itself. It describes employees who meet the basic requirements of their job but refuse to go above and beyond. No extra hours. No voluntary projects. No enthusiasm beyond what's contractually required.

Some call it setting boundaries. Others call it disengagement. For employers, it often feels like a slow-motion resignation without the courtesy of actual notice.

Here's what quiet quitting is not: it's not insubordination, it's not job abandonment, and in most cases, it's not grounds for immediate termination. The employee is still showing up. They're still completing assigned tasks. They're just not giving you their heart anymore.

Before you start building a case for termination, you need to understand the legal landscape you're walking into.

Yes, most employment is at-will. Yes, you can generally terminate employees for any reason or no reason. But that doesn't mean you're protected from lawsuits, and it certainly doesn't mean you'll win them.

When an employer terminates an employee who was technically meeting job requirements, several legal theories come into play. Discrimination claims arise if the quiet quitter belongs to a protected class and can argue that similarly situated employees outside that class weren't terminated for the same behavior. Retaliation claims surface when the disengagement started after the employee engaged in protected activity like filing a complaint, requesting accommodations, or taking FMLA leave. Constructive discharge claims can flip the script entirely if your response to quiet quitting creates conditions so intolerable that you're essentially forcing the employee out.

Here's where employers get themselves into serious trouble. Frustrated by an employee's disengagement, managers sometimes respond with their own version of passive-aggressive warfare: reduced hours, exclusion from meetings, reassignment to undesirable tasks, denial of previously approved accommodations.

This is called "quiet firing," and it's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Courts define constructive discharge as occurring when an employer creates working conditions so intolerable that a reasonable person would feel compelled to resign. If your quiet firing campaign succeeds and the employee quits, they can still sue you for wrongful termination. The legal system treats their resignation as an involuntary termination because you forced their hand.

Before you decide how to respond, you need to understand what's driving the behavior. Quiet quitting rarely happens in a vacuum, and sometimes the problem is you.

Is the quiet quitter a victim of quiet firing? Sometimes managers create hostile conditions without realizing it, or worse, with full intention. If multiple employees reporting to the same manager are disengaging, the problem might not be the employees.

Is there an underlying legal issue? Disengagement often follows workplace events that create legal exposure. Did the employee recently file a complaint? Request an accommodation? Take protected leave? Return from FMLA? If so, treating their subsequent disengagement as a performance problem could be catastrophic.

Is the employee misclassified? Overwork and underpay breed disengagement. If your "exempt" employee is grinding through 60-hour weeks while their non-exempt counterparts are getting overtime, their quiet quitting might be a symptom of classification problems that expose you to wage claims.

Is management failing? Poor communication, lack of recognition, broken promises about advancement, and inconsistent enforcement of policies all contribute to disengagement. Before you blame the employee, audit the environment.

Here's the truth most management books won't tell you: sometimes the right answer is to let a disengaged employee leave. Not to fire them. Not to force them out. To create the conditions for a dignified departure that protects everyone.

Employees come into your organization for a season. Some seasons are long, some are short, but none are forever. When an employee's season is ending, trying to force them to stay or punish them for leaving creates more problems than it solves.

The employee who is quietly quitting has often already decided to leave. They're just working up the courage, waiting for a better opportunity, or managing financial constraints that prevent immediate departure. Your job isn't to trap them. It's to manage the transition professionally.

Fighting to keep disengaged employees or pushing them out aggressively is expensive in ways that don't show up on a balance sheet. Lawsuit defense costs can easily reach tens of thousands even when you win. Wrongful termination verdicts regularly exceed six figures. The disruption of litigation pulls management attention from productive work. And word gets around. How you treat departing employees affects how remaining employees view their security.

A graceful transition costs you a few weeks of transition planning and possibly a small severance. A lawsuit costs you months of management time, attorneys' fees, and potentially a verdict that dwarfs anything you would have spent on doing it right.

A marketing firm had a senior account manager who had been a star performer for four years. After she returned from maternity leave, her manager noticed she was no longer volunteering for evening client events or weekend campaigns. She completed her assigned work competently but stopped going above and beyond.

Frustrated, her manager began documenting "attitude problems" and "lack of commitment." Within six weeks of her return from leave, she received her first negative performance review in four years. Two months later, she was terminated for "failure to meet expectations."

She sued for FMLA retaliation and gender discrimination.

The company's defense? Her performance had declined. But the personnel file told a different story: four years of stellar reviews followed by sudden documented problems that started the moment she stopped working extra hours after having a baby.

The Outcome:

The timing was damning. The sudden shift from exemplary reviews to termination, coinciding precisely with protected leave and her new parenting status, created an inference of discrimination that the company couldn't overcome.

A healthcare consulting firm faced a similar situation when a senior analyst began doing minimum work after being passed over for promotion. Instead of documenting "attitude issues," the managing partner had a direct conversation.

"I've noticed your engagement has changed. What's going on?"

The analyst admitted he was job searching and felt his career at the firm had stalled. Instead of viewing this as a betrayal, the firm responded strategically.

They negotiated a transition timeline: 90 days to knowledge transfer and find a replacement. They agreed not to contest unemployment. They provided a positive reference focused on his actual skills. And they wished him well.

The Protection:

No lawsuit. No unemployment fight. No damage to the firm's reputation. The analyst even referred a strong candidate for his replacement. The transition cost the firm nothing beyond what they would have spent anyway, and they avoided the litigation risk entirely.

The key difference: they treated disengagement as information rather than insubordination, and they responded with honesty rather than hostility.

When you identify a quietly quitting employee, follow this framework to protect your organization while treating the employee fairly:

G - Gather Facts Before Acting

Before any disciplinary conversation, investigate the context. Review the timeline. When did the disengagement start? What happened around that time? Did the employee file any complaints, request accommodations, take leave, or engage in any protected activity in the preceding months?

R - Review Job Requirements

Pull the job description. Pull any written expectations. Is the employee actually failing to meet documented requirements, or are they simply not exceeding them? If your only complaint is that they're not going above and beyond, you don't have a performance problem. You have an engagement problem. Those require different responses.

A - Address Directly and Document

Have a direct conversation. Not accusatory. Not punitive. Direct. Express your observations. Ask questions. Listen to answers. Document the conversation including what the employee says. Sometimes you'll learn about problems you didn't know existed.

C - Create Clear Expectations

If there are legitimate performance concerns, document specific, measurable expectations going forward. Not "improve your attitude." Not "show more commitment." Specific deliverables with specific timelines. If you can't articulate specific deficiencies, you don't have grounds for discipline.

E - Exit Gracefully When Appropriate

If the employee's season at your organization is ending, facilitate the transition rather than forcing a termination. Negotiate transition timelines. Offer references. Consider modest severance in exchange for releases. A clean separation is almost always cheaper than a contested termination.

When managers get frustrated with quiet quitters, they often resort to tactics that create massive legal exposure:

Don't Reduce Hours Without Legitimate Business Justification

Cutting a disengaged employee's hours looks like retaliation, especially if it follows protected activity or if similarly disengaged employees aren't treated the same way.

Don't Exclude from Meetings

Suddenly leaving an employee out of meetings they previously attended creates isolation that supports constructive discharge claims.

Don't Reassign to Undesirable Tasks

Moving an employee to worse duties, less desirable shifts, or dead-end projects as punishment creates the conditions for an EEOC complaint.

Don't Stack the File

If you had no documented performance concerns before the disengagement, suddenly manufacturing documentation looks exactly like what it is: pretext for termination you've already decided to make.

Don't Set Impossible Standards

Creating performance expectations that no reasonable employee could meet, then terminating for "failure to meet expectations," is textbook constructive discharge.

Hospitality and Retail

In industries with high turnover, quiet quitting often precedes resignation by days or weeks. The cost of fighting it usually exceeds the cost of facilitating departure. Focus on cross-training and transition planning rather than discipline.

Healthcare

Patient safety concerns can create legitimate grounds for action that wouldn't exist in other contexts. But documentation must focus on specific patient care deficiencies, not general "attitude" complaints.

Professional Services

Client relationship concerns may justify intervention, but only if you can document specific client impacts. "She doesn't seem as enthusiastic" won't survive legal scrutiny. "Client X complained about response times" might.

Manufacturing

Safety implications of disengagement can be documented concretely. Equipment operation errors, safety protocol deviations, and quality control failures are measurable and defensible reasons for action.

The best defense against quiet quitting is a workplace where employees don't want to disengage:

Conduct regular check-ins that focus on employee development, not just task completion. Recognize contributions meaningfully. Create realistic expectations about advancement and timelines. Address management failures that contribute to disengagement. Respond to accommodation requests promptly and in good faith. Make exit interviews safe spaces for honest feedback.

Every employee relationship has a beginning and an end. How you handle the ending defines your character as an employer and your exposure as a defendant.

When someone's season at your organization is over, let them go with dignity. Not because they deserve it (maybe they do, maybe they don't), but because you deserve the protection that comes from treating departures professionally.

The employee who leaves gracefully takes nothing with them but their final paycheck and their experience. The employee who leaves fighting takes a chunk of your budget, months of your attention, and pieces of your reputation.

Fight for the employees who want to be there. For the ones who don't, open the door and wish them well.

There's a season for everything. Including letting go.

Keep fighting the good fight.

This article provides general information about employment law and is intended for educational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such. Employment law varies by jurisdiction, and the specific facts of any situation can significantly affect legal outcomes. The information presented may not reflect the most current legal developments.

No attorney-client relationship is created by reading this article or contacting Jacobs & Associates through this publication. If you need legal advice for a specific situation, please consult with a qualified employment attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.

The case studies presented are hypothetical scenarios based on common employer situations and are intended for illustrative purposes only. Any resemblance to actual cases or specific employers is coincidental.