‘The Great Detachment’ is the Defining Workplace Trend of the New Year

Remember “quiet quitting?” The pandemic-era buzzword may have faded into relative obscurity — no buzz is forever — but the quiet quitters haven’t exactly quit quiet quitting.

Indeed, workplace morale has hit an alarming low point in the US. American employees are reporting high rates of stress, exhaustion, and perhaps most notable of all, apathy. If the early days of Covid ushered in the so-called Great Resignation, when workers en masse quit their jobs in search of greener pastures, then the middle years of the 2020s were a humbling reminder that the grass isn’t always greener. Now, the Great Resignation has given way to what many are calling “The Great Detachment,” with workers across the country finding it difficult to, well, give a single hoot. 

But what’s behind our collective malaise? Is a mental health crisis taking root in the workplace? And, most importantly, what’s the cost of collective burnout?

Actively Not Active

The bad vibes you may feel at your workplace aren’t just vibes. They’re part of a trend, now discernible in considerable datasets. Gallup’s series of annual surveys on US workplace sentiment, published earlier this month, show across-the-board shifts toward discontent:

• According to Gallup, fewer than 1 in 3 US workers — or 31% — considered themselves to be “engaged” at work in 2024. That’s the lowest figure since 2014.
• Also hitting levels not seen since 2014? The number of employees who consider themselves “actively disengaged” at work, which crept up to a full 17% in 2024.
• Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the youngest in the workforce who profess to be the most unhappy; engagement fell a full five points from the prior year for workers under the age of 35, more than any other age cohort.

In a separate survey on employee sentiment released in May last year, The Conference Board similarly found notable slippage in job satisfaction. While overall job satisfaction actually hovered around multi-decade highs last year, employees reported a decrease in satisfaction across each of the 26 different subcategories included in the survey – subjects such as “work/life balance,” “quality of leadership,” and “workload.” Translation: Everyone may like their job in broad strokes, but zoom into the details and you’ll quickly discover discontent. It was enough for the industry group to declare that job satisfaction in the US is at risk.

Get No Respect: So what’s behind the great detachment? The usual culprits are certainly present: Per Gallup, just 46% of employees “strongly agree” that they understand what is expected of them at work, down 10% from 2020, while just 39% say someone cares about them at work and just 30% say that someone encourages their development, both also down from 2020 levels. All of which is a way of saying employees aren’t feeling a ton of love; in a separate poll, Gallup found just 37% of workers strongly agreed that they are respected at work.

So is it a management problem? Perhaps. And, unfortunately, just 31% of managers — or the same as workers overall — say they feel engaged at work. Hey, burnout can affect us all. The Great Detachment knows no bounds.

Stuck With You: While the Great Resignation wave of the 2020s saw employees quit in droves for more preferable jobs, workers today report dwindling prospects elsewhere. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that US job openings have surpassed new hires. For one reason or another, workers feel stuck, whether they have reason to or not. 

Alphabet Soup: The tension between work-from-home set-ups and return-to-office mandates plays a role. Though partisans in the WFH-RTO war may be surprised that the data so far isn’t entirely black-and-white, or firmly supporting either side of the equation. Some 90% of office workers said they didn’t want to return to work in a Gallup poll from 2023. And when Amazon ordered most office staff back to physical on-site locations five days per week, an anonymous poll of employees from professional social network Blind found 91% of employees were dissatisfied with the mandate and 73% said they were considering looking for new jobs. 

Seems clear-cut, right? Not exactly. The Great Detachment has certainly coincided with a rise in remote work, at least for white collar and knowledge workers, which has also coincided with another major phenomenon wrecking America: the so-called loneliness epidemic. And Gallup research also shows that fully remote workers are more likely to be disengaged from their employers’ mission or purpose compared with hybrid or full-time in-office employees.

Still, what the data mostly shows is that employees are tired of rapid, successive shifts in either direction. Worse, mobilizing a discontented workforce for the next stage of organizational change could alienate employees even more. Our best advice for the powers that be? Figure out which workers are extroverts and which are introverts, and adjust accordingly.

Mental Health Makes Wealth

So what’s the damage of detachment, other than stilted office parties and overall bad vibes? Unsurprisingly, burnout — which often manifests as absenteeism or turnover — hurts the bottom line. Dr. Etty Burk, an organizational psychologist, told The Daily Upside it can also manifest as “presenteeism,” or when employees “come to work but underperform due to stress or mental health issues.” Each takes its toll. By most estimates, replacing an employee can cost anywhere from 50% to 150% of their annual salary. Meanwhile, at least one study has shown that presenteeism costs the US around $150 billion in lost productivity per year, far more costly than illness-related absenteeism. 

The solution? Invest in employees’ mental wellbeing. Dr. Burk told The Daily Upside that employers should “offer comprehensive Employee Assistance Programs, train managers to recognize signs of burnout, and ensure access to mental health resources,” adding that “employees with access to such support are more likely to stay engaged and productive.”

Gallup, meanwhile, has found that employee engagement is positively correlated with several key business metrics, including quality of work, safety, profitability and more.

The Trouble on Wall Street: While the Great Detachment inherently implies quiet quitting, or doing the minimal amount of work possible, there’s at least one sector where employees are reporting considerable discontent yet are definitely not taking it easy. You guessed it: finance. Per Gallup, along with young workers, finance workers were amongst those reporting the biggest dips in year-over-year engagement. But is Wall Street’s extreme work-life imbalance starting to change? Well, maybe. At least, a little bit.

Last May saw the tragic death of a 35 year-old Bank of America investment banker, who suffered from an acute coronary artery thrombus, a type of blood clot, after reportedly working over 100-hour workweeks. The event sparked a firestorm of discussions over the industry’s infamously toxic culture. By the end of the summer, JPMorgan instituted an 80-hour workweek cap for junior bankers, while Bank of America rolled out a timekeeping tool to keep track of employee hours. That’s because BofA already imposed an 80-hour limit back in 2014, shortly after a 21-year-old intern died of an epileptic seizure possibly due to fatigue after reportedly working 72 hours straight. But a bombshell Wall Street Journal report from last year revealed senior bankers instructed younger employees to lie about the amount of hours they worked if they were pushing past the 80-hour cap. Is Wall Street ready to change? Let’s just say we’re skeptical and waiting for the data from next year’s surveys.