With more than half of Australian workers ‘quiet cracking’, two HR leaders reveal how they’re addressing this hidden disengagement through transparency, behavioural shifts and cultures of psychosocial safety.

Across Australia, many employees are keeping up appearances while quietly crumbling under forces like economic stress, political division and climate anxiety.

This subtle but dangerous form of disengagement has been dubbed ‘quiet cracking’. And recent research by Dr Michelle McQuaid, founder of The Change Lab, reveals more than half of Australians (55 per cent) are experiencing it.

“This came up over and over again in their comments: ‘I’m keeping it all together at work, but I’m going home and I’m falling apart,’” says McQuaid. 

McQuaid recently spoke about quiet cracking in an episode of AHRI’s podcast Let’s Take This Offline. Listen to the full episode below.

Below, McQuaid shares a framework for managing quiet cracking, and HR leaders from City of Canterbury Bankstown and TelstraSuper share how they’re confronting the trend head-on in their own organisations.

Managing quiet cracking through the ‘heart of change’ framework

Following on from HRM’s recent article on the nature and causes of quiet cracking, we now look at the levers leaders can pull to create genuine and lasting change.

While external pressures will always create turbulence, The Change Lab’s study points to organisational tools that can materially reduce the risk of quiet cracking. The most powerful of these is the equilibrium between demands and resources.

Employees who reported manageable workloads were 53 per cent less likely to be on the path to disengagement.  

Other protective factors were cultural in nature – civility in day-to-day interactions, the opportunity to apply personal strengths in meaningful work and leadership practices that minimise psychosocial risks.

McQuaid has distilled these factors into her Heart of Change framework (below), which outlines five habits that can help leaders embed these protective elements at scale.

Importantly, these habits are not tactical quick fixes. They represent a disciplined approach to workforce design and leadership practice that, when applied consistently, can buffer organisations against the destabilising effects of constant change.

While volatility cannot be eliminated, the capacity to create conditions that prevent erosion of workforce stability sits squarely within HR leaders’ remit.

City of Canterbury Bankstown’s top-down approach to psychosocial safety

To tackle quiet cracking in the workforce, it’s often the case that leaders need to confront it in themselves first.

At City of Canterbury Bankstown in Sydney, Director of People and Performance Simone Robards MAHRI began to notice the early signs of quiet cracking among the organisation’s leadership team.

“It was clear the executives were deeply committed to creating a safe environment for our people,” she says. “But within our own leadership group, there were times we ourselves weren’t speaking up when we were feeling overwhelmed, and that overwhelm was showing up in negative ways.

“If it’s happening with us at the executive level, you can be sure it’s happening in other leadership teams across our 200-strong cohort as well.”

Cultivating psychosocial safety will never be a grassroots initiative, she says – it has to start at the very top.

“We need to have an environment where it’s safe for everybody, including leaders, to speak up to say they’re overwhelmed or that they’ve messed up. That’s both the most important thing, and the hardest thing to do,” says Robards.

To bring that principle to life at the manager level, she supported her leaders to set aside time to reflect together, speak candidly and show vulnerability, modelling the behaviour they wanted to see across the organisation. Robards introduced a monthly book club for managers to spark honest conversations about leadership.

By keeping readings short and focused, the sessions encourage reflection without adding to workloads. The format has helped leaders show vulnerability, share experiences and adopt growth-mindset thinking.

At the executive level, leaders were coached in ways to strengthen wellbeing and engagement without pushing themselves to breaking point, in part through targeted workshops facilitated by McQuaid.

Based partly on McQuaid’s Heart of Change framework, the team identified a number of behavioural shifts that needed to happen to achieve this, including:

1. Strengths-based conversations. One leader introduced a tool to help managers identify and lean into their strengths. 

“The philosophy is that when you’re good at something, you enjoy it, and when you enjoy it, you want to do more of it, and in turn you get better at it,” says Robards. 

2. Setting clear expectations. For example, the CEO focused on being explicit about priorities so team members knew what was truly urgent and what could wait. 

“If he doesn’t say it’s urgent, people don’t run themselves ragged trying to deliver it today when it could be done next week.”

3. Amplifying gratitude. One leader has made it his mission to thank people for their efforts more visibly. 

“He leads the support function, which is often forgotten – you often don’t hear anything unless something goes wrong, so they feel somewhat neglected and unappreciated. He’s finding opportunities to show them gratitude.”

4. Adopting a growth mindset. “The growth mindset is about saying, ‘It’s okay not to have all the answers. It’s okay to get it wrong,’” says Robards. “You talk about what’s going on and the struggles you might be having, which helps you deal with them before you quietly crack.”

She stresses that the work is ongoing, and that leaders need to continually recalibrate their expectations of themselves and their teams.  The focus now, she says, is on sustaining these practices so leaders at every level feel equipped to support their people without putting their own health and wellbeing on the line. 

“We need to have an environment where it’s safe for everybody, including leaders, to speak up to say they’re overwhelmed or that they’ve messed up.” – Simone Robards MAHRI, Director of People and Performance, City of Canterbury Bankstown

How TelstraSuper uses transparency and support frameworks to guide employees through change

Among the strongest drivers of quiet cracking identified by The Change Lab’s research was uncertainty around the impact of economic pressures and new technologies on job security.

That means employers can ease the strain by communicating openly, building trust and providing practical tools to help employees manage uncertainty. For Krithika Hansen MAHRI, Chief People Officer at TelstraSuper, the key to strategic transparency during periods of change is building clear frameworks and keeping communication steady.

“There needs to be a clear communications framework and a willingness from your CEO and the executive team to keep talking to people,” says Hansen. “Even if you don’t have anything to say, tell them you don’t have anything to say – it goes a long way.”

When TelstraSuper announced an intention to merge with another fund in May 2024, Hansen faced the difficult task of keeping employees engaged and reassured.

“We’ve got a strong culture and leadership,” she says. “I knew one of the things people would be most concerned about is what’s going to happen to our culture and our ways of working.”

At this point, no merger partner had been confirmed, which exacerbated employees’ sense of uncertainty. Rather than wait for anxiety to build, Hansen and her team quickly put scaffolding in place.

The team decided to design its support framework under four pillars, with wellbeing as the first. This included coaching leaders on how to better understand and manage natural stress responses.

“We did topics like coping with stress and understanding your nervous system, and it opened a lot of people’s eyes. It gave us a shared language and prompted individuals to ask, ‘Now that I have language and understanding around what’s going on, how can I adapt and respond appropriately?’”

Another pillar was about careers.

“That was about asking, ‘Whether it was a takeover or a merger of equals, how might you best position yourself?’”

Regardless of the outcome, employees needed to be professionally prepared.  A takeover by a larger fund could mean fewer roles, while a merger of equals might offer more opportunities to transition. 

Instead of downplaying the risk of roles being affected, the organisation addressed it directly and began equipping employees to prepare for any outcome. 

Hansen’s team supported employees to update their LinkedIn profiles, refresh resumes, strengthen interview skills, highlight transferable skills and showcase their achievements. 

Building on this, the third pillar focused on managing change. 

“At TelstraSuper, we have been in a state of change now for 18 months. Particularly for the past few months, we’ve consistently supported people with managing themselves – focusing on what they can control, such as career readiness.”

The final pillar was about attracting and retaining the right talent, and making sure TelstraSuper continued to deliver on its employee value proposition. Together, these pillars offered a flexible change framework at a time when the outcome of the merger was still unknown.

As more details emerged, Hansen’s team was able to shift the emphasis between pillars without losing sight of the broader picture. At the heart of TelstraSuper’s approach to mitigating quiet cracking is connection.

“It all comes down to the connections the person has with their manager, their peers and their colleagues,” says Hansen.  “It’s about understanding what the individual wants and needs, and thinking about how you can respond to that in a way that means the business can still do what it needs to do.”

Parts of this article were originally published in the October/November 2025 edition of HRM Magazine.

Develop the skills to design a sustainable wellbeing strategy and build a psychologically safe workplace with AHRI’s Implementing Wellbeing Initiatives short course.