There’s a term that swept through HR circles a few years back and never quite left: quiet quitting. The idea that employees are doing the bare minimum, mentally checked out, counting down to 5pm and collecting their salary on the way out.
It became a convenient explanation for disengagement. Blame the workforce. Call it a generational attitude problem. Move on.
The problem is, it’s almost always wrong.
In working with founders and leadership teams across Singapore’s startup and SME community, the pattern I see is almost never employees choosing to coast. It’s managers — usually stretched, usually well-intentioned — who have quietly stopped managing. And the team has adjusted accordingly.
Call it what it actually is: quiet managing.
What quiet managing looks like
It rarely happens all at once. It creeps in. The one-to-ones get moved, then skipped, then quietly dropped from the calendar. Feedback becomes something that happens at annual review time, if at all. A team member flags a problem and gets a “let’s circle back on that” that never circles back.
The founder or CEO is busy — genuinely busy — and people management has slipped from the priority list. Not out of indifference, but because there are twelve things competing for their attention and only so many hours.
The team notices. They’re not stupid. When the boss stops asking how things are going, stops giving direction, stops acknowledging good work, they read the signal. They stop bringing problems. They stop going above and beyond. They do what’s asked of them and nothing more. From the outside, it looks like disengagement. From the inside, it’s a perfectly rational response to a leadership vacuum.
The moment it becomes expensive
Quiet managing rarely announces itself. You don’t get a memo saying “your management rhythm has collapsed and your top performer is now six weeks from handing in their notice.” You just find out one Tuesday afternoon when they ask for a meeting and you can already tell from their face what’s coming.
That’s where most founders realise they’ve been reading the situation backwards. They thought the employee was the problem. The employee thought the same about them. Neither of them had the conversation that might have changed things.
The cost is significant. Replacing a valued team member in Singapore typically runs between six and nine months of their salary once you factor in recruitment, onboarding, and the productivity trough while the new person ramps up. For a S$70,000-a-year role, you’re looking at S$35,000 to S$52,000 gone. And that’s before you account for the institutional knowledge that walked out with them.
The fix is not complicated
Here’s what I tell every founder I work with who’s worried about retention: you don’t need a new HR system, a culture consultant, or a team off-site in Bali. You need thirty minutes a week per direct report.
That’s it. Thirty minutes. No agenda template required. Ask two questions: what’s going well, and what’s getting in your way? Then genuinely listen to the answers.
Most founders who start doing this consistently are surprised by what they hear — not because their team has been hiding some catastrophic problem, but because nobody had bothered to ask in a while. People want to feel that someone senior notices them, cares what they think, and will do something with the information. The thirty-minute check-in delivers all three, for free, every week.
What the best-run companies actually do
The companies I’ve worked with that retain their best people well are rarely the ones paying the highest salaries in the market. They’re the ones where the boss shows up every week and pays attention.
That’s it. That’s the whole competitive advantage. Consistent presence.
They’ve also usually built a few lightweight structures that stop management from being the first thing to fall off the list when things get hectic: a standing weekly slot that doesn’t get cancelled, a shared note where they track what came up and what they said they’d do about it, and a habit of following through on small commitments. None of this requires HR software or a People Operations function. It requires the decision to treat management as part of the job, not an optional extra.
If your team looks like they’re quiet quitting
Start by asking yourself the uncomfortable question: when did you last sit down properly with each person on your team? Not a Slack message, not a drive-by chat in the kitchen — a proper, scheduled conversation where you asked them what they needed?
If the answer is “recently and regularly,” then yes, you might have a disengagement problem that needs a different kind of investigation. But if the answer involves some awkward mental arithmetic and a vague recollection of a conversation at a team lunch three months ago, there’s your starting point.
Most of the time, the issue is not that your team has checked out. It’s that they’ve been waiting for you to check in.
Expert People Solutions works with founders and leadership teams of Singapore startups and SMEs — providing fractional HR support that builds the people foundations you need without the overhead of a full-time hire. If any of this resonates with where your team is right now, get in touch. A thirty-minute conversation is usually enough to work out whether and how we can help.
