Across offices worldwide, a silent crisis is unfolding, from one empty desk to another. Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, says it is ready to walk out of jobs faster than any generation before it. Employers are confused when the answer has always been right before them.
This generation has never stopped talking. The problem is that nobody has been listening.
Rafi is 24. He studied marketing and held a management trainee role while he was still a student. His first real taste of the corporate world was a three-month internship, and it was also his last.
For Rafi, the job was consuming everything. He had always envisioned building his own venture, and the internship left no room for that. "There was nothing left at the end of the day," he says. "No time or energy to invest in myself or my plans."
Then the workplace became hostile as well. A senior colleague was persistently disrespectful, and the manager feigned ignorance. His concerns went unaddressed. "That was it for me," he says. He realised that in such a system, he was merely a cog in the machine rather than a valued individual, and staying was no longer an option.
Nadia's story cuts differently. She is 25, and she joined her first company as an intern with a finance degree and a strong academic record. She was good enough to be promoted to a full-time role. "For a moment, it felt like the beginning of something great."
It wasn't. Her manager consistently favoured her male peers for opportunities and ignored her requests for more responsibility. He often went days without speaking to her. Her contributions were regularly dismissed in favour of her male colleagues' input.
"I began to doubt my own abilities, questioning if I was even suited for finance," she says. After nearly a year, she resigned. Only then did she understand that the insecurity had never been hers. "I realised my self-doubt wasn't mine," she says. "It was built by people who kept dismissing me."
Nadia had loved the work itself all along. She found comfort in the women she worked alongside. But comfort changes nothing while the structure stays the same.
Rafi and Nadia are not exceptions. They are examples of a growing worldwide trend.
Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which covers 44 countries, found that one-third of Gen Z respondents plan to leave their current employer within two years, close to double the share of Millennials who said the same. Not all of them will go through with it. A third of the workforce saying it intends to leave is still a problem.
The same survey found that 45% of Gen Z worldwide hold traditional full-time roles, and that 31% of those who do would prefer to combine the job with a side venture. That is not a disinterest in the work. They want to build experience, diversify income and gain more control over their careers.
That 45% needs a caveat. The generation's youngest members are still in education, and surveys of Gen Z count students alongside working adults. A share of that remaining 55% has not reached full-time work, rather than turned away from it. The second figure says more about the trend. A third of those who already hold the full-time job want something running alongside it.
Deloitte's 2025 findings identify inadequate pay, lack of purpose and indifference to personal wellbeing as the primary drivers. These are not abstract preferences. They are the conditions that decide whether a young person can sustain themselves in a role.
Neither Rafi nor Nadia mentioned pay, and the gap between the survey and the interviews is worth explaining. Pay comes top of the list because it is the driver everyone can name. The other two only show up when someone describes a particular job. For Rafi, it was the hours the job took from the business he wanted to build. For Nadia, wellbeing had nothing to do with workload. She spent a year being treated as though she were not in the room.
Nadia's story shows a deeper exhaustion: the feeling of being an outsider in a room you earned your place in. The evidence for how common that is comes from different countries, and it does not line up neatly.
In the United Kingdom, the Young Women's Trust Annual Survey recorded young women reporting workplace discrimination rising from 42% in 2022 to 53% in 2024. It is the clearest multi-year tracking of its kind, and it describes a labour market very different from Bangladesh's.
In Bangladesh, the exclusion begins before the workplace. International Labour Organization data puts the share of young women aged 15–24 who are not in employment, education or training far above the share of young men, a gap among the widest in South Asia. Many of the women who would have been Nadia's peers never reached the office she walked into.
The two figures measure different things in different countries, but they point in the same direction. What Nadia ran into was not one unusual manager.
Their stories point to a structural problem: a generation carrying one set of values entering workplaces built around another. Employers have not ignored this, but they have misread it.
McKinsey's research on attrition found a straightforward disconnect. Employers ranked compensation and work-life balance as the levers that matter. Employees who had left named something else entirely. They did not feel valued by their managers or their organisations, and they had no sense of belonging. Employers were answering a question about money. The people who left were talking about how they had been treated.
TriNet's State of the Workplace 2025 report, covering employees at small and mid-sized firms in the United States, shows how that misreading plays out. Employers reported improved mentorship and greater autonomy. Over the same period, employee satisfaction in those exact areas declined. The initiatives were real enough. They just did not land where the problem was. The gap between what employers believe they are offering and what employees experience is widening, not closing.
Flexibility sits at the centre of it. Deloitte's 2025 survey found that 45% of Gen Z workers report work-related burnout, the highest of any generation. The drivers they cited were the following: lack of flexibility, poor communication and inadequate support. Workload does not appear on that list at all.
Before coming up with any initiative, employers must first understand what they are actually dealing with, and that requires extensive research. The evidence points toward the following set of recommendations for employers who are serious about landing on the correct diagnosis and subsequently retaining their Gen Z workforce.
Know what they want before deciding what to offer. Stay interviews, exit analysis broken down by age cohort, and third-party assessments that compare employer perception against employee experience will show where the two already align and where the real friction sits.
Listen with intent before you diagnose. Feedback has to be regular, anonymous and visibly acted upon. A channel nobody acts on teaches people that speaking up is pointless, which is worse than not asking.
Make growth visible. Written promotion criteria and structured pathways, paired with mentorship that actually connects junior staff to senior leadership. Nadia never complained that promotion was slow. She could not see what the route was, or why it kept going to someone else.
Build the infrastructure before announcing flexibility. Hybrid and remote work need platforms, training and ground rules underneath them. Offering flexibility without the supporting conditions produces the gap TriNet measured, where a policy exists on paper but staff never experience it.
Rafi is already looking beyond the regular nine-to-five, building something of his own. Nadia is applying again, in the same field. She knows she may face all of it a second time. She is moving forward anyway.
They are two different people. But they represent a great many young workers emptying their desks under organisations that remain indifferent to the actual problem.
The data is clear. The voices are loud. The only question left is whether anyone in charge will finally do something about it.
Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals interviewed.
Author: Mashnur Mahbub is a Junior Associate at Innovision Consulting Private Limited.
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