Gen Z: The Canaries Who Stopped Singing. Why Are You Still in the Mine?

Almost every person who has appeared on the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast is chasing the same ghosts. They're worried that AI will replace their workforce. They're scrambling to address "quiet quitting." They're struggling to understand what looks like Gen Z job-hopping and a perceived lack of loyalty, perceptions that may say more about broken organizational systems than about the generation itself. They're rolling out another engagement survey, hoping this time the data will tell them something actionable. They're like miners checking the canary's cage, trying to figure out why it stopped singing, but still refusing to evacuate the shaft. Here's what nobody's saying out loud: You're treating symptoms. And the patient is dying while you argue about the fever.

The headlines scream about 191,000 tech layoffs through November 2025. About Gen Z's 1.1-year average job tenure. About how automation is coming for everyone's job. These stories are real. But they're not the disease; they're what happens when the disease goes untreated long enough for the body to start shutting down.

The actual diagnosis is staring you in the face: 68% of your workforce is disengaged.

Disengagement isn't about satisfaction scores or happiness metrics. It's the absence of emotional connection, enthusiasm, and discretionary effort, the extra 20% people bring when they genuinely care about outcomes. Disengaged employees show up, do what's required, and leave. Not unhappy. Not complaining. Just psychologically checked out. Doing the minimum and waiting for something better.

That 32% engagement rate isn't a metric; it's a confession that your organization has normalized dysfunction for so long you've forgotten what health looks like. And before you blame the pandemic, or remote work, or "kids these days," let me save you some time: This has been broken for decades. Gen Z didn't create this crisis. They just refuse to pretend it doesn't exist.

The symptom: People are leaving. The diagnosis most leaders make: "We need better benefits / more flexibility / higher pay." The actual problem: Your organizational structure is incompatible with how humans need to work.

Drawing on Gallup-based estimates summarized in Forbes and related analyses, each disengaged employee typically costs an organization 18–34% of that employee's annual salary through lower productivity, higher absenteeism, and the costly churn of replacing people who've mentally quit before they physically leave. In the United States alone, Gallup's 2025 data shows that disengaged and actively disengaged workers account for $1.9 trillion in lost productivity annually. Globally, the hemorrhaging reaches between $8.8 trillion and $9.6 trillion, roughly 9% of global GDP bleeding into a system that leaders keep trying to fix with engagement surveys and wellness apps.

For individual organizations, the math is more specific and more damaging. Gallup data, summarized by Forbes, show that disengaged employees have 37% higher absenteeism, 18% lower productivity, and 15% lower profitability compared with engaged employees, leading to missed deadlines, client dissatisfaction, and lower throughput than competitors.

The turnover costs compound the problem. Work Institute's research shows that replacing an employee costs 33% of their annual salary when accounting for recruiting, onboarding, training, lost productivity during the vacancy, and the time it takes for a replacement to reach full productivity. This breaks down to approximately 11% in direct replacement costs and 22% in indirect costs, lost performance, strained team dynamics, and managerial time invested in hiring.

When Gen Z walks out after a year, that's not disloyalty. That's diagnostic speed. They evaluated whether your stated values match what you reward. They tested whether their voice matters in decisions that affect their work. They looked for evidence of a growth trajectory that makes sense. And when they saw the gap, when the mission statement on the wall contradicted the behavior being promoted, when their expertise was ignored in favor of hierarchy, when, six months in, they still couldn't see where they were heading, they left.

Previous generations saw the same gaps. They just learned to rationalize them. Millennials call it "paying dues." Gen X developed sophisticated coping mechanisms. Boomers pushed through because that's what you did when options were limited. The exhaustion you're seeing across all five generations currently working. That's the accumulated cost of spending years in systems that require you to suppress core parts of yourself to succeed.

Your organization is losing talent. Your engagement scores are mediocre at best. Your best people are exhausted, and your newest hires are already looking for exits. The question isn't if you have a problem. The question is: Are you diagnosing it correctly?

Because if you're still chasing symptoms, blaming generations, or AI anxiety, or "the great resignation,” you're going to keep losing people who could have solved the problems you're spending millions trying to fix. The canary stopped singing. The mine is toxic. And arguing about whether canaries are just more sensitive than other birds misses the point entirely. The air is poisoned for everyone.

Next week, I'll show you why the technology implementations you're betting on won't fix what's broken. But for now, sit with this: if 68% of your people are disengaged, what does that say about the system they're working in?