Gen Z Wants Meaning, Not Meetings
Gen Z is often accused of lacking commitment. But many are simply reacting to work that feels increasingly fragmented, performative, and hard to care about.
Imagine this: a young man has a genuinely good setup. He has a supportive boss, a relocation package, and real development opportunities. He is talented, he is young, and he knows exactly where he wants to go - building something of his own one day.
And yet, he still finds himself dreaming of leaving the corporate world.
As he put it, there is simply too much “fake work” - the kind that looks productive, sounds important, but somehow leads nowhere.
It is not difficult to see why that lands so strongly with Gen Z.
This is a generation that is often portrayed as disengaged, impatient, or difficult to retain. But a lot of what looks like disengagement is often frustration with work that feels fragmented, performative, or disconnected from any real sense of meaning.
And the wider workplace context does not help.
Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index found that workers are interrupted roughly every two minutes by meetings, emails, or pings. Gallup has also found that engagement among younger workers has dropped sharply, with just 35% of Gen Z and younger millennial employees engaged in its U.S. data. That level of disconnection starts to make more sense when attention itself has become so fragmented.
It also helps explain why younger workers are increasingly intolerant of work that feels performative rather than meaningful. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that many career decisions are now shaped by a combination of money, meaning, and wellbeing rather than salary alone.
So when younger employees start questioning whether corporate life is really for them, it is worth asking whether the issue is ambition, attention span, or something more structural.
Because if your day is spent moving between calls, chats, updates, decks, admin, and performative responsiveness, it becomes much harder to access the part of work that actually creates meaning: contribution, progress, challenge, ownership, and growth.
Low engagement is not always a motivation problem.
Sometimes it is what happens when people are surrounded by too much activity and not enough meaning.
And if organisations want stronger retention, stronger leadership pipelines, and more committed talent, that is not just a Gen Z problem to fix. It is a work design problem to take seriously.
Work that feels real still matters - especially to the generation expected to build what comes next.
This post was written by Maryna Harrison. You can follow her here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryna-harrison/
