The Biggest Threat to Your Organization May Not Even Be on Your Radar

If you are a leader in a large, corporate setting, your greatest risk is related to your youngest employees who are likely: suffering poor mental health, disengaged, and about to quit.

A recent paper from researchers at Dartmouth and the University of Glasgow found that, for workers under 25, mental health is now so poor, it is equal to or worse than those who are unemployed or disabled, and is roughly 15 points lower than those 55 or older. This despair is particularly acute for women, minorities, and those with less formal education. Additional research shows that about two thirds of Gen Zers report at least one mental health symptom, 60% are taking a psychotropic medication, and 42% have actually been diagnosed with a mental health condition. A full 85% are worried or very worried about the future.

What is causing this historically unprecedented despair among today’s youngest workers?

Within organizations themselves, the researchers see an increasingly poor work environment, with limited opportunities for autonomy, mentorship, and growth, and unprecedented micromanagement via technological surveillance, all in the face of declining wage-based buying power, declining or non-existent benefits, and reduced job security.

The paper notes that “there has been a growth in job demands and a reduction in worker job control,” and that, “employers are successfully deploying new technologies to minimize “break’ times, and exert greater control over production processes, often aided by close technological monitoring of work processes, which limit worker control and autonomy over ever-more-demanding processes.” While companies may think they are leveraging “productivity,” they are also effectively eliminating opportunities for creative thought, collaboration, innovation, problem solving, and a sense of purpose, which by definition are not “surveilable,” and, which are at the core of job satisfaction. Probably more importantly, most Gen Z employees struggle to see meaningful purpose in their work as what they do is becoming more about discreet tasks, which are rarely visibly connected to bigger picture outcomes.

Globally, young people have also gotten the worst “raw deal” of any generation since boomers’ parents and have lived their entire lives under the gloom of multiple existential threats such as climate change, a pandemic, the “great recession,” growing wealth gaps, and frighteningly divisive zero-sum politics. This has all transpired in the world of social media, which, is understood to be its own substantial threat to mental health and wellbeing[1], with both correlational and experimental research showing associations between heavy social media use and higher rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Gen Zers are also suffering more than other generations from what psychiatrist Anna Lembke describes as the “physiologic distress of overabundance,” which refers to the overwhelming quantity, access, potency, and novelty of everything from food to smart phone content and apps to pornography to alcohol and other drugs. All modern humans are experiencing constant dopamine cycling, but Gen Z was born into a world of dopamine burnout, which like other factors, leads to depression and anxiety among other symptoms.

For many young workers, all of these factors are exacerbated by significant student debt, insecure housing, and an inability to achieve historical markers of “adulting” such as marrying, buying a home, and having children. In fact, in the 2025 Gen Z Home Buying report, “Nearly 1 in 3 (30%) have even thought about squatting or living in their car out of desperation [and] another third (36%) say they would consider marrying someone just to afford a home.” As for home ownership, “nearly half of Gen Z (49%) believe homeownership is so far out of reach that there's no point in trying to save now,” while 79% believe they are simply priced out of homeownership under any circumstances.

Importantly, the Dartmouth and Glasgow researchers make it clear that while mental health is declining among youth at large, for the first time, this decline is prevalent among those who are actually employed, noting, “we have confirmed that the mental health of the young in the United States has worsened rapidly over the last decade, as reported in multiple datasets” and “we can conclude that the reason that mental despair now declines in age is because of the recent decline in the mental health of workers under the age of forty and especially those under twenty-five.”

To be clear, not all Gen Zers are struggling and some are thriving. Regardless, for those who are experiencing despair, it is not a result of some sort of defect or character flaw. They are simply facing far more headwinds than any generation in the last 100 years. They certainly do not possess an inherently less robust work ethic than their elder peers. They are simply and rightly pessimistic about the cost-benefit of a system in which there is little long-term value in sacrificing their time, effort, and wellbeing when there is currently far more cost than benefit.

So, what are employers to do?

While employers cannot control the myriad global realities contributing to the poor mental health and despair felt by so many young workers, they absolutely can control many factors in the work environment. Even ignoring altruistic motivations for creating a better, more sustainable work environment, there are profound self-serving reasons that leaders should care about supporting wellbeing among their youngest employees. First, as noted many times by Gallup, disengaged workers are extremely costly to the organizations that employ them—and employees who are feeling despair are rarely engaged. Second, the cost, both overt and covert, of replacing workers who quit is crippling, with the initial financial outlay alone usually exceeding the annual salary of the employee, and the downstream, indirect costs being potentially magnitudes greater. Third, it is becoming clear that so far AI by itself is a very poor replacement for human beings, with a recent study by MIT finding that only about 5% of current AI investments are providing a positive ROI. If you as a leader think that you can afford to drive young employees out of your organization with a low-quality work environment and simply replace them with bots, you are very likely to create expensive and even profound downstream problems for yourself. Moreover, who will fill your future mid-level and senior management if your youngest employees are disengaged, dispirited and feel no affinity toward their employer even if they stay? Who will be the source of new, innovative ideas? Who will be the foundation of any net-positive value for your organization? Who will comprise the market that buys your products and services and those of other companies in your eco-system if your employees (or former employees) are living in a distressed, hyper-fragile economic state?

These are not hypothetical questions. The future of your organization, both short and long-term, is meaningfully dependent on what happens to your Gen-Z workforce. Ignoring their distress is likely at your own peril.

[1] Social media is designed to generate comparisons of a user’s real life to false, curated lives as well as to feel a general sense of inadequacy and repeating cycles of dopamine highs and lows, which drives behavior that is beneficial to social media companies.