How excited are you about your job these days?

If you’re feeling pretty bleh, you’re right in line with most of your colleagues.

Only 31% were engaged at work last year the grouchiest reading in a decade.

That alone is worrying news for employers, who need their armies to be motivated.

The question is why.

Fresh out of school, they’re more likely to rely on the office to make friends.

They’re also in need of the most mentoring, which doesn’t happen as much over Zoom.

Left to flail on their own, I concluded, they’re less enthusiastic about their jobs.

Since my original story, though, I’ve begun to wonder if other factors are playing a role.

For starters, the workplace feels increasingly chaotic and unfriendly these days.

Adding to the uncertainty is therise of AI.

Maybe it’s not that they’re lazy or entitled.

Of course, work has always been a drag difficult, dull, and demanding.

For boomers, the prize was alifetime of job security.

For Gen Xers, it was theprestige of a corner office.

For millennials, it was fulfilling your true potential and making the world a better place.

Gen Zers, on the other hand, seem to have grasped thetransactional nature of workfrom the very outset.

They don’t have any of the naive expectations about employment that I did when I was their age.

They get thathustle cultureis a one-way ticket toburnout.

And they know that no amount of putting up with shit at work will protect them from being shitcanned.

They’re disengaged at work because they don’t trust that they’ll be rewarded for working.

So what should employers do, given Gen Z’s startling level of disengagement?

First off, don’t order everyone back to the office.

As I wrote two years ago, research shows that RTO edicts only demoralize everyone even more.

Instead, employers need to be more intentional about designing jobs to meet the needs of their junior staff.

All of these steps would help.

This isn’t about catering to the whims of Gen Z.

Making jobs more interesting will motivate the entire workforce.

Aki Itois a chief correspondent at Business Insider.