What Gen Z Actually Means When They Say They Don't Feel Safe at Work
by Tess Brigham, Certified Coach & Licensed Therapist
This article expands on a recent episode of The Gen Mess with Tess, where I explore generational differences, communication, and psychological safety in modern workplaces.
When a Gen Z employee tells you they don't feel safe at work, there's a good chance you're misunderstanding what they mean. And that misunderstanding, small as it sounds, is creating some of the most expensive, avoidable problems in organizations right now.
I'm Tess Brigham, a licensed therapist and certified coach who has worked with Gen Z for over two decades. I've heard this phrase from the inside of a therapy room, which means I know what's underneath it in a way that most HR leaders and managers never get access to. And what's underneath it is almost never what leaders assume.
Why Does “I Don’t Feel Safe” Land Differently Depending on Who Hears It?
The word 'safe' doesn't have a universal meaning. It has a generational one. And the gap between how different generations understand it is creating genuine breakdowns in organizations that nobody is naming clearly.
For leaders over 45, safety at work lives in a very specific legal and physical register. Is there a harassment issue? Is this a hostile work environment complaint? Is there a liability exposure here? When they hear 'I don't feel safe,' their brain maps it onto the only framework they have for that language, and it goes straight to HR protocol.
For Gen Z, 'safe' almost always means something psychological. It means: I don't feel safe to be honest about what I'm experiencing. I don't feel safe to make a mistake and have it treated as a learning opportunity rather than a character flaw. I don't feel safe to ask a question without it signaling that I'm not capable. I don't feel safe to take up the kind of space here that I'd need to take up to actually do my best work.
When a leader hears the first meaning and the employee intends the second, you get a collision. The leader either escalates into a formal investigation process that completely misses the point, or they dismiss the concern as dramatic, which confirms for the employee that they were right to feel unsafe. Either way, the actual problem goes unaddressed. And the employee starts planning their exit.
They're not filing a complaint. They're telling you that something about this environment is making it impossible for them to bring their full self to work. That's information worth having.
Where Did This Language Come From, and Why Does It Feel So Foreign to Older Leaders?
Gen Z is the first generation to grow up in a culture where emotional literacy was explicitly taught. Not universally, and not always well, but pervasively enough that psychological vocabulary became part of their everyday language in a way it simply wasn't for previous generations.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman, whose work on emotional intelligence reached mainstream audiences in the late 1990s and 2000s, helped launch a wave of social-emotional learning programs in schools across the country.¹ By the time many Gen Zers were in elementary and middle school, naming emotions, identifying boundaries, and talking about what 'safe' and 'unsafe' felt like internally were part of the standard curriculum. This wasn't therapy. It was Tuesday morning in homeroom.
At the same time, wellness culture on social media, the rise of public conversations about mental health, and a generation of parents who were themselves processing concepts like emotional safety and attachment, all of this meant that Gen Z absorbed a fluency in psychological language that previous generations simply didn't have.
So when a Gen Z employee says 'I don't feel safe,' they're not being dramatic or strategic. They're using the most accurate language available to them to describe a real internal experience. The fact that their leaders don't share that vocabulary isn't a reason to dismiss the experience. It's a reason to get curious about what it means.
What Does 'Not Feeling Safe' Actually Do to Performance?
This is the part that tends to get leaders' attention, because it moves the conversation from 'employee wellbeing' to 'business outcomes,' and in my experience, those two things are always connected anyway.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, developed in the 1940s and still one of the most replicated frameworks in organizational psychology, tells us that safety is a foundational need.² When it's unmet, higher-order functioning, things like creativity, collaboration, risk-taking, and genuine contribution, becomes biologically difficult. The brain doesn't prioritize growth when it's in a state of perceived threat. It prioritizes self-protection.
What this looks like in practice is an employee who is technically present and completing tasks, but operating well below their actual capacity. They're not bringing ideas they're not sure will land. They're not flagging problems that might reflect badly on them. They're not asking questions that might signal uncertainty. They're doing the safe minimum, not because they don't care, but because their nervous system has correctly identified that going beyond the safe minimum carries risk in this environment.
Researcher Geoff Cohen at Stanford calls this belonging uncertainty, the chronic background question of whether you truly fit and are valued in a particular environment.³ His research shows that it's not just emotionally draining. It's cognitively expensive. People experiencing belonging uncertainty devote significant mental bandwidth to monitoring for signs of acceptance or rejection, bandwidth that isn't available for actual work. You're paying for someone's full capacity and getting a fraction of it, because the environment is consuming the rest.
What Are the Real Situations Behind the Language?
Let me make this concrete, because abstract frameworks are only useful if they help you recognize what you're actually seeing.
In my practice, 'I don't feel safe at work' tends to describe one of a handful of recurring situations. A manager whose nonverbal responses to questions signal impatience or irritation, even if their words are neutral. An environment where mistakes are discussed publicly or used as examples in team meetings, creating a culture where everyone learns that errors are dangerous. A leadership style that changes based on mood in ways that employees can't predict or prepare for, which creates chronic low-grade anxiety. A culture where certain voices are consistently heard over others, and the pattern is obvious to everyone except the people in charge.
None of these are legal problems. None of them would show up in a formal investigation. But all of them are real, and all of them are costing you the kind of performance and retention you're paying for and not getting.
The difference between a Gen Z employee who thrives in your organization and one who quietly disengages often comes down to whether they experienced any of those situations in their first six months, and whether the response they got when they tried to signal it made things better or worse.
How Should You Actually Respond When Someone Says This?
The instinct for most leaders is to either fix it immediately or defend against it. Both responses miss the point.
What actually works is what therapist and communication researcher Marshall Rosenberg called nonviolent communication: separating the observation from the evaluation, connecting with genuine curiosity, and making a request rather than issuing a defense.⁴ In practice, that sounds less like a technique and more like a real conversation. Something like:
'I appreciate you telling me that. Can you help me understand what a specific situation felt like for you? I want to make sure I actually understand what you're experiencing before I respond.'
That response does several things simultaneously. It validates that the concern is worth taking seriously. It shifts the conversation from abstract language to specific, addressable behavior. And it signals something the employee's nervous system is actively scanning for: that honesty in this environment doesn't get you punished.
Some of what they describe will be immediately actionable. A manager's tone in meetings. Unclear expectations about what's okay to say and to whom. A team dynamic that needs to be addressed. Those are real things you can change.
Some of it will be more complex and take time. That's okay. The response that causes the most damage isn't 'this will take time to address.' It's 'that's not a real problem.' The first one keeps the relationship intact. The second one ends it.
What's the Bottom Line?
When Gen Z says they don't feel safe, they're not complaining. They're not being oversensitive. They're using the most precise language they have to describe a real experience that is directly affecting their ability to do their best work in your organization.
They grew up in a world that gave them that language deliberately. Your job isn't to agree or disagree with the word choice. Your job is to be curious enough to find out what's actually happening, and respond in a way that demonstrates the environment is safe enough to be honest in. Because an organization where people can be honest is always going to outperform one where they can't.
The full episode goes much deeper into the specific psychological mechanisms behind this, including three real examples from my therapy practice that show what this actually looks like inside an organization. Listen to GMWT Episode 65 wherever you get your podcasts.
And if you want to talk about what this looks like in your organization specifically, I'd love to connect.
REFERENCES
1. Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam Books.
2. Maslow, A.H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-396.
3. Cohen, G.L., & Garcia, J. (2008). Identity, belonging, and achievement. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(6), 365-369.
4. Rosenberg, M.B. (2003). Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. PuddleDancer Press.