Make no mistake, they are coming. Gen Z is out of college and young people have been entering the workforce for years, soon to outnumber Baby Boomers, According to the Wall Street Journal, it will happen in 2024.
Young blood changing the workplace has always created friction, it’s a psychological certainty, just like young lions fighting for supremacy (or maybe this is a boomer metaphor, and we should look for something less patriarchal). However, Generation Z, people born between 1997 and 2012, is made up of men and women who grew up in a technological world, radically different from whatever went on ‘before’. To them, a world with no Internet and no smartphones is prehistory, and most relationships are conducted at least partially online and at a distance. It means most executives find them ‘difficult’; the most difficult to work with, according to a survey quoted by the WSJ.
Efforts to deal with them include mentorships for those who started working remotely during the pandemic; new perks like on-site therapists, and an array of measures to help them with social skills – or what executives think social skills should be: i.e. learning how to communicate and, most importantly, how NOT to spell out their every thought.
The point, for most companies, is not whether these things are necessary – that’s a given – but whether it makes economic sense for the employer to offer them. Last June, dozens of board members from public companies met at the Sheraton Hotel in Palo Alto, California, to discuss just that. When Christine Heckart, executive in Silicon Valley for more than 25 years, said that young employees’ needs have to be met, because then they will be better workers – it did not go down well with everybody. “When they’re not heard, when they don’t have an opportunity to grow, when they’re not appreciated, then they check out pretty quickly”, says Heckart, who advises companies.
Cat Ward is a vice president at the nonprofit Jobs for the Future, working with big employers to improve workplace practices. She says that they recognize that “they have to respond” to Gen Z’s requests, but “employers are trying to make sure they maintain relevance.”
Others underline that young employees think nothing of giving a presentation of more than 40 pages of slides – although one must think that level of inexperience, surely, is part of the learning process of any generation, even those who didn’t have PowerPoint.
A better point seems to be that social network habits transfer too easily to the workplace: during remote meetings, people leave “snarky comments” in the chat room, apparently incapable of differentiating “constructive” from “inappropriate” – or maybe just yielding to temptation. Once upon a time, in a meeting, snarky comments could not event be transmitted privately via WhatsApp – they had to wait until the meeting was over, whispering at the coffee machine. Online practices did indeed change our perception of human and work relationships.
When credit card issuer Synchrony Financial asked its Gen Z employees what kind of work culture and benefits they hoped to find, some of them asked free therapy at work. “Maybe 25 or 30 years ago, it would have been a gym,” said DJ Casto, Synchrony’s chief human resources officer. “Now, it’s someone to help me figure out how to have the right mental wellness.” Synchrony decided it was worth a try and enrolled a third-party therapist, now working behind frosted glass on the first floor of a secondary building, a bit like a guidance counsellor.
Other employers say that the “younger crowd” lives on feedback, that they love having additional, one-to-one mentorships and they want to feel that their work matters; being paid well is not enough to reassure them.
The big question remains: is social media creating frail, unable-to-navigate-life people, or is the problem that they are mostly having to respond to elderly people who struggle to understand the difference between TikTok and Instagram, and who sometimes issue orders they couldn’t execute?
