Generation Z not winning employee generation of the month
Covid didn't help
This is a reprint from the Telegraph.
It rings true. The refusal to pick up a phone, the entitlement, and the idea that leisure is the norm and that work interrupts it is very Generation Z.
I’ve seen students who seem to think a mediocre BBA and being in some club at uni nobody has heard of left them ready to make senior manager strategic decisions.
The concept of working your way up in an organization vanished during the COVID break, and the demand to set up a personal face-to-face meeting with someone is met with an “okay boomer” smirk.
I asked one young lady what she was looking for, “60K a year and working from home.” Good luck with that. I’ve assigned work that I later timed myself on, about 45 minutes. My Gen Z apprentice? Twelve hours working from home. I paid her off and was done with her.
My biggest success story is the kid who nobody noticed but who prepared like mad for interviews, the kid who wasn’t the big man on campus but sat in the front row and opened his mouth, the one who, no matter what his role was decided that he would do it better than anyone had before. This kid is soaring and will probably be president by 30.
Gen Z Work Utopia. Except they would likely be alone.
Charlotte Gill / Telegraph / 2024
A nightmare” is how James McNeil describes his experience working with members of Generation Z.
Many young workers are barely able to get through an interview, are unwilling to pick up the phone and have even ghosted their new companies completely on the first day of their jobs, according to exasperated employers.
McNeil, 38, had been in charge of a sales team of an organisation collecting music royalties from businesses and often he received job applications from 20-somethings to join the company.
“We’d book interviews [but] people wouldn’t turn up, or they’d turn up late, or they’d turn up and were wildly unprepared,” says McNeil, who now runs Ready2Lease, a car leasing firm. “They didn’t know anything about what they were doing, what they were there for.”
Jade Arnell, 37, shares McNeil’s exasperation with Gen Z-ers. She’s wary of making generalisations – one of the best employees at her firm, Rebellion Marketing, is part of this generation – but says she’s had to let go of four others because they were unreliable.
Generation Z, which is defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, and currently aged between 12 and 27, has become one of the most talked-about cohorts economically and socially.
It’s no wonder. According to the World Economic Forum, they are expected to make up a quarter of the workforce by 2025. It’s never been more important for businesses to get their heads around the generation leading the future.
It is a rite of passage for every generation to complain about the previous ones, but there appears to be a deeper divide and bigger forces at work.
In its report on this generation, Deloitte writes: “As more Boomers enter retirement, Gen Z will be replacing them, bringing an entirely different worldview and perspective on their careers and how to succeed in the workplace.”
It describes this age group as a social-media-savvy, socially-aware cohort that “proactively seeks out learning opportunities to enhance skills”, and “desires diverse and entrepreneurial opportunities”.
Jade Arnell, 37, has been forced to let go of four Gen Z employees because they were unreliable
For McNeil, though, some members of Gen Z can barely get through an interview – never mind being able to deploy sophisticated skills.
“The biggest issue [in interviews] was the language they would use,” he says. “They were quite negative about things.
He adds: “When you go for a job, you always have to put a positive spin on everything... [but they would make comments like] my old job was crap. My manager was horrible; I hated it, and things like that, which, as an employer, turned you off immediately.”
Once recruited, he says, “We had two occasions where I hired people; one was not a junior role but a senior sales role. It wasn’t a high-end role but it was £35,000 a year, company car, laptop, phone; a decent position for somebody. On both occasions, they just didn’t show up on the first day. They never responded to us again, never answered the phone, never replied to email, nothing. Just vanished off the face of the earth.”
Others were “afraid of getting on the phone” and thought “that everything should just be done via email or text”, McNeil says.
“Back in the day, when I started in sales, everything was done by phone; email was secondary. They wouldn’t want to pick up the phone and speak to somebody because they sometimes didn’t like that one-to-one conversation or confrontation. They’re good with technology but not good with life skills.”
Arnell describes her experience with Gen Z as “pretty poor”. She takes pride in the flexibility of her marketing business, where staff have freedom around what hours they work, can take 32 days of holiday and train in new areas, supported by the company.
However, she believes Gen Z members took advantage of the culture. “They want everything and deliver nothing in return,” she adds.
“They don’t seem to be that arsed about anybody else but their personal space and experience and what they need and want. There doesn’t seem to be any bigger picture thinking.”
At worst, Arnell says, “I’ve had situations multiple times with people that have literally gone out with their friends all day on the p-ss and then basically done their work at 3 am, drunk, and then couldn’t understand why that was unacceptable.”
They would even admit what they’d been up to, according to Arnell.
“Until they reach a certain age, they just can’t work remotely; they need to be in an office environment. Even though they claim that they want the freedom and the flexibility, they’re not structured themselves to be disciplined”.
McNeil found Gen Z workers repeatedly asking for flexible working and says they had “an automatic assumption they could work from home”. He describes it as a “consistent battle of trying to get people into the office”.
McNeill and Arnell are wary of their experiences; nowadays, Arnell takes longer to interview people applying to work at her company. McNeil blames Gen Z’s woes on technology making “things too easy for people so that when [it] fails, they don’t know how to get around it” and schools not teaching enough teenagers about “the real world”.
Shoshanna Davis, 27, founder of Fairy Job Mother, a consultancy helping young people and employers build better working relations, says the internet has shaped expectations, especially around remote employment.
“There’s a huge glamorisation of the idea of working from anywhere, which is made to be very attractive.”
Shoshanna Davis, 27, believes the internet has shaped Gen Z's expectations around remote employment
Although she agrees that Gen Z have issues, such as not wanting to pick up the phone or hesitation to put their camera on for video calls, she thinks there are more sympathetic reasons for their behaviour.
“Most people have a Year 10 or 11 work experience; we have 18-year-olds coming to work today where that experience was cancelled because of Covid, so they genuinely missed out and have never worked in an office before,” she says.
“Or we have university graduates who missed out on things like placement years or internships because they were either cancelled or very competitive at the moment.”
Some researchers have suggested that Gen Z—having grown up around social media and influencers encouraging them to be authentic—tends to talk and dress in more “informal” ways. This, in turn, can lead older colleagues and employers to perceive them as unprofessional.
In her interactions with Gen Z, Davis finds that they are very ambitious.
“Sometimes I get feedback from clients that they’re too ambitious; they want to walk before they can run.”
She says there could be a misunderstanding, with employers thinking their younger recruits are asking too quickly for a promotion and are entitled. In contrast, younger generations are simply aspiring to it.
Given demographic trends, we will soon discover the reality of Gen Z’s workplace habits en masse.