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Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.
As the latest generation to join the job market, Gen Z is expected to account for more than a quarter of the U.S. workforce by the end of 2025. And by some accounts, this group is different from what employers have encountered before.
Of course, this happens with every generation—we were told that millennials were overly entitled participation trophy–chasers and, before that, Gen X–ers were disaffected slackers. Whenever a new generation ages into the work world, the sky always seems to be falling, accompanied by much hand-wringing from their elders.
In my experience as a manager, this is usually BS. It’s not that generational differences don’t exist—they do. But most of the complaints about young workers, of any generation, are simply about young people. The concerns arise from young people’s inexperience, not their particular generation.
But Gen Z might actually be different, at least in some ways. Because of COVID-19’s impact on this cohort’s high school and college years, many in the group missed out on experiences like internships and summer jobs, so they’re starting their professional careers without already having learned the “How work works” lessons that generations before them often got before graduating.
For example, one manager recently wrote to my work advice column, concerned that her company’s latest crop of young workers is struggling to adapt to work in ways that earlier generations didn’t:
The early-career employees we’ve hired since the pandemic are … different. Our company was quick to recognize that, because these employees started their careers when everything was remote (and in some cases had a remote college education), they would be behind the curve in terms of professionalism and business norms, and we tried to adapt by providing more training and more support. But we’re now five years out, and a significant segment of this cohort continues to struggle.
They are chronically disgruntled. I work hard to be fair, compassionate, and supportive while also maintaining the high standard of performance common to our company. But members of this group always seem to be grumbling about how they are treated unfairly. I have been accused of “humiliating” someone by asking a routine follow-up question to a report they gave to a meeting. They have a group chat where they complain about myself and my higher-ups being cruel and inhumane because we ask them to arrive at the office by 8 a.m. (a standard expectation in our field), correct their mistakes, and suggest that they take on new challenges. I’m “mean” because I ask them to redo work that is below par. They talk constantly of quitting.
Sometimes they complain to management, but more often they complain to each other, and the venting turns into an echo chamber of toxicity that drags morale. We are paid very well for our industry, but they frequently complain they aren’t being paid enough. Because I have no power to give them money, I often ask what else I can do to make their jobs more fulfilling and help them to do their jobs well. They don’t know. What I’m seeing is that some of these people will simply not last in this organization unless they adapt to our culture, and may not have thriving careers in this industry at all.
Interestingly, the manager who submitted this letter notes that she herself is a millennial who spent years “being mocked and maligned for enjoying avocado toast” and, as a result, is averse to generational generalizations. She’s not the only one noticing this trend, though. Here’s what other people have written to me:
“I’ve been hiring and supervising new college graduates for over a decade now. The difference in expectations, support needs, and coachability between the new grads I hired in 2015 and the ones I’m hiring now is massive, primarily around ability (or even attempt) to problem-solve, level of instruction required to complete basic tasks, expectation of compensation and flexibility regardless of business needs, oversharing, and unreasonable expectations about accommodations.
Previously, I could do a training and provide a handout with a high-level checklist detailing where to go to get specific information. They could use the info, do some internet searching, look at prior examples, and draft documents and a plan. Now I have to provide step-by-step details for each specific jurisdiction, provide them links to exemplar documents, and very closely QC their work.”
“A junior colleague at my place of work was given some (fair, reasonable) feedback by one of the directors and responded that she would 'rather you didn’t give me that feedback'—not something we’d heard before! It’s not every single member of the entire cohort all the time, but it’s distinctive to this group.”
“I hire a lot of college students and recent grads. I’ve noticed a subtle shift in work habits that the pandemic has magnified—mainly around work experience and professional norms. I’ve noticed that those in the younger generation are much more vocal about their needs, which I applaud them for, but sometimes they need a reality check on what is reasonable to expect or ask for. I’ve also noticed a decline in work experience as a teen/young adult. For full-time roles, I’ve stopped accepting people for interviews if they don’t have some type of experience outside of the classroom.”
“Students who went through college during COVID didn’t learn the coping skills that other students learn, and they were not held to the same standards.
I’m a college instructor, and this year has been OK. The last two years before this were really rough. The students were unprepared in so many nonacademic ways: how to ask for help without crying, how to take no for an answer, how to manage life when you don’t get your way, how to handle mistakes and learn from them without falling apart.
I do think that young people are learning the things they missed and catching up; they’re just getting there a little later than they would have if it hadn’t been for COVID. The students I have this semester have been pretty great, and they also went through years of COVID. It may just take everyone time.”
On top of the disadvantages the pandemic subjected members of this generation to during their high school and college years, the widespread increase in remote work may be compounding the problem. Entry-level hires traditionally have learned a ton simply by being around more experienced colleagues, where they could overhear how a senior colleague handled a difficult client or interviewed a source, and where they would receive real-time reactions if they grumbled about something not grumble-worthy. Because of remote work, new grads are missing out on much of the education that transpires naturally from sharing physical space with more-seasoned co-workers.
To be fair, though, even before the move to remote work, companies didn’t always do a great job of teaching professional norms to early-career hires. There have always been junior employees who struggle to figure out professionalism and what is and isn’t reasonable to expect from a job, who annoy a lot of colleagues on their way to professional maturity, and who would benefit from more-structured mentorships and training on how to operate in an office. But the effects of that experience sure aren’t mitigated when they end up isolated in their first jobs either.
It’s far from Gen Z’s fault that it’s facing these challenges. But employers must be realistic about instituting strategies to make up for those gaps. For example, they should facilitate formal mentorships and be more deliberate about pairing up junior employees with more-senior colleagues on work projects to broaden the variety of perspectives they’re exposed to. In prior years, it might have been easier for companies to get away without proactively doing that work—since it tended to happen organically when people were in the same physical space. But if enough people are remote, informal mentorship won’t happen by osmosis, so companies need to intentionally create more structures for it.
To be clear, I say all this as a huge proponent of remote work, and as someone who has seen far too many people ordered back to the office for “collaboration,” only to spend their days sitting in empty rooms on Zoom calls with co-workers across the country. But although there are many, many reasons to cheer for remote work, we need to be honest about the very real drawbacks it presents for people new to their careers. This problem can be solved, but it requires companies to be deliberate about addressing it.
