Here Comes Gen Z. Prepare for Your Values to Be Questioned

BY Angelica Frey | November 09, 2021

Is Generation Z here to save us–or shove the rest of us aside? Not long before the pandemic arrived, in an optimistic story headlined “Gen Z Are Going to Save Us All From Office Life,” the New York Times asked, “Could they be among the first to understand the proper role of work in life–and end up remaking work for everyone else?” Just two years later, though, the saviors have turned a little scary. In a widely noted piece headlined, “The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them,” employers said they were taken aback by “the new boldness in the way Gen Z dictates taste.”

While everyone was preoccupied with the pandemic, a new generation started making its mark on the world of work–and things are going to be different around here. Gen Z, typically defined as the 72 million people born between 1997 and 2012, will make up an estimated 27% of the global workforce by 2025. They’ll be joining preceding generations of colleagues–including the Millennials, Generation X, and the Baby Boomers–in a workforce where age diversity is the widest ever.

What’s unusual about Gen Z is the degree to which they see themselves as the ones who will course-correct what the previous generations have wrought. Where millennials had self-obsessed icons like the Lena Dunham character Hannah Horvath, Gen Z has the likes of real-life climate crusader Greta Thunberg.

Similar to other generations, though, Gen Z is the product of the world in which they grew up. Members of Gen Z were mostly too young to remember what life was like before 9/11, but old enough to internalize major upheavals including the Great Recession, the Trump Administration, climate change, and the pandemic. Their historical context is nonstop crisis.

What’s more, they’re the first fully digital native generation, which gives them unprecedented adaptability to new technology brought into any avenue of life. “Gen Zers are shaped by and encounter the world in a radically different way from those who know what life was like without the internet; they seamlessly blend their offline and online worlds,” according to a new book, Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age. “They have had to navigate this new digital world largely without the guidance of their elders, and so have learned how to make their way within this fast-moving digital environment on their own.” The ability to share information with blinding speed made activism more feasible on a large scale.

At the same time, however, the experience of Gen Z is 'often paradoxical, even contradictory,' observe Gen Z, Explained’s authors, a team of four academics who conducted extensive interviews with members of the generation. While “they have more ‘voice’ than ever before,” thanks to the internet and social media, “they also have a sense of diminished agency ‘in real life,’” which they attribute to the failure of the institutions and systems around them. “They’re often optimistic about their own generation but deeply pessimistic about the problems they have inherited,” the authors note, and see “little chance of owning a home or improving on their parents’ level of affluence.”

In the realm of work, they're looking for purpose, meaning, diversity and inclusion, and a sense that their employers are good corporate citizens. According to research by Deloitte, “while salary is the most important factor in deciding on a job, Generation Z values salary less than every other generation: If given the choice of accepting a better-paying but boring job versus work that was more interesting but didn’t pay as well, Gen Z was fairly evenly split over the choice.”

You’ll be hearing a lot more from them. “One area that I think majorly differentiates Gen Z from previous generations is their willingness to speak up and challenge the status quo–and the openness from other generations to listen,” Kate Beckman, executive manager of community and insights at the early-career platform RippleMatch, told From Day One. “This generation has a lot of ideas and they aren't afraid to share them, but there's a level of openness from other generations that I think will lead to more fruitful conversations.”

While millennials were often stereotyped as the original slackers, in practice their work ethic has been marked by an obsession that has led to widespread burnout, an object lesson that Gen Z is taking to heart. Among the other Gen Z characteristics that will bring change to the workplace:

Understanding What Being ‘Digital Native’ Means in Terms of Workplace Behavior

As the first generation raised entirely in the era of smartphones, with the internet available on all devices, Gen Z assumes boundless information and communication. “Disruption has been their life: for them, collaboration comes in all forms, shapes, and sizes,” said Hope Bailey, global head of solution advisory for SAP SuccessFactors, in a Quartz webinar on Gen Z management. “They're seeking collaboration across multiple platforms, and they view their work much more dynamically because of their built-in disruptions.”

Where millennials were seeking positive affirmation and reassurance about their doing the right thing, Gen Z has more confidence in its moral compass. “It is very much influenced by their social networks, as in, ‘I want to do the right thing but I am likely to be influenced by X,’” said Bailey. Their collaboration style implies the existence of multiple data sources. When you want that much input, you have to be able to collaborate across platforms. “In their pursuit of equity, their communication pattern is slightly different; the signals are a little subtler,” said Paul Rubenstein, chief people officer at the people-analytics platform Visier, in the Quartz webinar. “A like button might mean something different for different generations.”

Understanding Their Different Stance on Leadership

Their comfort with collaborative work shapes the attitude Gen Zers have about how leadership should be exercised. “The vast majority of the Gen-Zers we interviewed, when asked what kind of leadership they favored, said that they prefer leaders to be respectful, caring, and willing to take responsibility for the good of the group, and some cited skillful moderators of online sites as models,” write the authors of Gen Z, Explained. To them, top-down leadership feels like a relic from the industrial revolution at a time when digital work requires new techniques to harness the combined power of workers sitting in front of their screens, with their colleagues scattered across the world. The authors continued: “Tech startups and new family structures that are intentionally less hierarchical have provided some examples, but, as with their vision of a pluralistic society, their orientation to collaborative leadership will likely be another front in the Gen Zers’ social change battles that proves difficult, requiring considerable innovation and experimentation.”

Yet it remains to be seen what is the more powerful influence: their ethos or the technological context. “Each generation, from Baby Boomers to Gen X to Millennials to Gen Z,” said Beckman, “have been provided with new technologies that have fostered stronger collaboration. The invention of conference calls was likely a huge boost to the concept of collaboration at its time, and the generation that experienced that firsthand was likely branded as ‘more collaborative.’”

Going Beyond Monetary Benefits

While pay and benefits still provide powerful retention tools, Gen Z is looking for something more. “To retain Generation Z, you need to provide a workplace that allows them to thrive professionally and personally,” said Beckman, citing RippleMatch data. “Specifically, our data has shown that the Covid-era Gen Z professional highly values work-life balance and flexibility, as well as financial security and compensation.”

(Photo by Eva Katalin/iStock by Getty Images)

This goes hand in hand with their openness about mental health. “For post-millennials, mental health challenges are normal. They talk openly about them all the time: it is a mark of authenticity to talk about what is going on in your life,” reports Gen Z, Explained, adding that stating a mental-health diagnosis can be an integral mark of their identity. While this means that Gen Z values mental-health resources as part of their benefits packages, and might not shy away from asking for a mental-health day in a candid manner, their openness to mental-health challenges also comes with lack of confidence in the workplace.

For this reason, managers need to recognize and foster a growth mindset, one where feedback is seen as valuable, skills are presented as learnable, and making mistakes is part of the process. “Some companies have promoted a culture of experimentation, which includes safe-to-fail challenges, helping them exercise their strategic thinking,” as the University of California, Berkeley’s California Management Review reported.

Parsing Their Cynicism

Generation Z has faced unique challenges. They’re accustomed to living in uncertainty, having experienced two major upheavals in the past decade as they were coming of age (both the financial crisis and the pandemic), when they witnessed people losing their jobs and corporate managers struggling to adapt to the remote-work revolution. “These experiences make it easy for Gen Zers to be cynical and hard for them to believe that a corporation or company will operate ethically,” write Robin Paggi and Kat Clowes in their new book Managing Generation Z.

This distrust extends to national institutions, which largely fell short of people's expectations during both the financial crisis and the pandemic. “Employers should realize Gen Z workers will be on high alert for policies or programs that seem to benefit the workplace over its workers,” write the Managing Generation Z authors. “So, if you are looking for loyalty from Gen Zers, you will first have to prove your loyalty to them and frequently let them know where they stand.”

Gen Z might appear oblivious to the social norms that constitute workplace etiquette, but should that be a bad thing? “Ignoring social norms stems from the fact this generation is understandably questioning why things are the way they are,” said Beckman. “The traditional advice of ‘Go to college, get a job’ was turned on its head in the 2008 recession that they saw impacted their parents and older siblings, and then it happened once again to the oldest members of Generation Z with the onset of Covid-19. Gen Z ignores social norms because there hasn't been much upside to adhering to traditional social norms.”

Gen Z members are also more progressive and diverse, having witnessed that the traditional social norms have been laced with inequities and have benefitted certain groups more than others. “This is a generation that is seeking to leave the world a better place and improve upon the status quo, so it's not surprising they're choosing to question traditional norms and traditional definitions of what it means to be professional,” said Beckman.

Considering the Side Hustle 

A survey in 2020 by LendingTree reported that nearly 46% of Gen Zers ages 18 to 23 have a side hustle, while other surveys indicate that about three-fourths of 21-to-26-year-olds do freelance work on top of their full-time jobs. Much of the motivation for this extra work is financial, given that the growth in wages has lagged far behind the growth in worker productivity in recent years. Yet side hustles can also be a conduit to personal fulfillment. When they approach their day-job managers for approval of this work, their hope is that their employers will not push back.

“People have to grow, right?” said Rubenstein, speaking in his managerial role. “I can support your side gigs, but these are your accountabilities.” Side hustles can bring potential conflicts of interest regarding either competitors or intellectual property. Yet they can be enriching for the employee and the employer as well. “Companies should be excited about having employees that are multifaceted and can bring diverse perspectives into the workplace based on the activities they do outside of working hours,” said Beckman. “That said, if you’re a company that doesn't want to leave room for side gigs, own that and be upfront about it. It’s OK to stick to your identity, especially as Gen Z is not a monolith.”

Finding the Virtues in Generational Differences  

While Gen Z arrives with a challenge to the status quo, their older colleagues don’t need to take it personally, despite the ubiquitous “OK Boomer” meme, which implies that “the older generation misunderstands millennial and Gen Z culture and politics so fundamentally that years of condescension and misrepresentation have led to this pointedly terse rebuttal and rejection,” as Vox put it.

To gain some personal perspective, I consulted a Gen Z member among my From Day One colleagues. “Gen Z is like this because we have to be. Because of our unsustainable economy and environment, these crises have become existential,” said Mahmoud Khair-Eldin, a From Day One data marketing assistant and teaching fellow at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. “Gen Z can’t change this world alone, and we don’t have time to wait till Gen Z is the oldest generation to fix the problems of today.”

While appreciating generational differences is important, so too is resisting stereotypes when it comes to judging individuals, including some of the myths about older workers. The richness of thinking and experience that makes diverse companies more innovative can apply to generational differences as well. As the workforce gets more multi-generational, with people working well into their 60s alongside new college grads, managers should emphasize common goals. “By doing so,” reported Harvard Business Review, “both older and younger people can see themselves as part of the same team working toward the same outcome.”

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.


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Jenny Sucov | September 23, 2024

Is Talent Acquisition Equipped to Go Up Against the Global Labor Shortage?

For all the concern about AI taking over jobs, an equally pressing question has arisen: Who’ll fill the jobs that still call for human workers? A growing, global talent shortage presents a major threat to businesses across all sectors, countries, and continents. Energy companies don’t have enough green-skilled workers, professional services firms can’t find accountants, and manufacturers are struggling to fill roles on the shop floor.Despite the desperate need for workers, talent acquisition teams report being asked to cut costs and do more with less. Human resources may have moved into the C-suite as a strategic contributor, but not everyone in the department has a seat at the decision-making table. According to new research from the Josh Bersin Co., just 32% of talent acquisition leads feel that they’re strategic contributors to the business. Corporate plans change too quickly, they say, if there is a plan at all, and executives treat workforce planning as an afterthought. Right now, Labor Department statistics show overall job growth slowing more than expected, but employers need to take a long-term view. The problem, HR analyst Josh Bersin told From Day One, is that “workforce planning isn’t a very strategic process. It’s a once-a-year budget exercise. And when there’s a bad quarter, the company looks at the workforce and says, ‘Freeze the headcount over here, freeze the headcount over there.’”For some business leaders, hiring and firing are reflexes, not strategies. The cycle is so predictable that a 2023 story in the Harvard Business Review advised employees to assess their job security by checking their company’s quarterly filings. A bad quarter foreshadows layoffs.Companies can no longer afford to run their recruitment departments like e-commerce warehouses, Bersin argues. And unless leaders start taking it seriously, businesses won’t be able to outrun the talent shortage.Updating Antiquated Talent Acquisition ModelsThere are two types of TA departments, said Bersin: Operational and strategic. The former works like a fulfillment center. A requisition is opened, recruiters source candidates, conduct interviews, present options to managers, and complete the hire. “They’re operationally measured and operationally configured. They look at cost-of-hire, they look at channels and sources, they outsource a lot of stuff, and they design around scale,” Bersin said. The strategic TA team works differently. When someone wants to open a req, they ask questions: Who do you want to hire? What skills should they have? How will they contribute to the business? Is there someone internal who can fill the role? Could the responsibilities of this role be automated?HR analyst Josh Bersin (Photo courtesy of Josh Bersin Co.)If a talent acquisition team isn’t strategic, it’s not necessarily their fault, according to Gina Larson, an HR consultant with more than a decade of experience in HR and talent development. “It’s the direction of the business, the remit that they’re given, and the control that they have” that determines how strategic they can be, she said. “Most companies aren’t set up to invest time and energy into developing more diverse and non-traditional hires that would bring the company into the future.”When Bersin’s company surveyed business leaders about their views of TA, 55% of the respondents said they see the function as an integral part of the organization, but it appears they haven’t learned to treat it that way, and they continue to set the wrong expectations. Old habits die hard, it seems.If executives think recruiters are order-takers, then that’s what they’ll be, Larson said. “We all report to someone. Short-term results typically get the rewards. If you’re struggling for a while and you say, ‘Just trust me, we have long-term results coming,’ it’s hard. Everyone has a stakeholder, and I think there is the pressure of short-term results.”Operational teams are a vestige of an outdated philosophy that equates headcount with revenue, one that prioritizes cost-to-hire and time-to-hire above all else, Bersin said. Companies that run operational TA teams are typically ones that put the business–and its workers–at the mercy of market swings. “The financial pressures on companies these days are so quarterly-based,” Bersin said. “I think CEOs and CFOs have to deal with this very short-term mentality in their investor base. A lot of companies over-hire and then lay people off, and then over-hire and lay people off. What I call ‘enduring companies’ don’t think that way. They ignore those signals and think about long-term, sustainable growth.” When Bersin’s company asked TA leaders to identify the biggest barriers to becoming a strategic business partner, 36% said that shifting business priorities is obstacle No. 1.Talent Acquisition and the Future of BusinessIt seems that no industry is safe from the skills shortage. In the energy sector, imperatives to develop next-generation technologies mean companies need workers with green-energy skills, but seven in every eight workers globally have no green skills to speak of, according to research from LinkedIn. In 2023 the World Economic Forum declared the talent shortage “the next energy crisis.”Companies ranging from auto parts retailers to biotech companies blame financial-reporting problems on the lack of accountants, a shortage so severe that industry-regulating bodies are considering cutting certification requirements for the role. Meanwhile, consulting firm Korn Ferry estimates that the media and telecoms industry is on track to “hit a wall” with a shortage of 4.3 million workers by 2030, and manufacturing is forecasted to have 2.1 million empty jobs by then.Korn Ferry projects that, globally, the shortage of skilled workers will result in more than 85 million empty jobs by the end of the decade. Fifty-seven percent of respondents to the Bersin Co. survey said that it’s the skills shortage that will present the biggest challenge to the TA field in the next 12 months. Some companies are thinking strategically, however. Talent intelligence, as it’s situated in HR, is an increasingly influential discipline, Bersin said. That’s typically led by a data-wielding analyst who advises HR on where to look for the best candidates, what cities they live in, and which schools they graduate from, even the companies they work for. Some companies, like Aon, have invested in apprenticeship programs that train unskilled workers into highly skilled ones. PwC is trying to influence college curriculums to create more accountants. Talent acquisition just can’t afford to work on the sidelines, said Kumud Sharma, chief people officer at financial advisory firm Betterment. Her recruiters work cross-functionally, getting to know all parts of the business. Otherwise, how will they show candidates what the company can offer them?Sharma remembers when talent acquisition was its own entity outside of HR–working like a restaurant window. A hiring manager filled out a form requesting one engineer, and recruiting served up one engineer. But that doesn’t work anymore–because we know better, she said. “We’re not thinking of people as widgets anymore. We’re not thinking of people as products. We’re thinking of people as people now.” It’s this change in thinking that has changed the HR profession altogether.“For 30 years or so, we have been saying that people are the assets of the organization. Who’s bringing those assets in? Those assets are coming through talent acquisition,” said Sharma. “How can that not be a strategic function?”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, and Fast Company.(Featured photo by Izusek/iStock by Getty Images)

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | August 19, 2024