“A greater expectation that work will have positive impact and meaning.“
Most Gen Zers have little to no memory of what office culture was like before the COVID-19 pandemic. They haven’t had much opportunity to socialize or acclimatise, given the drastic change in norms and the increase in remote working. Social activism, political polarization and hyper-transparency have shaped Gen Z attitudes into a broad consciousness of culture and leadership.
While Gen Z does not have a monolithic perspective, they have a greater expectation that work has positive impact and meaning, and that workplaces adapt to an individual’s needs and not the other way around.
To respond effectively, employers should be careful to distinguish Gen Z’s long-term expectations (such as taking greater responsibility for environmental impacts) from their unique coping difficulties (hypersensitivity to criticism). Here’s what to expect:
1. Generation Z is more socially aware and expects institutions to respond to their demands: Although less knowledgeable, Gen Z predicts that leaders should and will respond enthusiastically to the ethical judgments and concerns they express.
This thirst for meaning focuses on the employer’s key business and strategic decisions. For example, young employees may expect their company to refuse to work for certain clients for ethical reasons.
Business leaders must understand that they will never be able to accommodate the full range of beliefs of a multigenerational workforce without conflict. One good idea is to emphasize individual voice and participation in the democratic process. Encourage employees to have personal lives and engage with their communities, rather than trying to impose values or control speech. Of course, it’s fine to impose some restrictions on employee conduct, but you need to be clear about these before, not after, a crisis.
2. When Gen Z employees broadly align with Millennials on social issues, significant intergenerational tensions should be expected: While young people are sometimes called progressive or “woke,” the reality is more complex. Overall, Generation Z still shows strong bipartisan alignment on issues like diversity, inclusion and environmental responsibility, and supports greater government intervention in social services.
Younger millennials agree. Where the alignment is clearest, the two will be ready to bring intergenerational tensions to the fore. Under disproportionately white and male corporate leadership, conflicts around power, opportunity, and inclusion are certain. Now is not the time for companies to abandon DEI programs, but rather to make them more authentic and less legalistic. The purpose of diversity is so that an organization can benefit from a broader range of perspectives and more accurately reflect both its customers and its employees.
Older employees may feel that the advent of a more diverse workforce could foster conflict and inefficiencies; younger employees may attack the willful blindness of those who defend the status quo. What is needed is a nuanced understanding of the focus on social identity and the misunderstandings it can create among the workforce. Equipping employees with the skills to negotiate and resolve conflicts can help channel energy productively.
3. Gen Zers are the first “digital natives” and this will intensify the risks in the new dynamics of corporate transparency: Gen Z’s intuitive relationship with technology is impossible for older generations to fully understand. The oldest members of Generation Z were accessing social media as early as middle school. As the first members of Gen Z began to become teenagers, the rise of a hyper-transparent environment began to undermine companies’ traditional reliance on confidentiality. More and more employees are leaking confidential information to the media in an attempt to expose the company’s internal issues to wider comment and judgment.
While employers must now assume that confidentiality provisions are no longer secure or reliable, they should avoid explicit commitments to “radical transparency”. Much research suggests that employees suffer when they have to perform all tasks in public, where performance and creativity are intertwined with the fear of failure.
Indeed, employers must build structures that invite Gen Z to learn, ask questions, and make mistakes outside of collective control. Just as true freedom of expression requires significant privacy, psychological safety is necessary to safeguard employees from falling prey to “call-out culture” in the workplace.
4. Generation Z suffers from high rates of anxiety and depression: Numerous studies show that anxiety, depression and suicide among Gen Z are rapidly increasing, particularly among women. The National Institute of Mental Health found a significantly higher prevalence of serious mental health problems among Gen Z compared to older generations: 7.5%, compared to 2.7% for people over 50. The increases, experts say, cannot be ignored by cultural changes that make it easier to disclose such problems.
Generation Z has become accustomed to academic accommodations in the form of additional time on tests. Employers are struggling to determine how to best respond to requests for more flexible working hours or unpaid leave, as the law allows negotiation over what is “reasonable.”
In fact, companies concerned about this unhealthy change in the social contract between workers and employers have provoked it by pushing for ever more in-depth information on their workers and monitoring everything from sleep to time spent online. More and more employers are getting involved in wellness initiatives, and a recent Harvard Business Review article argues that managers should have training in providing cognitive behavioral therapy. This is understandable, but it can raise unsustainable expectations regarding an employer’s responsibilities. Again, allowing time off when needed, but clearly defining role expectations, emphasizing teamwork and accountability, and combining empathy with clear performance expectations can help.
Gen Z’s fluid concept of power and distrust of institutions puts its members on an overall collision course with management. New approaches are needed in team management, diversity and inclusion training, mental health provision, and political and social positioning, to name a few key areas. Healthy businesses thrive on trust, cooperation, productivity and morale.
Alison Taylor is a clinical associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and executive director of Ethical Systems, where her research focuses on ethics and corporate responsibility. She is the author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2024).
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