“Increased expectation that work should have positive impact and meaning.“
The majority of Gen Z have little or no memory of what office culture was like before the COVID-19 pandemic. They did not have much opportunity to socialize or adapt, in light of the significant change in norms and the increase in remote work. Social activism, political polarization, and hyper-transparency have shaped Generation Z's attitudes amid widespread reckonings about culture and leadership.
While Generation Z does not have a monolithic perspective, they have a growing expectation that work should have positive impact and meaning, and that workplaces will adapt to the needs of the individual rather than the other way around.
To respond effectively, employers should be careful to distinguish between Gen Z's long-term expectations (such as greater responsibility for environmental impacts) and its peculiar adaptive difficulties (excessive sensitivity to criticism). Here's what to expect:
1. Generation Z is more socially conscious, and they expect organizations to respond to their demands: Although Generation Z is less experienced, it expects that leaders should respond enthusiastically to the ethical judgments and concerns they express.
This thirst for meaning focuses the business owner's core business and strategic decisions. For example, young employees may expect their company to refuse to work for certain clients or clients on ethical grounds.
Company leaders must understand that they can never meet the full set of beliefs held by a multigenerational workforce without conflict. One sound idea is to emphasize individual voice and participation in the democratic process. Encourage employees to have a personal life and be involved in their communities, rather than trying to impose values or control speech. Of course it is good to set some limits on employee behavior, but be clear about these limits before the crisis rather than after.
2. When Gen Z employees broadly align with Millennials on social issues, significant generational tension should be expected: While young people are sometimes described as progressive or “woke,” the reality is more complex. Overall, Generation Z continues to demonstrate strong bipartisanship on issues such as diversity, inclusion, and environmental responsibility, and they support more government intervention in social services.
Younger millennials agree with this view. Where compatibility is clearer, the two will be willing to bring generational tensions to the fore. With corporate leadership that is disproportionately white and male, struggles over power, opportunity, and inclusion are certain. This is not the time for companies to roll back DEI programs, but rather to make them more realistic and less legalistic. The goal of diversity is for an organization to benefit from a broader range of perspectives and more accurately reflect its customers and employees.
Older employees may view the emergence of a more diverse workforce as more likely to lead to conflict and inefficiency; 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. Providing employees with the skills to negotiate and resolve conflicts can help channel energy productively.
3. Generation Z are the first “digital natives,” and this will intensify the risks in the new dynamics of corporate transparency: It is impossible for older generations to understand the intuitive relationship between Generation Z and technology. The older Generation Z accessed social media in middle school. As the first members of Generation Z became teenagers, the emergence of a highly transparent environment began to undermine companies' traditional reliance on secrecy. More and more employees are leaking confidential information to the media in an attempt to open up internal company matters to wider comment and judgment.
While employers must now assume that confidentiality provisions are no longer secure or trustworthy, they must avoid an explicit commitment to “radical transparency.” Much research indicates that employees struggle when they are asked to do all the tasks in public, where performance and creativity are intertwined with the fear of failure.
In fact, employers need to build structures that invite Gen Z to learn, ask questions, and make mistakes outside of group scrutiny. Just as true freedom of expression requires meaningful privacy, psychological safety is required to protect 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 in Generation Z are increasing rapidly, especially among women. The National Institute of Mental Health has found that the prevalence of severe mental health problems among Generation Z is much higher than among older generations — 7.5%, compared to 2.7% for people over 50. Experts say the increases cannot be ruled out through cultural shifts that make it easier to detect such problems.
Generation Z has become accustomed to academic accommodation in the form of extra test time. Employers struggle to determine how best to respond to requests for more flexible working hours or unpaid leave, given that the law allows for negotiation of what is “reasonable.”
In fact, companies concerned about this unhealthy shift in the social contract between workers and employers have brought about this shift by pushing for increased insights into their workers and monitoring everything from sleep to internet time. More and more employers are becoming involved in health and wellness initiatives, and a recent Harvard Business Review article argued that managers should have the training necessary to provide cognitive behavioral therapy. This is all understandable, but it may inspire unsustainable expectations about the employer's responsibilities. Again, granting time off when needed can help, but clearly defining role expectations, emphasizing teamwork and accountability, and combining empathy with clear performance expectations.
Generation Z's fluid concept of authority and distrust of institutions puts its members on a public 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 of the key areas. Health organizations thrive on trust, collaboration, 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 business 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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