Should Corporate America Be Concerned About Gen Z Workers?

A survey from ResumeBuilder.com finds 74 percent of managers believe Gen Z workers (ages nine to 24) are more challenging to work with than other generations. A news.com.au article explored whether older workers “could do better” adjusting to Gen Z.

“Gen X and Baby Boomers are more traditional, conservative, and rule-following,” Roxanne Calder, a Sydney-based recruitment agency founder, told Australia’s news.com.au. “Gen Z challenges the status quo and way of thinking, which is much needed in a world so fast and ever-changing.”

A 2021 New York Times article noted that “twenty-somethings rolling their eyes at the habits of their elders is a longstanding trend” and questioned whether Gen Z represented a “new boldness” or just another generation facing skepticism as they enter the workforce.

Stanford University researcher Roberta Katz in an interview with Stanford News, said while Gen Z is often seen as “too coddled,” she describes the typical Gen Zer as a “self-driver who deeply cares about others, strives for a diverse community, is highly collaborative and social, values flexibility, relevance, authenticity and non-hierarchical leadership, and, while dismayed about inherited issues like climate change, has a pragmatic attitude about the work that has to be done to address those issues.”

“What Gen Z wants is to do meaningful work with a sense of autonomy and flexibility and work-life balance and work with people who work collaboratively,” Julie Lee, director of technology and mental health at Harvard Alumni for Mental Health, recently told the Washington Post. “During the time I entered the workforce, I didn’t feel empowered. I didn’t feel that I was able to ask for those things.”

Still, among the reasons managers in the ResumeBuilder.com survey found Gen Z difficult to work with were lack of technological skills, cited by 39 percent; lack of motivation, 37 percent; poor communication skills, 36 percent; and being easily offended, 35 percent.

“Gen Z are digital natives and they’ve always communicated online, so their interpersonal skills, or soft skills, have suffered,” Tara Salinas, a business ethics professor at San Diego University, recently told CNBC. “They took an even bigger hit because of Covid-19, and it has shifted the way that we need to interact with them in the workplace.”