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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I thought the other day when I received an email from a work contact that said, “Thanks for your email. I’m on leave until August 15th. For anything urgent, please email me.”
This was annoying. I had no idea what it meant to send a WA message to someone. Also, when I realized that WA was short for WhatsApp, I realized that even if I wanted to send the young sender a WA message, I couldn’t do so because she hadn’t included a phone number in her email.
This, I later said sarcastically to a friend, is the problem with young people at work.
They don’t have the slightest clue about basic office etiquette. Who includes a confusing abbreviation like “WA” in an out-of-office email? And why tell the world to WA you when only people who have your phone number can WA you?
Once I stopped ranting, my friend pointed out that the sender had actually been pretty sensible.
She had come up with a polite way of saying she was available for urgent work matters while she was on leave, but only if it was a client, a co-worker, or someone who knew her well enough to have her phone number, rather than some irritating random cold caller.
My friend was right, I was wrong. In fact, after receiving many calls from such irritating people after leaving a phone number in OOO messages, I am planning to adopt WA’s policy myself.
This is an example of one of the most irritating things about young people at work: they often turn out to be right.
I say this as someone who believes that generational differences can be greatly exaggerated. I also know how many managers have a hard time dealing with what they consider to be spoileddisconnected and difficult young workers.
But I have had to come to terms with the awful truth that people younger than me sometimes know more. This goes beyond their admirable, if skittish, preference for wide open spaces. cargo pants over tight jeans and long socks under shoes instead of the less comfortable ones —and seemingly outdated — invisible socks that fill my drawers.
It’s the youthful approach to “work-life balance,” a phrase I don’t recall uttering before the pandemic, that has really forced me to rethink.
I was reminded of this last week when I was telling a journalist I’ve known for decades about a stack of deadlines I’d accepted that threatened to ruin the next fortnight.
“Why don’t you just drop one of your commitments?” she asked. I looked at her, slightly surprised, as she added that that’s what someone younger would do.
She and I spent years working nights and weekends to keep up with breaking news or meet important deadlines. Everyone did it at one time. More recently, we’ve both heard younger colleagues announce that after working over the weekend, they would take two days off during the week, no matter what kind of news was happening. The first time this happened, my reaction was much the same as when I got OOO’s message: You’re kidding. I still think you shouldn’t sign up for a career with unavoidably long or unpredictable hours unless you’re prepared for it.
But I started working before email and smartphones kept me tied to work 24/7.
And as I’ve seen older people in various sectors burn out, get sick from stress, or simply become more tired and unproductive, I’ve become convinced of the need to make working hours sustainable.
The health benefits are clear. Working at least 55 hours a week caused 745,000 deaths from stroke and coronary heart disease in 2016, a 29 percent increase since 2000. UN data sample.
And long working hours aren’t necessarily good for business either.
Gallup investigation In June, only 6 percent of employees felt engaged in their jobs in Japan, where there is a whole word for death from overwork (karoshi).
That makes them some of the least engaged employees in the world, a ranking they have maintained. For yearswhich is worrying considering that employee engagement is linked to productivity and profitability.
Ultimately, what younger workers around the world are questioning is older workers’ acceptance of long, unhealthy working hours. Their disapproval may be shocking, even irritating, but it is certainly taking working life in the right direction.