You can’t blame all workforce woes on Gen Z

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I had just left university and at the end of my first week of work when an older colleague took me aside, in the pub, inevitably. “You seem like a nice guy,” said this concerned veteran, who might have been 32 at the time, “but you give the impression that you are studying journalism, not practicing.”

He had a point, which I took to heart. But this exchange came back to me as I read the latest headlines about how eager today’s employers seem to be for their new hires.

Deloitte and PwC felt the need to give their younger UK staff additional training after their years in lockdowns came to an end and Covid restrictions had left them less adept at networking and speaking in meetings. reported the FT this month.

For those members of Generation Z who entered the workforce after the Covid-19 hit, “the pandemic turned their first jobs into a two-year video call,” worries a new report from Oliver Wyman and The News Movement, which paints an image of a separate person. cohort more interested in their sideline activities than their day jobs.

We are witnessing one of the periodic panics in the world of work that its newcomers will refuse to conform to the way things have been done. This time, that anxiety is heightened by a hunch that the pandemic years have so disrupted normal college experiences that a covid-scarred microgeneration is landing in workplaces without the usual social skills.

This fear is not consistently supported by polls: a recent study Conference Board Study found that job satisfaction for US workers has never been higher, while Oliver Wyman’s research found that Gen Z workers were more likely to thrive on the job than their elders.

Still, it’s driving many of the anxieties employers harbor about bringing people back to the offices where their Gen X and millennial managers began their careers. “Professional development happens in teachable moments among team members”, BlackRock told his staff last week to explain why they had to be in their offices at least four days a week.

Managers are right to debate how often their younger employees need to be at their desks as they try to strike a balance between flexibility and “teachable moments.” But they also need to think about what they’re doing for Gen Z employees once they’re in the office, and how often they get them out of the office.

Melissa Swift, a partner at consultancy Mercer, sees Gen Z as “caught in a mess between Covid and ChatGPT.” The pandemic left them “in the wild” as students and now artificial intelligence is revolutionizing much of the work early professionals once learned their trades with, she says.

That said, she sees that the unusual needs of this group clash with the fact that their managers are so burned out that they have little time to train the next generation, or even figure out what their work experience is like. In other words, you can’t blame all of this on Generation Z.

Companies have spent billions of dollars to improve the customer experience, says Tiffani Bova, global growth evangelist at Salesforce, but they haven’t made any comparable effort to improve the employee experience. Instead, their productivity drives have left young employees overburdened, while still promoting bosses to managerial roles with little training in skills like coaching.

So what should Gen X managers and millennials do to improve the work lives of Gen Z?

Wayne Berson, chief executive of accountants BDO USA, says his firm, like PwC and Deloitte, has rethought its approach to training. But he’s also mentored all of his recruits and talked to their leaders about building more camaraderie.

That can mean anything from getting teams to work in collaboration rooms to hosting a happy hour or dinner party, he says. Swift is also a proponent of happy hours, and she is encouraged by the restaurant clubs and sports leagues she sees training young employees.

Staff entertainment budgets have been slashed during the pandemic, but there is a case for subsidizing informal occasions where colleagues can learn from each other in an environment less forced than a training course. Much of what I learned about my trade and the places where I have practiced it, I did not learn at my desk but during afternoons, lunches and coffees with my colleagues.

Employers should also give managers and newcomers time to do this, understanding that time spent exchanging stories and advice is not stolen from the workday, but a vital part of it.

Not everyone is as comfortable in a pub as I was in my twenties, so if happy hour sounds like a recipe for unhappiness, at least take your new hires out for lunch. And as you share the insights gained throughout your long career, take a moment to ask what insights they have for you.

andrew.edgecliffe-johnson@ft.com