Starting a career has increasingly felt like a right of passage for Gen Z and Millennial workers struggling to adapt to the working week and stand out to their new bosses.
But it looks like those bosses aren’t doing much in return to help their young staffers adjust to corporate life, and it could be having major effects on their company’s output.
Research by the London School of Economics and Protiviti found that friction in the workplace was causing a worrying productivity chasm between bosses and their employees, and it was by far the worst for Gen Z and Millennial workers.
The survey of nearly 1,500 U.K. and U.S. office workers found that a quarter of employees self-reported low productivity in the workplace. More than a third of Gen Z employees reported low productivity, while 30% of Millennials described themselves as unproductive.
Millennials finally realized that working for soulless corporations is a necessary evil for many of them and shouldn’t rule their lives. Then they passed that news on to Gen Z. The Boomers who thought they had to put their entire lives into working 40 hours a week for shit wages in order to increase shareholder profits don’t get it, especially when they were able to do things like buy houses on their salaries.
Yeah man my boomer dad gets a fucking pension! Blows my mind, except it doesn’t because he was in a great union. I actually remember being on vacation once when they were doing contract negotiations and my dad calling his buddy each night to see if there was news. Kind of put a damper on the vacation but he only has that pension because he was in a union who was willing to strike.
What my boomer dad doesn’t get is that so much of corporate enterprise, like even the thing they are ideally making or doing in the world, not just the working conditions or profit sharing, is not unquestionably good for us. He’s an engineer from a time when it looked like technology would save the world. My zoomer kid feels conflicted just starting a hobby thinking of the consumption and waste it requires. If they could believe the companies they work for shared their values I think it would go a long way, but i don’t see that happening very quickly.
If they believed that these companies shared their values, they would be believing in a lie. The sad truth is that corporate america doesn’t share their values, nor their ethics.
Our options are to either submit and slave away to capitalistic greed, or find alternative sources of income.
I like the first half but reaching an agreement with your employer for your labor doesn’t have to be slavery, there is a balance that can be struck
And then came the mass layoffs, and everybody that came after that knew that long term loyalty was gone. Long term promises and careers didn’t mean anything.
Then the budget for raises dried up suddenly, and the only way to get more wage was to change company. Any short term loyalty was gone, and putting in the hours for something that wouldn’t come by the end of the year is now considered foolish. A career was a sequence of hops.
These are the kids that grew up seeing how this works and what it did to their parents. Now companies are shocked these kids don’t want to play the same game.
These are the kids that grew up seeing how this works and what it did to their parents.
I was half-raised by my retired grandparents because my parents worked so hard. I have done everything I could to spend as much time with my daughter as possible. Which means not bothering with extra job shit.
Speak for yourself but I’m Gen X and I’m gonna need to work till I die. No retirement unless you count hospice
Story of our generation.
Smallest generation bookended by two massive cohorts and yet we are expected to pay the brunt for everything because we are the “adults” as our parents get older and need care and our kids and grandkids need support.
All we want is to put our heads down, do our work and check out when it’s all done. All everyone else does is bitch about eachother.
FML.
right of passage
…
“They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m,’” Foster said of her younger colleagues in an interview with The Guardian.
Every single generation has thought this about the younger generation. Every single one.
In this case, I think the whole issue is exacerbated by the fact that giving sincere effort at work is so clearly a mug’s game. It used to be that being disciplined about showing up and doing your job was difficult, but at least there was a reason to do it and develop the skill over time. Now? Unless you have some sort of unusual job where the management gives a shit about you, why would you?
Hard work gets rewarded with addition work. Im half assing for my own sanity. If I was paid enough to be comfortable things could be different.
I’m in the highest paying workplace for my field in the country and it’s still not worth putting in any extra effort.
Capital just fundamentally doesn’t understand that monetary incentive has an inverse relationship with performance and that you can’t hire 9 Women to have a baby in 1 month.
I was late to work last Friday, intentionally, because my cat fell asleep in my lap while I was eating breakfast. That moment meant more to me than making sure I was there in time, no matter what it may have impacted. Working to live, not living to work, is the rallying cry upper management needs to come to terms with.
Every single generation has thought this about the younger generation. Every single one.
I think you’re right. My guess is that as companies get greedier and work offers fewer and fewer benefits, people are less and less willing to work as hard as their parents did. Employers that don’t understand this are either genuinely ignorant or just pretending to be ignorant.
I sincerely doubt the idea that people are working less. I worked at a college with a lot of boomers. Great people, but I was radically more efficient than any one of them. The woman who had my job before (college print shop), would complain about the work load. I only really worked until lunch and caught up on every single thing I needed to do. Watched YouTube and coded the rest of the day. Helps that I had a boss that didn’t care as long as I was caught up.
Alas, the whole campus shut down last August.
I spent a over a year trying to get a promotion while an ex boss who’s team I left was secretly sandbagging me.
I got an offer elsewhere and suddenly leadership asked “what number would keep you”. That was exciting until they followed up that raises and promos were frozen so I’d have to wait indefinitely.
I left.
I did exactly the same thing early in my career.
- Yo I’m underpaid, can I have more money?
- No
- Yo I found another job, I’m leaving, here’s my notice
- Oh shit, what if we gave you more money?
- Definitely not, good luck tho
That happened to me many moons ago.
“Hey so I’ve been here a few years and I’ve learned a lot more and I’m much more productive in my role. I’ve also learned the business enough that I’ve applied the skills I brought with me to the point that that’s now less than 10% of my workload, having become so efficient with it that you haven’t had to fill the other opening you had for my role because I’m handling it all. What do you think my prospects would be for a raise or promotion?”
“Sorry, no budget for a raise this year beyond your 1.3% annual raise (in a year with 4% inflation). And sorry but we can’t promote you either. You don’t have the skills for the position above yours, and besides, if we promote you out of your role we’ll be too under staffed in it.”
“So hire someone, let me train them for my role while you train me for the role I could promote to?”
“Nah that’s too expensive and we wouldn’t likely get the performance from them that we get out of you. Great job by the way. But no, no promotion, no raise.”
“Do you think that might change next year? Or like…where do you see my role here in the future?”
“We’re really happy with the roles you’re in and feel you’re well suited to it. And we feel that your pay is in line with the work you’re doing, so just keep up the good work.”
…so they basically told me that they’d keep overworking me and that I could expect to never get a significant raise or promotion ever again.
Two months later I got a job offer doing less work, work that was much more in line with my skills and preferred work…and a 38% raise. When I gave my notice, immediately they wanted to make a counter offer. I said I’d hear them out but based on our last conversation I doubted they were going to be willing to retain me…but sure I’ll listen.
Their offer:
No raise.
I could work a shift of mandatory 9 hour days to make more money (OT was always unlimited and freely available so this was literally just taking away my choice to work OT and forcing me into it).
No promotion.
But they would also start training me to assist another guy in the office with his work. Basically I could work longer hours and have more responsibilities for the same pay.
…and they were surprised when I refused.
They even had the gall to tell me how they felt betrayed that I only gave them 2 weeks notice, rather than agreeing to stay on until they could find my replacement and I could train them. When I pointed out that they literally told me they weren’t hiring my replacement as long as I stayed their only response was that they would have if they knew I was going to leave.
I’m easily fooled into productivity with a median wage that adjusts with inflation and quantified growth goals.
Boomers would have expected their wages to go up above inflation. Not settle for keeping in line with it.
Right? Inflation raises are not raises. It’s saying you’re no better than last year.
It’s this actually something that can meaningfully be said of Gen Z / millennials, or it’s just “young people”.
I ask because millennials are not just starting their careers, millennials are in their 30s and 40s. I’ve been in my career more than a decade and I’m a millennial.
I’m also less productive now than before because I have too much to meaningfully accomplish it all, so I say no to a bunch of work but still end up working on random things an executive asks for instead of deep focused work that could really push the company forward. But if you don’t do what an exec wants you get fucked.
Oh my god haha. So relatable. And then they complain about progress on your core tasks for which they hired you. Eh, whenever that happens I point out to them that it’s not in my job description and that I did them a favor. Shuts them up most of the times about the part where I was hired for.
The survey of nearly 1,500 U.K. and U.S. office workers found that a quarter of employees self-reported low productivity in the workplace. More than a third of Gen Z employees reported low productivity, while 30% of millennials described themselves as unproductive.
“In a given week I maybe do fifteen minutes of real, actual work” - Peter Gibbons, 1999
All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
I’m Gen X, and I recall similar complaints about us from the Silent and Boomer generation employees as we were coming up. So, it just seems like more of the same, with the added benefit of more awareness of what’s happening.
I’m hoping with the rise of the internet, millennials break the cycle for Gen Z. There’s a lot more awareness now and Gen Z are pretty alright
I’m a millennial and I straight up consider Gen z the same as us.
I hope this doesn’t offend anyone if we’re like considered boomer af, but I just see the same social views and the same issues. The generational divide feels dead post Internet.
Coming up? I’m Millennial, and 43.
It’s just news shitting on a group and not realising who they are.
This has always been the case. Socrates talking about children “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
I don’t know about gen z, but it’s probably a similar story. Millennials are better behaved, better educated, more intelligent had less teen pregnancy and less violent crime than any recorded generation before them. The kids these days aren’t getting worse, the seem to be getting better.
Millennials are also more productive, especially productive relative to inflation adjusted cost. Productivity has been rising and real wages have been stagnant. Millennials make up the most productive part of the workforce right know. The prior generation are retiring and the younger are still junior/eduction.
