What do Generation Z employees want from the workplace?

Analysis: it turns out that the work attitudes we often attribute to Gen Z workers are widely shared across generations.

One of the most widely discussed ideas in the business press is that workers from different generations have substantially different ideas, values, motives and norms, and that organisations struggle as a result to adapt to generational changes. The crisis de jour is to understand what workers from Generation Z (those born between 1995 and 2012) want from employers - and what they are willing to do in the workplace.

It is widely believed that Gen Z workers value a combination of stable jobs and a healthy work-life balance. It is also often thought that these workers are lazy and are not committed to work. In other words, this generation is often portrayed as wanting a great deal from organisations, but not willing to do much to earn these rewards.

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This criticism workers from a certain generation is far from unique. On their arrival into the workforce, Generation X (born 1965-1980) workers were criticised as entitled and unmanageable. Millennials (born 1981-1995) were termed the Me-Me-Me generation. All of this suggests that once Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) have worked their way through the system, the bottom will fall out and organisations will be left with an entitled, lazy, and self-centered workforce that is impossible to manage.

As you might guess, these criticisms are not very realistic. For example, labour productivity has grown consistently in the EU over the last 30 years, something that would hardly be possible if a growing portion of the workforce was lazy and unmanageable. Rather than reflecting shortcomings of younger workers, these criticisms of Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z seem to reflect a long tradition of older people bashing the young.

The sentiment that young people today are not as good, hard-working and moral as their elders has been with us for thousands of years. The criticism of young Gen Z workers as not willing to work is no more credible than the claim on an Assyrian clay tablet (circa 2800 B.C.) that "Our Earth is degenerate in these later days…children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching." The old have been bashing the young since time immemorial, and we need to take this into account when reading criticisms of younger workers by older ones.

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Do Gen Z workers want different things than Baby Boomers, Millennials and Gen X? The best answer is both yes and no. Gen Z workers want some level of security in their jobs, and they also value a reasonable work-life balance, but Gen Z workers are not much different from any other workers in these regards.

To the extent that there are any real generational differences in their preferences and work-related values, these probably have more to do with life stage than with generations. For example, Gen Z workers will have grown up in societies with less rigid gender norms than their parents and the vast majority will have yet to become parents.

It is no surprise that these workers are likely to seek some balance between their work and non-work lives. At the same stage of their lives, Baby Boomers did not seem to show as much interest in work-life balance because that whole idea was at odds with general societal norms that kept Dad at the office and Mom at home.

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Most fundamentally, you should take almost everything you read about generational differences in the workplace with a grain of salt. Organisational researchers are increasingly critical of the whole idea of "generations". There is growing evidence that there is as much variability within generations as there is between generations in many work values and personality traits. On average, Gen Z workers might value work-life balance slightly more than workers from other eras, but there is tremendous variability within the Gen Z workforce, with some workers placing a very high value on work-life balance and others barely caring about this aspect of their lives.

There is also evidence that values, preferences, motivation and the like change over time. For example, differences between Gen Z and Baby Boomers as measured today might not hold up if measured again 10 years from now. The simple truth is that stereotypes about different generations in the workplace almost certainly exaggerate the real differences between Gen X, Gen Z and Gen Whatever.

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It is instructive to think about the way workers responded to Elon Muck's demand that Twitter/X employees work long hours at high intensity and that they accept the norm that only exceptional performance would be acceptable. Large numbers of employees accepted Musk’s offer of severance pay rather than working in that environment.

Is this a sign that Millennials or Gen Z workers are lazy? I suspect it is a sign that society has moved on from the deeply unhealthy idea that employees should put work ahead of everything else in their lives and drive themselves to exhaustion just to line some billionaire’s pockets. The work attitudes we often attribute to Gen Z workers are widely shared across generations. Instead of criticising Gen Z workers for wanting some sensible balance between work and life, older workers should be asking themselves why they had not thought of making similar demands of their employers when they were younger.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ

What do Generation Z employees want from the workplace?

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