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
Idealistically, yes that would be great. Very few will ever achieve that though.
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.
Gen x: “we got ours but we didn’t know the truth until it was too late.”
I didn’t get mine but I was at least able to see the floor collapsing before it happened and adjust my life accordingly. I won’t have to work till the day that I die, but my home has wheels.
Nobody ever mentions Gen X in these articles/posts, I wonder why?
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.
All I need them to understand is to pay me a fair wage and don’t fucking talk to me on my days off and just let me do my job.
don’t forget hiring more people when the workload increases instead of just dropping it on an already overburdened team and then get shocked when they just quit
Better yet, hire more before the workload increases so you aren’t training newbies during crunch time.
Most of my career is showing how we could solve problems, being told not to because the morons above me don’t comprehend abstract, being thrown under the bus, finding ways to do what is needed anyways, and only after the fact, after proof is shown that it was the correct thing to do, getting some meager acknowledgement that perhaps I was right amd know what I’m doing.
But it still never causes these idiots to actually trust me the next time. It doesn’t seem to matter who is above me. If they are even slightly older than me, they don’t ever trust people like me.
I see this same thing happen to a lot of my peers my age and younger as well. The high quality individuals suffer because the world is full of idiotic managers.
Quite probably managers have ended up where to they are at due to the Peter Principle:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
They might have been great at their jobs at some point, and kept getting promoted until they couldn’t succeed any more.
This principle helps explain why any hierarchy will eventually be shit.
That happens all the time. But usually they don’t really want to give up the task that they were good at and end up a micromanager. Good management is hiring capable employees and clearing the deck so they can do their best with a minimum of BS and stress.
I think these last few years of geriatric rule is just going to be a lesson of what not to do for when we take control.
To summarize a long story, I (a millennial) put in a task request to a Gen Xer, including step by step instructions. I knew what to do, I just don’t have access to do it.
Xer told me that was the wrong service, it’s this other one, he can’t find the settings in the Other Service. We went back and forth a few times, he repeated I was wrong, until finally he showed me a screen capture from Other Service that showed “managed by service 1” that proved I was right in the first place.
If he were willingly to accept I might know what I’m talking about and looked at the instructions, it would have been done in minutes instead of dragging it out over 11 days.
Obviously this is a hand picked anecdote, but yeah, bosses and non- boss elders definitely get in the way of productivity.
I can’t make total generalizations about a generation but I’ve got a high schooler, and it’s amazing to me how their assignments are spoon fed to them. Every assignment is posted on Google classroom, the syllabi the teachers create are amazingly comprehensive, writing assignments are broken up into multiple milestones with separate deliveries for research, thesis, draft, etc. Then the grading rubric has very detailed instructions about how the assignment will be graded with hyperlinks to examples. Then the assignment is due at midnight the day after the last class session.
It’s no surprise to me that a kid would expect work to function the same way. What is so often missed is that the person assigning the task doesn’t know how to complete the task or what the process should be. We hire someone to help us figure it out.
So… Workplaces should do a better job of providing detail instructions? Cause I sure as shit could of used better instructions doing something the first time when I was getting out of high school.
If it’s a repeatable task, then yes. Documentation and good p&p are important. But sometimes a task requires creative problem solving skills and you need to learn to develop them somewhere. Other times it requires asking questions of someone who knows. In a small company if the instructions don’t exist then you should create them as you learn to help the person who replaces you.
Well that creative problem solving is going to come from experience, I just don’t like making sweeping generalizations of ones capabilities due to a lack of exposure. Too many times people in leadership positions either don’t want to teach or forget/take for granted what it was like to be new at something.
Honestly it depends on the job and your education or training. If you’re hired out of college as a consultant or an auditor then you’d better pick up quick. There’s a difference between bad training and being unwilling to be flexible. My initial comment was more about how a high school prepares you differently than before. I don’t think the content is different, if anything more advanced, but it seems like the system is created to accommodate only the most passive participant. Sometimes we have to step outside our comfort zone, but now I have one kid who thinks it’s rude to call someone without texting them to warn them first and another who refuses to confirm homework assignments with a friend if they are not posted to Google classroom. That is certainly a generational difference and not the result of bad training from an employer.
Well I think you’re starting to wander from the topic at hand but I think we can at the very least both agree that better documentation could be helpful getting into something new out of high school.
Call me crazy but the fact that no matter how hard a millennial or gen z person works: they still lack job security, most of their wages go in bills/rent, they often act as a carer in some capacity, and are generally not doing work related to their studies might also have something to do with it…
Research by economists should not be trusted in matters of employee well-being.
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.
Couldn’t this just mean gen x/boomers feel more productive? Doesn’t sound like it really speaks to the output of the employees
Definitely.
I suspect many genx/boomers don’t feel productive either - BS jobs don’t discriminate - but they have probably seen enough layoffs to know when they need to appear busy - when a reporter asks is one of those times…
Millennials/Gen Z:
- Uses computer to finish day’s tasks in 4 hours, browses internet for remaining 4.
- “Wow, I feel like a useless piece of shit.”
Boomers/Gen X:
- Spends 2 hours reading every single email in full as if they are addressed specifically to them, getting angry that people are telling them useless information. Spends an hour printing & collating papers for the day’s tasks. Spends 5 hours doing the tasks because paper is less efficient. Stays 1 hour extra for scanning/data entry when the whole thing could have been done on the computer in the first place.
- “Gee golly, I sure am swamped.”
bosses aren’t doing much in return to help their young staffers adjust to corporate life
I can’t recall when this was ever a thing. It has always been do or fail.
Depends on the boss. Some can be good and actually try to manage, but most tend to be lazy and not care much about working with their staff. Figuring out how to get the most out of your employees is part of every management training course I’ve ever seen, but a lot of managers/bosses tend to pick the things they like and not necessarily the things that work best for their employees.
I like that more and more of the kids these days are willing to settle for shitty stuff. Most of the people in my generation (+/- a generation) just deal with it and shut down anyone that thinks things can and should be better, and that sucks.
and shut down anyone that thinks things can and should be better, and that sucks.
I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but you should consider if the person you’re listening to is legit, or astroturfing, before weighing their words.
Corporations have a benefit to their bottom lines to shape narratives a certain way.
You mean like a corporation got some coworkers hired and doing actual work at the place I’m working at just to tell me I need to deal with my shit job? That seems a bit on the paranoid side.
I have a good job now.
You mean like a corporation got some coworkers hired and doing actual work at the place I’m working at just to tell me I need to deal with my shit job?
Have no idea how what you just said can be response to this…
and shut down anyone that thinks things can and should be better, and that sucks.
Corporations have a benefit to their bottom lines to shape narratives a certain way.
I’m talking about astroturfing comments on forums that are pushing back against positive change.
Yeah, I gathered what you were talking about. But you’re responding to me talking about me talking to coworkers. I get that I didn’t specifically say that, but I also don’t say anything about comments on forums.
but I also don’t say anything about comments on forums.
But, you did say this…
and shut down anyone that thinks things can and should be better, and that sucks
I read that sentence and thought that you were not happy about the fact that people want to shut down conversations about things that could be better.
My thought process was to try and cheer you up (“and that sucks”), by letting you know that you should realize it may not be just regular everyday people who don’t want things to improve, but actual astroturfers who don’t want things to improve, for their own personal benefit reasons.
And by saying that to you, you would realize that more people potentially think the way you do, want positive change conversations, and cheer you up a little bit.
So, my response to you…
I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but you should consider if the person you’re listening to is legit, or astroturfing, before weighing their words.
Corporations have a benefit to their bottom lines to shape narratives a certain way.
Yeah, get that. I get where you went wrong as described in my last post.
I am not happy with a lot of people in my generation wanting to shut the conversation down. Astroturfing doesn’t apply since the people that were doing it, were in person, face to face, coworkers. Not astroturfers.
What does make me feel better is that millennials and later seem to be more on board with me on this.
Right, and this has been true for hundreds(?) of years.
I think it ebbs and flows. My grandpa liked his job and didn’t put up with shit even if that meant losing his house. But he was still able to manage. We’re in the roaring twenties again, hopefully after the coming financial disaster we get another round of 40 or so years of a strong middle class before the neo boomer summer children fuck it up for everyone.
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*rite of passage
ITT:
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“I’m smarter than my boss that’s why I don’t care” “no you’re not, and yes you do.” “Yeah, actually, I am, and no, actually I don’t.” “‘Actually’ they don’t care, which is why you’re complaining about it. The only people that don’t care in this scenario are your boss and me.” “Nuh uh.” “Ya huh.”
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“This has happened before, it is always like this.” “No it’s not, we’re uniquely smart and capable and they’re particularly not and not.” “Ok, you’re brilliant but no one cares. That must be what’s happening.” “It is!” “It isn’t.”
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“The olds are so old and work culture is bad, we need better work culture.” “What does that look like?” “Doing things I care about when I want to and being paid a lucrative salary for it.” “That won’t work.” “Yes it will.” “Ok, but it won’t. Good luck.”
Sanded it down for you all. These threads were getting a little knotty and overgrown.
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Ha yeah I’m old now how do I get a job? A career I mean.
So far most of what I’ve seen is “want to stare at phone a day”, “can’t I work from home?”, “stopped working at the first excuse or (god forbid) difficulty”.
I can’t even understand what you are trying to say. You must be a supervisor.
