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.
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.