If the mainstream media is any indication, the youngest generation of adults and the corporate workplace are already falling out of love with each other. What happened to all that enthusiasm about “hiring young talent”?
Gen Z workers are being “stereotyped as lazy” by some managers. Meanwhile, a group of Gen Z TikTokers (is there any other kind of TikToker?) are complaining online that the marketplace doesn’t acknowledge their worth. And when it does, it works them too hard.
@notkaityfuqua Like baby it’s not that simple🫠 #corporate #corporatelife #corporatetiktok #millennialsoftiktok #millennial #work #worktok #burnout #9to5 #worklife #jobtok #stress
♬ Monkeys Spinning Monkeys – Kevin MacLeod & Kevin The Monkey
I’m a member of Generation X, the first generation of young Americans officially designated as “slackers” in the workplace. (In fact, I think the term was originally coined on our behalf.)
That was back in the early to mid-1990s. Then, as now, generational norms and practices were changing in the workplace. In the early 1990s, most senior management positions were occupied by men (almost exclusively men, in those days) who had begun their adult lives in the late 1950s.
These were the so-called Silent Generation of men. They had been too young for service in World War II, and too old to be drafted for Vietnam. This was the generation that discovered Elvis, and settled down to marriage and family before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Think Richie Cunningham and Happy Days.
That crowd had faith in institutions. They were no-nonsense and reflexively suspicious of anyone under forty. That was a generation that had never been under forty, not even when they were in high school.
The Baby Boomers, meanwhile, were eager workaholics. They were the forty-somethings in middle management in the early 1990s.
The Baby Boomers had dabbled in rebellion in the 1960s. Then they took advantage of the 1980s economic boom, becoming the yuppies (Young Urban Professionals) of the Reagan era. Despite their early flirtation with the counterculture, most Baby Boomers trusted the system. After all, the system had functioned well for both them and their Greatest Generation parents.
@thenatashaann Why is the job market so bad? Let me tell you #unemployed #unemployed2023 #unemployment #unemployment2023 #jobmarket2023
Young Gen Xers, circa 1990, weren’t necessarily lazy. Almost all of us had worked through high school and college, to one degree or another. We were, however, stubbornly cynical of institutions and cagey by nature. We weren’t eager joiners.
And while we were willing to work, we were very much coin-operated. We weren’t enthusiastic about toiling for years at a low-level position in the hope of an eventual payoff. We knew how that often went. “Downsizing” was a corporate buzzword of the early 1990s. The old social contract was dead–or at least revised.
Therefore, we were regarded as “slackers”. But we weren’t slackers. We just had a different set of underlying assumptions and motivations.
Today the surviving members of the Silent Generation are in their eighties and nineties. They haven’t been in the workplace for years. The Baby Boomers are in their sixties and seventies. The Boomers are either recently retired, retiring, or soon to retire.
So that leaves Gen Xers at the top. How ironic. (Gen Xers have always loved irony.) The typical senior management position is now filled by a fifty-something Gen Xer, that “slacker” of 1990 or 1992.
And what is that Gen X senior manager doing? He or she is complaining about the youngest adults in the workplace, Generation Z. That’s ironic, too.
I’m sure some of the complaints about Generation Z are valid. Too many Zoomers are performatively sensitive, a quality that immediately irritates Gen Xers. Whatever else you might say about Generation X, we always had thick skin. I am quick to roll my eyes whenever a twentysomething publicly behaves like a wounded kitten on TikTok. In that regard, Gen Xers are as gruff as members of the Silent Generation were.
What will happen over the next thirty years is that Generation Z will adapt to the workplace in some ways, and the workplace will adapt to them in other aspects.
That’s what happened in the past, after all. Gen Xers who succeeded in organizational settings eventually learned to set aside some of their cynicism. On the other hand, there are a lot more Gen X women in management than was ever the case for Baby Boomers or the Silent Generation. In that way, the workplace largely adapted to Generation X, the generation of “girl power”.
Generational adaptation, then, is something that goes both ways. Thirty years from now, fiftysomething Gen Z managers will be grousing about those Gen Alpha employees, who strike them as lazy, indifferent to organizational norms, and downright incomprehensible at times. It could not be otherwise.
-ET
