Why Gen Z struggles in the workforce
That the kids these days don’t know the value of hard work is a trope as old as the concept of youth itself. It’s mostly wrong – or at least outdated – reflecting the natural changes in attitudes that people experience as they age rather than any real degeneracy among the younger lot. In the case of Gen Z, however, something interesting, and concerning, is afoot.
Anecdotal evidence as Gen Z enters the workforce suggests that these emerging adults are struggling to interact productively with coworkers and clients alike in white-collar settings. Survey data back this up. According to a recent sample of 1,300 managers, one in eight has had to terminate a Gen Z employee after less than one week on the job.
And real-world evidence confirming this concept even further: Last month, global accounting giants Deloitte and PwC reported spending valuable time and money to give new recruits in Britain remedial lessons on in-person meetings and face-to-face presentations.
Psychological markers indicate that Gen Z’s outward workplace difficulties are matched by inner turmoil. Between 2005 and 2017, the year the oldest Zoomers turned 20, rates of anxiety and depression increased among American young adults by 63%. Now on the other side of a global pandemic that disrupted this cohort’s most formative years, more than half are reporting having experienced such distress.
To comprehend the underpreparedness and vulnerability of these new white-collar workers, it makes sense to study their last stop before the office: the college campus.
In 2018, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.” In it they argue that a cult of “safetyism” — a fundamental resistance to risk — has captured our universities. The coronavirus pandemic, striking 18 months after the book’s debut, confirmed and magnified its thesis. The universities were among the most zealous advocates for remote activities long after its necessity wore off.
In the 2022 spring semester — a year after vaccines became universally available — the University of California system still had most of its campuses in remote-only mode. By that point, the third academic year into the pandemic saga, norms had been degraded and performance expectations lowered. Simple actions like showing up to class and turning in assignments were suddenly optional. One department head at a public university in New York grumbled to me privately of not-so-subtle guidance from administrators to ease standards for both attendance and timely work submissions as late as the 2022 fall semester.
Pressure to wave laggards through the system means that an important signaling mechanism—both for the students themselves and for their prospective employers—has been distorted. Restrictions placed on Gen Z during the pandemic, and concessions granted to it, amplified the human tendencies toward sloth and conflict avoidance. Fearful of inflicting the trauma of real-world expectations on these students, university administrators, as Haidt and Lukianoff warned in “Coddling,” have actually set them up for failure as they enter the workforce.
Moreover, having been cloistered from interactive university experiences, Zoomers also lack resilience in the face of challenge. Haidt and Lukianoff identified three key safetyist falsehoods now dominant in the academy that have left Zoomers ill-equipped for the workplace. The first is that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; the second, that feelings are always to be trusted; and the third, that life is a battle between good people and evil people. Embracing these untruths, the authors contend, retards young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development.
New white-collar workers thus now bring with them corresponding safetyist pathologies that render them unable to cope with discomfiting ideas and unwilling to manage relationships through friction. Employers are left to sort out the mess, dealing with new hires that expect the corporate world to cater to their worries as their universities did so gratuitously. This skills deficit can often mean that new Gen Z employees find themselves out of jobs before they’ve even gotten their first paycheck.
The time has come for university administrators to once again demand accountability, to force a little discomfort, and to reintroduce a bit of risk to the college experience. Gen Z’s well-being — and that of our workplaces — counts on it.
Jordan McGillis is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
