Gen Z and millennial productivity is being crushed by bosses who don’t understand them, top university research says
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.
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.”
Speak for yourself but I'm Gen X and I'm gonna need to work till I die. No retirement unless you count hospice
Many Gen x were able to get while the getting was good. Cheap housing, cheap education, benefits, and a fat inheritance.
Obviously it didn’t apply to everyone.
Story of our generation.
Smallest generation bookended by two massive cohorts and yet we are expected to pay the brunt for everything because we are the "adults" as our parents get older and need care and our kids and grandkids need support.
All we want is to put our heads down, do our work and check out when it's all done. All everyone else does is bitch about eachother.
FML.
I fucking feel this in my DNA dude. Well said.
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?
Its a silent X
...
Every single generation has thought this about the younger generation. Every single one.
In this case, I think the whole issue is exacerbated by the fact that giving sincere effort at work is so clearly a mug's game. It used to be that being disciplined about showing up and doing your job was difficult, but at least there was a reason to do it and develop the skill over time. Now? Unless you have some sort of unusual job where the management gives a shit about you, why would you?
Hard work gets rewarded with addition work. Im half assing for my own sanity. If I was paid enough to be comfortable things could be different.
I'm in the highest paying workplace for my field in the country and it's still not worth putting in any extra effort.
Capital just fundamentally doesn't understand that monetary incentive has an inverse relationship with performance and that you can't hire 9 Women to have a baby in 1 month.
I was late to work last Friday, intentionally, because my cat fell asleep in my lap while I was eating breakfast. That moment meant more to me than making sure I was there in time, no matter what it may have impacted. Working to live, not living to work, is the rallying cry upper management needs to come to terms with.
I think you’re right. My guess is that as companies get greedier and work offers fewer and fewer benefits, people are less and less willing to work as hard as their parents did. Employers that don’t understand this are either genuinely ignorant or just pretending to be ignorant.
I sincerely doubt the idea that people are working less. I worked at a college with a lot of boomers. Great people, but I was radically more efficient than any one of them. The woman who had my job before (college print shop), would complain about the work load. I only really worked until lunch and caught up on every single thing I needed to do. Watched YouTube and coded the rest of the day. Helps that I had a boss that didn't care as long as I was caught up.
Alas, the whole campus shut down last August.
Strategic ignorance. You can exert more pressure on someone if you genuinely believe the crazy self-serving things you're telling them with a straight face.
I'm easily fooled into productivity with a median wage that adjusts with inflation and quantified growth goals.
Boomers would have expected their wages to go up above inflation. Not settle for keeping in line with it.
What? Ridiculous. You want fair pay and non-arbitrary, non-shifting performance metrics? Cold day in h*ck when that happens!
"In a given week I maybe do fifteen minutes of real, actual work" - Peter Gibbons, 1999
All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
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.
Yes, but also some fucking healthcare so I can get medication for ADD is necessary. I felt like a horrible human being for twenty five years for having a terrible work ethic. And then I went on meds and suddenly I'm productive and motivated. Made me realize I'm not a shitstain on the drawers of humanity, just someone who needs help regulating brain chemistry and is capable of great things when I get that help.
That gives me great empathy when people are crying about laziness. I suppose some folks are lazy, but I wonder how many of them wouldn't be if they could get help.
I'm actually off meds right now for various reasons (job change and related insurance fuckery) and I can't wait to be able to resume them because I'm a tenth of the person I can and want to be.
Ya when I'm not on my meds I can't even function like an adult and it fucking sucks.
Okay, as another person with adhd- THIS. but also maybe I shouldn't have to regulate my brain chemistry. What if we could just fucking be allowed to exist unproductively, what if we didn't have to take pharmaceutical grade meth to function normally? Why is that pressure there? Considered reasonable? Why is this acceptable? Gods it's unfair, and it makes me want to watch the world burn tbqh
I also have adhd and while I get where you are coming from and your experience may be different from mine but if I'm not on my meds I can't even keep up with my hobbies or have fun doing them. I love macro photography and I'm pretty good at it but if I'm not on my meds I just can't do it.
Yeah no dig at that, obviously these things should be available and destigmatized and while it's great these meds work for you- I was put on high-dose concerta against my consent as a teenager and suffered terrible side effects so I just wanted to explain my bias and offer these additional thoughts on this; it's not for everyone and it especially shouldn't be so quickly pushed as a solution when schoolchildren are disengaged or underperfoming. Moreover, consent is fucking important. I stayed up until 5am almost every night of 10th grade that shit was not normal or healthy.
On 100% your experience and feelings on it are valid and real. I personally think if kids are underpreforming in school then they should just make school better and more engaging.
Yeah. This was my realization about a year ago. Which prompted me to finally get tested. Apparently I am a pretty severe case too. I think she was very curious about a lot of aspects of my life and how they functioned. The answer was not good. Haven’t even attempted to date in 7 years a cause I can’t even function
Yeah same, and the whole song and dance with a shrink to get amph is just so disrespectful after everything
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.
What the hell does this even mean. How is starting a career considered a "rite of passage" when the average American works 50-60 hours a week between 2 or more jobs? A career in a single field is straight up considered as unattainable as buying a house is by Millennials (46% of whom own a house, compared to the average of 65% for other generations). Plus Millennials have been in the workforce for multiple decades now. We're in our 30s and 40s. And nobody has "struggled" to adapt to the work week since the 40 hour week was created after unions fought for the right to 2 days off a week. Children are indoctrinated to this cycle in kindergarten! And it's a lie anyways with the modern culture of bosses demanding people be available to call during nights and weekends. The average corporate work week was closer to 47 hours even 10 years ago. Do they mean working at a single company for more than 3 years? Because that's often a loss in pay compared to changing companies.
We're off to a bad start before even hitting the paywall...
The 50 to 60 hour week over multiple jobs does happen. However that is not the average nor the norm. Though I'm sure you were using it for effect more than an actual data-point.
According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, for 2023, the average American works 38.5 hours per week. If you drop part-time workers (<35 hrs / wk), a full-time worker does an average of 41.9 hours.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat23.htm
I forget where exactly the 50-60 hour average comes from, I wanna say the Census Bureau's reports from 2021, but it was specifically pointing out that the average American works part-time at several jobs now. But, yes, it was mostly for effect rather than accuracy, as full-time employment has been becoming less common as people are replaced by contractors.
They beat you at home and they beat you at school
Unemployment might be relatively low, but the job market It's kind of sucking for skilled labor.
Unskilled jobs don't pay enough to get the "American dream" Even beginner skilled jobs aren't footing the bills anymore.
Rent is through the roof, housing prices are immense. Food is inflated, wages are not. I've been working 60 hours as long as I can remember. It shouldn't need to be that way. Especially not for young adults in the workforce now, thinking about starting a family.
As far as the beef with managers The consensus here is not wrong. I'm a Gen x manager and it's honestly a fight. I've been doing the job for 30 years and probably for the first 20 of them shit didn't really change All that much. There was a good way and a bad way to do x. I'm inclined to ask you to do x and tell you to make sure you do it the good way. What I don't know is that 9 years ago someone went why the f*** is there a bad way to do x and they changed it now there's no bad way, but I sound like an idiot grandpa telling you to watch out for something that's no longer an issue.
Sure I try to do trench work as much as possible but I've got budgets, reviews, and planning meetings. The best I can do on an average day is to remember that I'm not an authority on everything anymore and rely on my team. Hey do x, I remember the last time I did x you had to make sure that y and z weren't an issue, that might not be the case anymore so please do x and use your best discretion if Y and Z are still a thing make sure that they are covered. Hopefully they give me feedback on y and z or I'll just be crazy grandpa again in another decade. Worst case, their best discretion was a wrong choice and they waste their time we all feel bad about it and the work has to be redone.
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.
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.
By the time these fucking boomers retire we'll be geriatric too :(
But with the lessons learned from a lifetime of hardship, perhaps we stand a chance of not continuing the cycle. We lived the struggle, the grind, the hustle. It's just up to us to not inflict it in turn.
"We'll be different" - Every generation ever.
These people do realize that boomers used to be the hippies, right?
The cool ones died or retired. What we have left are the cowards, hall monitors and people so boring that even though they can afford to retire they wouldn't know what to do with themselves so they keep working, keep being in charge, keep shitting up everything.
That's not true - a lot of them were also killed or incarcerated by the government through programs similar to Cointelpro. Especially those boomers who were people of color and were active in the Civil Rights Movement
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
Most people weren't hippies. They were called counterculture for a reason.
A good sign that this is what's gonna happen is if you look around our generation is the first generation that is trying to work with the next ones to do better which has never been the case before. There is a reason millennials and gen Z are always in the headlines together.
Millennial here. An old one at that. I'm proud of my generation and even more so of gen z. We got your back.
What I mean is that by the time it's our turn to lead the best decision will be that we're too old and we should let zoomers run the show lol
It will never be "our" turn to lead. Power isn't based on age, it's based on wealth.
The next generation of billionaires is no different from the last.
If they promise with their actions to stay woke, tolerant to all but the intolerant and respecting towards the planet i don't care who rules the world.
I think (most) millenials and gen z are in pretty good agreement with what policies we want for the future, though. So I'm not that worried.
My pay is barely enough to get by on, so I’m only going to do the bare minimum to get by at work.
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.
Research by economists should not be trusted in matters of employee well-being.
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...
I've been laid off 5 times since I started what was my career over a decade ago. After the second time I learned to always keep a second or third source of income, which meant I never had a day off or a vacation for years. After the 4th time I gave up on corporate jobs but still took a position when a friend offered it to me. This time I will not go back, thankfully my side work of being a handy person landed me a job in the solar industry somehow and the pay is even better than my senior position at the last "career" job.
Cool. What are you doing in solar?
New sun.
Honestly just the basic installer, I travel, which is paid for and put panels up and run wire on commercial sites. I also do residential installs but those pay less, but fill time between the commerical jobs.
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.
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.
Have no idea how what you just said can be response to this...
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, you did say this...
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...
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.
Are your co-workers the only people on the planet that have ever tried to shut down that kind of conversation?
Cannot conversations be expanded upon?
No need to be so literal, especially when I was responding generally, and trying to make you feel better.
No. This is a conversation, the person you replied to said something and that something meant a specific thing. Since I'm the person who said it, I know what that guy meant. I was talking about conversations I had in real life.
Even if I didn't mention that specifically or clearly enough, talking about a random thing never before brought up in the discussion is your leap.
They sure can. But since it's a conversation between at least two people, those two (or more) people should be on board with the expansion. Just forcing it into a conversation and ignoring what the others are telling you, is not a good way to have a conversation for a myriad of reasons.
Talking about something that doesn't make me feel bad in the first place (astroturfing in this case), and "fixing" it, has absolutely no chance of making me feel better. It's like putting a bandaid on my knee when it was my finger that was cut.
I'm aware of astroturfing, and can usually spot it in the wild. But online comments from other people hold much less weight for me than in person or at least personal conversations. So by default, astroturfing doesn't really affect me.
One person has to start the expansion though, it just doesn't manifest on its own.
One person's forcing is just another person's expanding, and shouldn't be responded to rudely.
So the content I got from your replies is basically a person is only allowed to respond exactly to what was said, cannot leverage from that and expand on it like any other normal conversation between people, cannot be helpful if the other person is not in need of it, and if they do so they're just plain 'wrong' for doing so.
You must be really fun at parties.
Sure, and like I already said, the others should be onboard with you. If however, like I did, push back against it and provide the reason for the push back, then it's bad form to keep pushing. You haven't even addressed the reason for the push back.
The first time is not forcing. Continually pushing and pushing is forcing.
Not anywhere near what I said. I said it doesn't make me feel better, and yet you persisted. That's not good behavior.
If you want to talk with someone rather than at them, then yes, you have to accept and adapt to what the other parties are telling either directly, through their actions, or even in hints. I'm telling you directly and that doesn't seem to work.
You prefer to talk at me rather than with me where only your desires and intentions matter. I don't see why you bother talking with anyone if that's what you do, because a wall is just as good as a conversation partner as one you don't listen to.
Yes actually. For one, I don't force the conversations after someone lets me know they're not interested in it. Tends to put people at ease when they feel that their boundaries are respected.
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.
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:
Boomers/Gen X:
It's almost like nobody is able to give 100% at all times.
if you have 30% and you give 30% you fucking gave 100%
I give 100% every week. About 10% on Monday, 20% on Tuesday…
I've seen that when I first started decades ago. The department I was working on was filled with more senior staff and I was the only one in the department under 30.
There was very little in intentional teaching during that time. I'm not talking about training classes, but even basic things. It was just try your hardest and get comments back on your work. There were also cases where it was easier and faster for me to do certain tasks on the computer, but they weren't used to that idea.
And so you've got a lot of bad teachers in the workforce that have been doing their job forever. And because there aren't that many Gen X, there weren't that many in the middle ground to teach new staff.
And I feel like some elder millennials are taking the generational trauma of shitty mentoring and carrying it forward like a rite of passage.
People who never got decent mentoring don't know what it looks like. It's rarely intentional, they just believe that's how it is in the business world.
Right, there's a weird amount of romanticization going on here, it seems like, about how things used to be. Or some sort of victimization need.
There's plenty of things that have gotten worse, like average wages, benefits, minimum education requirements, etc. But this doesn't seem like one of them.
*rite of passage
OMG. A headline that doesn't lay the blame on millennials and Gen Z?!
I guess it was only a matter time. Millennials are hitting their 40s now. Now we can start blaming whatever-comes-after-Z for everything!
The youngest Zoomers are still 12 or so. Gonna be a long time before we can start blaming Alphas for the death throes of the Boomers
I know right? I just don't care about these articles anymore, not that I ever really did. We're all experienced and effective in our own ways.
Exactly as every previous person experienced for at least fifty Years.
The oldest millennials are in their mid-40s. You're pointing at the same thing.
A: your millennial age fact is irrelevant as they were not in the work force at birth.
B: yes, that is what I posted. This is nothing new and in no way unique to millennials.
C: what was your point?
Ha yeah I'm old now how do I get a job? A career I mean.
ITT:
"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."
"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."
"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.
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.