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.
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’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?
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.
New sun.
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.
deleted by creator
I think that’s a fair comment. I just got off a call with a vendor that has policies that don’t seem to be up to date. I asked them about them and the manager in question said she’ll ask her employees why they are doing something a certain way and it’s because a prior manager told them to do it that way 15 years ago. We used to call that tribal or anecdotal knowledge. It’s always an ineffective middle manager who can’t get out of their own way and “throws bodies” at a problem. I’m guessing if you get busy then your team gets burnt out. I’m not always convinced the higher ups are using technology well either.
Personally, I started a business that serves other companies. I’ve noticed that many potential clients want only a couple seat licenses for our software so they can keep the knowledge to themselves. I won’t sell these companies less than a dozen seats (small sales teams mostly) because I know the employee down the line needs the tool the most to be productive.
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.
Yeah same, and the whole song and dance with a shrink to get amph is just so disrespectful after everything
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. 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 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.
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.
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…
*rite of passage
My pay is barely enough to get by on, so I’m only going to do the bare minimum to get by at work.
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.
It is often said that the younger generation of workers, namely Gen Z and Millennials, are not as productive as their predecessors. However, the blame for this is often misplaced. It is not the fault of technology or lack of motivation that is crushing the productivity of these workers. Instead, it is their sense of self-entitlement that is causing the problem.
The rise of the internet and social media has led to a culture of instant gratification, where everyone wants everything now. This mindset has spilled over into the workplace, where younger workers feel entitled to promotions and recognition without putting in the necessary effort. They expect to be rewarded simply for showing up, rather than for producing quality work.
This sense of entitlement is not limited to promotions and recognition but extends to the work itself. Younger workers often feel that they are entitled to interesting and meaningful work, without having to do the grunt work that is necessary to get there. They are not willing to put in the time and effort required to develop the skills and experience necessary to take on more challenging work.
Furthermore, this sense of entitlement often leads to a lack of accountability. Instead of taking responsibility for their mistakes or shortcomings, younger workers are quick to blame others or make excuses. They do not see the value in learning from their failures and instead expect to be coddled and protected from any negative consequences.
To address this issue, younger workers need to understand that success is not handed to them on a silver platter. They must be willing to put in the necessary effort and take responsibility for their own success. Employers can also play a role by setting clear expectations and holding younger workers accountable for their actions. By doing so, we can help the younger generation of workers become more productive and successful.
Isn’t the entitlement on the part of the companies? You are not entitled to hard working staff. You make an offer: “give me 40 hours a week doing this thing and I’ll give you x salary” and people can accept or reject. If people reject that’s up to them. Unlucky, Mr Company.
And if you pay a low salary with very few benefits, you are not entitled to a loyal, hard working employee. In fact you get the employee who accepted your offer and it’s on you to make sure they meet their contractual obligations. If they do, you are not entitled to 100% or their effort or any overtime, sacrifices or anything else not written in the contract.
The fact that millenials and gen z aren’t as willing to stand and take this is a problem for the companies, not us. If you want better employees, treat them better. The days when you get undying loyalty for providing the bare minimum are gone.
And this is before we even look at, say, average salaries vs property prices for boomers vs millenials. Why aren’t we working as hard? Well what difference does it really make anyway?
Wow, 5 paragraphs, with an introduction paragraph and a conclusion paragraph. Looks like something I’d write in high school, except for the topic.
Did you remember to take your blood pressure meds this morning? Cherish them, kids these days can’t afford healthcare, lmao.
Another example of self-entitlement. Go ahead, keep proving my point.
Yeah but are you going to back your statements above up with data or are these just your feelings?
Shouldn’t you be asking that to the articles author?
No, you made a series of claims above without evidence. Let’s start with your claim that instant gratification has spilled into the workplace and is a cause for the problems as you see them.
Instead, it is their sense of self-entitlement that is causing the problem
Comments like this have always sounded so much more entitled to me than a worker expecting a paycheck. Boomers and C suites bitching about their employees’ desire to adequately support themselves on their wages doesn’t strike you as being just a little entitled?
I’ll bite …
crushing the productivity of these workers
What “crushing” of productivity are you delusionally on about?
https://assets.weforum.org/editor/HFNnYrqruqvI_-Skg2C7ZYjdcXp-6EsuSBkSyHpSbm0.png https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate/
I can find any number of sources showing that productivity has been on the rise for decades, and has continued to rise as Millenials and younger entered the job market. There is no “crushing the productivity”.
The rise of the internet and social media has led to a culture of instant gratification … This sense of entitlement
Millenials and younger have gone through their entire school life being told “you need to do well this year at school, to get into the top set next year, to get into a good university to get a good job”. We/they have been told this by every generation above them, for their entire lives. The have followed this, listened to their elders, worked hard through school, sat meaningless exams, gotten good meaningless grades, they have gone to university. They have worked hard their entire lives …
Just to be told, “culture of instant gratification” “you’re entitled” “you’ve not done the grunt work”. It’s selfish of the previous generations to not recognise this.
Your entire comment rings as “needs evidence” to me. To the point I’m not sure if it’s satire or not. You’ve failed to put in any grunt work, evidence anything or source it as anything more than conjecture.
They expect to be rewarded simply for showing up, rather than for producing quality work.
This is the opposite of how I see the world, as it stands. Look at the people calling for maintaining or increasing working hours. Look at the people calling to work in office. It’s the previous generations expecting people to turn up, in office and sit there for hours so they can be paid. They are expecting people to be rewarded simply for showing up.
Look at the people calling for unlimited holiday and reduced workhours, where failure to deliver is a disciplinary issue. Look at the people calling to work from home, and have the quality of their work assessed, not their dress sense or punctuality. Look at the people driving quick delivery, rapid review and peer appraisal of work. These are the people who are focussed on delivering quality, and not getting paid simply for showing up.
Look at the article this thread is based on before making such a stupid remark.
Nobody wants to work on their yelling at kids these days.
There’s no way you’re not trolling at this point.
Why would he even need to read the article, if his entire post is responding to your counter arguments? You’re already a step past the article.
deleted by creator
Yeah it doesn’t read at all like a normal interaction on here would. Checked their profile and sure enough half their posts are AI generated images. Trolls will troll.
Nope, I actually dislike chatgpt. Used it a few times in my community about BKFC though but stopped because of it’s hallucinations.
should’ve just admitted to chatgpt. That paragraph makes you look old and disconnected. You made a lot of assumptions about people you don’t know, and clearly don’t know the current age you’re in. It’s not entitlement or some need for instant gratification. People are actually getting less than they got when you started working. And generally a lot of jobs are also expecting more, especially now that computers allow for deeper, more analytical, and less empathetic tracking of employee activity.
I’m not going to admit to something I didn’t do. Are you nuts? Why should I??
It would look less embarrassing if you didn’t actually write it, that’s how bad it is.
Go on, criticize the writing instead of the content. That shows intelligence.
It’s overly wordy and bloviating to say little. Brevity and conciseness show intelligence. Typing paragraphs with absolutely no new ideas or analysis makes you look conceited and aloof.
It’s pretty bad when you type an essay and it reads like AI wrote it.
I mean, I already did. You just didn’t respond, Mr. Intelligence.
Boomers who bought their house for 20k working part time as kids complaining about the most debt ridden generations in existence.
Its almost like the spending power wages today are so much lower now than they were and therefore so is productivity.
But hey TVs are cheap even though essential goods like houses, food, and school are higher than ever, so fuck them kids right? Its a good thing boomers sacrificed good paying jobs for cheap imported junk.
Lol what? So many things have changed since the last two generations entered the labor force. None of which is their fault. First, older generations cashed in their kids futures for a second house and boat in Florida. Second, labor today is vastly different than it was 40 years ago. 80% of work today in the west is services not production. Add in the lose in union protections, and you have a whole generation working at Walmart and McDonald’s type jobs. Third, the purposefully crippling of education. Those in power knew education needed to be wage gated or made so expensive that no one could dig out from under it in order to force educated individuals to work for lower wages. I can go on and on, your take is uninformed. Gen Z and Millennials will change this because we suffered through it and it’s all a lie.
That post said one thing.
#ENTITLED
Found my dad
removed by mod
To address this issue, younger workers need to understand that success is not handed to them on a silver platter.
Ha, you mean the way boomers working a minimum wage job that could buy them a house and support 2.4 kids weren’t handed that on a silver platter?
Was thhe economy different then or do you just find thinking to be too hard sometimes?
Considering the minimum wage (in modern dollars) is about the same as it was in 1945 and now is 5 bucks lower than it was in the 70s, I’d say the economy was pretty different.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065466/real-nominal-value-minimum-wage-us/
yeah I can’t believe how much I was making as a teenager in terms of like number of eggs I could buy per hour.
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.
-
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
deleted by creator
yeah, thats pretty dark. maybe some anger issues ?
deleted by creator
I can’t even understand what you are trying to say. You must be a supervisor.
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?
removed by mod
What? Ridiculous. You want fair pay and non-arbitrary, non-shifting performance metrics? Cold day in h*ck when that happens!
Boomers would have expected their wages to go up above inflation. Not settle for keeping in line with it.
deleted by creator
Shit, mine don’t even keep up with inflation and they never have. I’m effectively being paid less and less year over year, and companies wonder why job hopping is so prevalent. It’s unreal!
Not just that. Even without getting better productivity grains should mean your wages go up on average above inflation.
