By Kevin Briscoe, Director at Briscoe PR and a Bizpedia Southampton board member.
Whether you grew up in the 70s, 80s or 90s, the social influences of the time will undoubtedly have played a big part on making you the person you are today.
Whether the people that brought you up were 1960s flower power hippies, safety pin wielding punks from the 1970s, New Romantics and Loadsamoney fans from the 80s or were shaped by the booming 90s and the advent of New Labour – those people will have influenced the person you have become.
But if you now think about the people that you are employing for junior roles across your businesses the chances are they were born in the era of the Internet, the growth of social media and the importance of the smartphone – all of this happening in the past 25 years – and changing the way we live our lives significantly.
And it is not just the way that we work that has changed. It is the attitude to work that has changed – maybe for the better or maybe for the worse.
If you are a business owner or director who was raised in the 1970s or 1980s, the chances are that you are going have a very different outlook on working life when compared with someone brought up between 2010 and 2020.
If you finished at school in 1983 (as I did) and are now employing people who finished school in 2020, before heading off to university, there is a 37 year gap between you. Thirty seven years before I finished at school was 1946. I wouldn’t have expected in the 1980s to be held to the same working standards and systems of the end of the Second World War.
And yet, you can quite often hear people in business complaining that young people today are different in their attitudes to work and the way that they work. Well, thank goodness for that – if we were still doing everything the same way we did in the 80s, 90s or Noughties, then we wouldn’t be innovating or moving forward.
But what about the work ethic? Has that changed too? Is work simply seen as a job – a means to an end of being able to afford the next holiday or down time?
We spoke to some Gen Z employees of Bizpedia members to find out what they want from their working life, what motivates them and what success looks like.
Apprentice working in technology
“People’s relationship with work is different today when compared with what it may have been 20 or 30 years ago, and some people get that but some others don’t.
I can remember that my parents worked all the hours that were available, no doubt because they had to in order to make ends meet. But I think that today people have a very different relationship with work.
There is much more focus on enjoying the down time – spending time with friends, socialising, travelling and seeing the world which was something that was out of reach for a lot people in the 70s and 80s. But it is much more accessible now. Work is the means to the end of being able to enjoy that down time.
I think older generations are recognising that and learning from it too – there seems to be much more focus now on enjoying down time and avoiding burn out, and that is something that has been Gen Z-led in my view.”
Business networking membership employee
“This generation has a worse work ethic, I would say. However, saying that, I think there is a miscommunication at a younger age with people about how much work is required to progress a career.
The world of work is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. There is much more hard work and doing the sort of low-level stuff that you really don’t want to do in doing your job.
I do think some employers could be a bit more enlightened about the people that they are employing, but by the same token Gen Z need to adapt more to what is expected of them.
We have been taught from an early age that we can get by doing the bare minimum and I think that the answer to getting ahead is that you simply have to work harder. That is the harsh reality that a lot of people in my generation don’t want to face.
You either work hard or you are not going to progress.”
Apprentice working in marketing
“We communicate with everyone through our different social media channels, so for us it is usually much easier for us to send an email, or a WhatsApp message.
We would avoid picking up the phone and having a conversation with someone as much as possible, unless there was no other way we could contact them. We are just not used to speaking to people on the phone – and yet there is clearly an expectation that we should be from some people.
We are not the generation that speaks to parents, friends or relatives on the phone when it is easier to send a message through one of the social channels. I think communication generally has moved on much more now and this is the way people communicate – lots of people don’t even have a landline at home any more because they can communicate in many other ways.
It is also really important that Gen Z people enjoy their work and feel valued at work too. I hear terrible stories from my own parents of what it was like working for some people in the 80s and 90s – no-one is putting up with that sort of thing today. We are no longer working drones that stay in the same job for 10, 20 or 30 years. If we don’t like our job we will simply move on to something else – employers can no longer rely on the fear factor of the sack as a way of controlling and manipulating their teams.”
Conclusion
The young workforce of today brings enormous levels of creativity, lots of strengths and an understated desire to succeed. They are not the kids of the 80s or 90s, their approach to their working environment and working life is very different.
Trying to force Gen Z to do it the way we always did it will just drive them away from your business. If that is your approach, then maybe it is time to harness the strengths and learn from their values and ethics of the workforce of tomorrow.