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.
“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.
I’m Gen X, and I recall similar complaints about us from the Silent and Boomer generation employees as we were coming up. So, it just seems like more of the same, with the added benefit of more awareness of what’s happening.
I’m hoping with the rise of the internet, millennials break the cycle for Gen Z. There’s a lot more awareness now and Gen Z are pretty alright
Coming up? I’m Millennial, and 43.
It’s just news shitting on a group and not realising who they are.
If you’re born in January 1981 then you’re basically Gen X and therefore, a boomer. I bet you remember the first Gulf War.
This has always been the case. Socrates talking about children “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
I don’t know about gen z, but it’s probably a similar story. Millennials are better behaved, better educated, more intelligent had less teen pregnancy and less violent crime than any recorded generation before them. The kids these days aren’t getting worse, the seem to be getting better.
Millennials are also more productive, especially productive relative to inflation adjusted cost. Productivity has been rising and real wages have been stagnant. Millennials make up the most productive part of the workforce right know. The prior generation are retiring and the younger are still junior/eduction.