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.
Nope, this article focuses on just one side however it is and should be a two way mutually beneficial deal, like any successful relationship. Good managers understand their employees and work within business needs to make their people happy.
Relationship only goes as far as you being paid for your productivity. Yes there are different management styles and you are free to choose a job that has a management style that suits you better but bottom line is a job is under no obligation to cowtow to an employee, unless of course it is a union job.
Then they can enjoy a high turnover rate as the best of best seek employment elsewhere. I’ll never understand this thinking. How do you expect to get anything other than shit employees if you treat them anyway you want? You aren’t the only employeer on earth
Pay peanuts, get monkeys
Disagree - there is a degree into which the needs of a managers direct report should be taken into account. Ignoring these needs in full comes with the risk of turnover and productivity loss. It’s a balancing act between business and employee needs. Again you’re taking it the the extreme by saying an employer should kowtow to the employee when the reality is that it should be a good balance in an ideal scenario and not entirely in either direction. A balance leads to the best outcomes for both parties.
I think you’re both right. Employees are free to choose jobs they like, and employers are free to hire people they like, for the most part. In theory.
Of course, the economy isn’t in great shape, and hasn’t been for almost the entire adult lives of millennials, so it’s not like people really have much of a choice in practice. You work at Soulless Company A, or you work at Soulless Company B…or you starve. Individual job-seekers don’t control the job market.
Similarly, companies don’t have that much of a choice, either. They can’t just exclusively hire senior citizens. They don’t control the hiring pool. It is expensive to hire and train new employees, and infeasible to replace a large percentage of your workforce on a short time scale.
Anyway, if you have a corporate culture that is hostile to the majority of employees under 40, you’ve got a big culture problem. You can’t just dig in your heels and expect two entire generations to come around to your geriatric worldview.
You were doing fine until the last paragraph.
If you see the corporate culture you are in as hostile, leave and find another one if you can. Otherwise, adapt to the situation you are in instead of acting self-entitled.
He’s just saying these companies need to adapt their culture to fit the culture of younger generations or the companies will die with the boomers in a few years.
Culture changes over time, those that refuse to change get left behind, this has always been the way of the world
Personally I’m ok with a lot of companies failing and being replaced with healthier alternatives. In my mind we need to get back to the economy of thousands of smaller businesses rather than 15 mega corps owning everything on the planet.
Yes, I would encourage everyone to take as little shit from their job as possible. Frequent job-hopping has been the norm for millennials, because it’s typically the easiest way to increase your salary.
I think it’s more useful to think in terms of trends than in terms of individuals. This isn’t about one person or one company. One person can leave one company, no problem. Millions of people cannot leave thousands of companies. There’s nowhere else for that many people to go.
It seems more realistic for a small number of companies to adapt to a large number of individuals than vice-versa. If you have one unproductive employee, then they’re a bad employee. If you have hundreds or thousands of unproductive employees, then you are a bad employer.
With all the crap about job contracts, is everybody talking about union jobs or jobs not in the US? only one state in the US is not at-will employment and that is Montana. Yes, at-will states can have unions and employment contracts but contracts outside of unions are rare.
I am assuming at-will employment. But I don’t think unions change the dynamic in principle. They just shift the power balance away from employers. That’s great, but it doesn’t resolve the fundamental issue that there is NOT an abundance of choice.
That fact that you would use a word like kowtow to describe a company being willing to meet its employees halfway says a hell of a lot. This is why “nobody wants to work anymore.”
Who said anything about obligation?