What's happening with Gen Z in the workplace?

I sighed. Really, Forbes? Another article about the flaws of Gen-Z? ‘3 Reasons Gen Z Is Getting Fired From The Workplace — A Psychologist Explains.’

But when a column topic falls into your lap, what’s a writer to do? And it’s not because I ‘lack motivation’.

At least the article’s author is a real psychologist, and he makes three claims. Why react, you may ask. Well, I want to know what the olds think of me.

The first is that we lack motivation, but that is not our fault. I agree with this, that our reluctance to work hard stems from direct knowledge of how our parents were mistreated by their employers, or in seeing it on a more macro level with the 2008 financial crisis, or in the pandemic and how poorly vital workers were being treated, just as we entered the workforce.

It’s nice to see that broadly, the science agrees with my lived experience, and harkens back to something I’ve mentioned a few times — why am I going to pull myself up by my bootstraps when people are rarely rewarded for it?

This section goes on to talk about the basics of what we want in an employer — cares about the world and its employees, and won’t exploit us. Anything else, an employer is getting what they pay for. I liked this line: “This perceived lack of motivation may be a form of self-preservation, a reluctance to pour themselves into a system that has not offered much stability in return.”

Next comes communication, specifically the premise that we are speaking ‘a different language’. We have plenty of interpersonal skills, we just have no evidence these legacy employers want to have their cake and eat it too, understanding everything and appealing to everyone. “Missing office face time at a crucial point in their career development” is a fair point, entering the workforce in 2020 as most of us did, and the author doesn’t trip into the same pitfall, pointing out how reluctant our employers often are to offer a middle ground.

I do feel the piece could go deeper here, which is a common failing of these legacy media outlets that try to ‘understand’ Gen-Z; meanwhile, we’re telling you what we want and need, and you’re acting like it isn’t all over the Internet all the time what we want and need.

Sidebar: Plenty of companies will always have open job postings to apply for to artificially inflate certain growth numbers, and will happily waste your time in an interview when they have no intention of hiring you. It JUST happened to me.

• Why is Gen Z finding old niches before new technologies