It was long enough ago that it’s kind of a distant memory, but Millennials were persistently vilified by Boomers and Gen Xers as whiny weaklings from the moment they entered the workforce, even though they spent the entirety of their careers teaching their elders how to do basic tech tasks like opening a PDF.
So now that the core of the generation is in their late 30s and early 40s, they’re perhaps extra suspicious of the constant maligning of Gen Z as utterly unfit for the working world. The phrase “Ok, Boomer” was literally started by Millennials, after all. However, one Millennial boss seems to have arrived at a point where their understanding approach has only helped their Gen Z employees live up to the stereotypes about them.
“As a millennial who spent years being mocked and maligned for enjoying avocado toast, I’m averse to generational generalizations,” the 40-year-old manager wrote to workplace expert Alison Greenknown for her popular blog “Ask A Manager.”
“That said, I’m a manager in a large finance company struggling with how to motivate and manage our youngest employees,” they went on to say. Finance, of course, is a much more old-fashioned environment than many workplaces today — as the Millennial manager described it, “buttoned up, long-ish hours, high expectations.”
That’s simply the way finance is, and it is not going to change. But their Gen Z workers seem utterly unable to grasp this, and even worse, they seem to have succumbed to a kind of groupthink about how things should be different that has created some impossible standards for their bosses.
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To hear the manager tell it, they simply cannot do anything right by these Gen Z employees. They constantly complain about the 8 a.m. start time, which is standard in finance due to the schedule of the markets. They have accused the manager of “humiliating” them for asking follow-up questions about their presentations in meetings that they were unable to answer. The manager has been called “mean” for asking them to redo sub-standard work.
Most of the Gen Z employees started their careers during the pandemic, and the manager and their colleagues have tried to accommodate for the fact that their foundational workplace experience was working remotely. “Our company was quick to recognize that … they would be behind the curve in terms of professionalism and business norms, and we tried to adapt by providing more training and more support,” they wrote.
Still, five years later, nothing has gotten better, and they are so disgruntled that they have a group chat where they complain about management and even their pay, which the manager says is much higher than standard. “The venting turns into an echo chamber of toxicity that drags morale,” the manager wrote.
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I’m no Boomer, but it does often seem as though Gen Z doth protest too much. There’s no disputing that they’ve had a tougher row to hoe when it comes to the working world and the economy. But unless this manager is secretly withholding that they’re a diabolical villain, it doesn’t seem like their Gen Z employees really have anything to complain about.
In fact, it seems a lot more like their highly paid jobs are the kind of thing most Gen Zers would kill for. But nothing is quite so effective at convincing people that a good situation is a bad one as groupthink. Misery loves company, as the saying goes, especially now that our culture is dominated by social media, where negativity is often the only thing the algorithm cares about.
It’s hard not to wonder if this workplace group chat “echo chamber” has created a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy for these young workers. They’ve turned their highly paid job where they work under a management team that has done everything it can to accommodate them into the kind of downtrodden, victimizing slog of a job they constantly encounter in the zeitgeist.
The other problem, though, is what Green focused on in her response to the manager: Their Gen Z workers actually are being coddled, and it has to stop. Green suggested being direct and blunt with the young employees: The 8 a.m. start time is not going anywhere, you’re already highly paid and will not be getting more, and subpar work is going to get feedback and edits. That is simply the nature of work, and none of it is unreasonable.
Alongside that, Green suggested offering their workers opportunities to be further trained or mentored by more senior workers closer to their age — younger Millennials, basically — so that they can get a better feel for the place from someone they have common ground with. And if they still can’t deal with the rigors of the job, they can always find another one. That seems like a solid compromise, because sometimes what needs to change at work is the worker, not the job.
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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
