To find managing gen z a massive headache

[Managinggenzoclock]

I’m a millennial and I manage a team of people. Some of them are gen z. It may be individual personalities but these are the things winding me up.. please excuse this rant. Is it just me? I manage people from late teens to early 60s. The younger group are by far the hardest work.

• Very interested in career progression and pay (not a bad thing but see below)
• at the same time not being willing to ever (I’m not talking often) work more hours or support a colleague
• not willing to recognise that anyone knows more than them, even those with decades more experience
• resisting hierarchical management structures
• making lots of mistakes (including repeated over and over) but not have the humility of inexperience/ youth which would make this much less annoying
• trying to patronisingly ‘educate’ people on contentious issues in inappropriate ways.

I think maybe I’m being too nice.

I think you're in danger of typecasting people from a whole group. It's never going to be the case that everyone, or even the majority are a certain way. It's like saying all older people are cantankerous gits, or people over 60 all have walking sticks & a cat.
Young people have a lot to offer, & life is often difficult particularly for young people, they deserve a break

You’re absolutely right. Apparently it’s current unemployment that’s at 1974 levels. Apologies.

So are we getting a hell of a shock, or have we already had one?

they are totally unable to think for themselves, easier to ask questions than to work anything out or think for themselves, resulting in them becoming a total pain in the ars@ to train

maybe that is a product of the teaching to the test model in schools these days

I have to say I never quite understand the attitude that you should hours trying to work something out, when someone else could tell you the answer in 5 minutes. It's hardly efficient.

Training is not just how to do things but why you do things. Understanding the why helps the employee to use their brain to apply the principle to a similar but not totally identical situation and work out the answers for themselves. It is the working out of the answer that reinforces the training.

What is frustrating to a trainer is having explained the 'how' and 'why' many times to have the question asked repeatedly in an identical situation and for more experienced employees to not be able to work out the 'how' in a different but similar situation since they should know the 'why' by then.

From the trainer's perspective, training is not efficient because they or others can do the same job faster and more accurately. But the trainer invests time and effort in the hope the employee picks it up and can work independently. If that same employee keeps asking the same stupid how question, it is a waste of everybody's time.

Teaching to the test has a lot to answer for.

So all of the things that millennials were said to be ten years ago, then...

No, not at all. Many of them are dangerous/ useful idiots. You’d think they didn’t have important things to protest, like school and university closures. I blame the parents! 😁

I think this rather amusingly sums up intergenerational differences www.videoman.gr/en/186423

It crept up in the second half of the 70s I think and then went much higher in the 80s. If I've got my election campaigns right I think the Conservatives did a poster in the lead up to the 1979 election titled Labour isn't Working with a twisting queue of people approaching the job centre.

I put my hands up that I might have the wrong election, they become a bit of a blur after a few of them.

No, it was that one. Saatchi and Saatchi came up with the advert. Unemployment immediately shot up after the Tories were in power. Interesting to speculate how the 1983 election would have gone if Argentina hadn't invaded the Falklands the year before (and if the UK hadn't succeeded in driving them out again).

A lot of posters here sound like they work in unprofessional environments. I'm not sure why they would expect professionalism from their new recruits.

I said earlier on this thread that I think management and culture have a lot of this to answer to.

Posters are talking about updating training programmes. But why do these programmes exist? Who made them? A few years ago you would shadow a colleague and be taught by someone on the job, who had hands on experience.

Now a faceless person in HR spends a fortnight cobbling together a PowerPoint on things they don't understand, and suddenly all the new recruits are useless.

Working culture has become too bloated, with everyone chipping in and demanding more. There are so many rules to follow now, so much to document and too many people to answer to. It's hardly surprising that people new to the workforce are confused and demotivated.

Presumably you missed this, the cabin crew told her to put it there.

They said there was room further down , put it in there (my hand luggage’, which I did.

I'm not sure what this has to do with generations, but on busy flights where most people take hand luggage only, only priority boarding passengers can realistically expect a decent chance of the licker above their seat having space. Flight attendants always tell passengers to use any locker where there's space.

The space under the seat in front should be used for small hand luggage like handbags and small rucksacks used like handbags, and the lockers for the maximum dimension hand luggage (usually the trolley style hand luggage these days). There's no special etiquette preventing the people in the back row using their full hand luggage allowance (which won't fit under the seat).

Well never let it be said that ‘we’re not bringing kids up to be confident’ and that there ‘isn’t enough support for young people’… sounds like they all have too much!

I don’t know about other companies, in my firm recruitment and induction is done by us, the people who work with the grads and train them by sitting near them day in day out. HR aren’t involved in that. Maybe that’s why we don’t have the issues people are talking about, i don’t know. It’s still a good idea to have an induction process at the start

I came here to say exactly this. As a Gen X myself, I generally find myself bewildered by Millennials and find Gen Z a breath of fresh air by comparison.

Nail hit on the head right there.

In my latest job (I’m an ‘older’ millennial) the training bollocks I’ve had to go through is INSANE. We use a ridiculous work management system that’s a job in itself (when a few spreadsheets would do the job) and all the training has been via power points or videos.

As a millennial (!) I’m pretty self-starting and have picked up everything I need to do in the first few weeks just by observing and asking questions.

Its not Gen Z fault if they’re being treated this way.

I am so pleased to hear that I regularly bewilder people who are a few years older. I didn't realise they were so easily confused. World domination, here I come! One avocado at a time!

Exactly the kind of response I would have expected 😁

You certainly should expect it by now, we've been getting this crap since 2006. Sorry, but you've exhausted our repertoire along with our avocado supply.

They're your avocados?

It does amuse me that I make a general comment to someone else, yet you think I'm talking to you. I wasn't.

Yes, the greengrocer was Gen X so I successfully bewildered him and got the lot. The kicker is that I don't actually like avocados. But I distribute them to the rest of the millennial cabal. Mwa ha ha.

Newsflash: when you make a comment on a public forum, anyone can respond. If you want it to be private, take it to PM (clue is in the name). I was perfectly aware you weren't talking to me but I didn't realise you expected a private conversation on a public forum.

Who are the snowflakes again?