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.

All these fancy names for different agges grouups but the same complaint has been going on since the beginning of time. Older people always think young adults are abominable

All the above levelled at my generation when we entered the workplace...You're just feeling old because they're young.

Sack them or get over yourself.

I have a nasty feeling boomer is in the process of becoming an insulting term used by younger people for an older person, regardless of when said older person was born.

Boomer started by meaning people born in the great Baby Boom that got under way at the end of World War II, for obvious reasons. The birth rate rose and then in the early 1960s when the pill arrived it started to fall. (I'm a boomer, by the skin of my teeth.)

Wikipedia tells me that some people refer to the period in the 1960s and 1970s when the fertility rate dropped as a baby bust, so you Generation Xers could have been known as busters. Think yourselves lucky.

You're not wrong...

I work in a global organisation - one of my colleagues is at a rough guess, mid 30s and the other is mid to late 20s. The latter is ok and seems to do her work fairly well but is a bit flakey.

At a recent work social event when we had new starters/joiners join us, she flicked her hair and said I'll be telling them "I'm X person, I know it all etc, follow me!" yet on the day she was anything but this person she wanted to portray!

I was told by the mid 30s colleague that the other colleague was 'unreliable' when I helped her out. And then today when I was off sick (I'm a contractor, temp) both colleagues refused or couldn't help me, zero effort.

I'm not sure if the younger colleague makes a lot of mistakes, as I don't think she'd be in her job if she did this!

The interesting thing is:

• a colleague who's a similar age to me - in her 40s recently left our organisation after 10 months, this colleague has won awards for being a PA, she was also covering maternity leave as well as doing her job.

• another colleague in her 40s or my age (51) has been there 5 years and 1 year as a PA and recently left.

I'm not sure and wouldn't ask if they were both fed up of the Gen Z's not pulling their weight etc.

I'm the sort of person who always offers to help out, if I have capacity, because that's the type of person I am. I've also worked as a legal sec for almost 10 years and they never have a quiet moment (constant work) so I know about job pressure!

We do however have a few graduates/new starters who are young or apprentices and although there are teething problems with them not attending college etc, we take this on board and cut them some slack. You couldn't be totally callous and not understand their issues, especially after Covid and lockdowns etc.

We've been there done that. You missed the 'ok boomer' trend from a few years ago.

Until very recently, it was millennials who got the piss taken out of them all the time. And 'millennials' are a very broad group.

As I always say, things ain't what they used to be - and they never were.

*Our fathers of old were robust, stout, and strong,
And kept open house, with good cheer all day long,
Which made their plump tenants rejoice in this song—
Oh! The Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!

But now we are dwindled to, what shall I name?
A sneaking poor race, half-begotten and tame,
Who sully the honours that once shone in fame.
Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,
And old English Roast Beef!*

(From a song by Henry Fielding, 1731)

Isn’t that all generations when they were young?

@Gingernaut your job sounds really tough and I'm sure I couldn't do it - but if younger people are looking at antisocial, gruelling shift patterns and thinking it's not worth it, then good for them - those roles should pay much better than they typically do to compensate for the work patterns, and if employers struggle to fill the roles they will have to increase the salary or close down. There's going to be a really uncomfortable shift in salary expectations for things like care work and shift work now that we're at nearly full employment. Young people without dependents and mortgages can afford to say 'no thanks' and I don't blame them for it at all.

Oh, trust me, we still do. Gen Z has been hiding behind us. But I think everyone older than we are has finally, finally, finally figured out how old we actually are, and we're no longer young enough to be bringing about the collapse of society.

Yes, and very often until recently people actually meant Gen Z. I'm glad people are finally recognising the difference! All this ranting about young immature millennials and I'm like...the oldest millennials are in their 40s!

It's not this...

I've had Gen Z'ers try to lecture me on veganism, try to say I'm a Daily Mail reader, threaten me subtly (soon stopped when I went to their manager and complained) and then quite a few like to pull the anxiety/autism etc card if things get too bad.

Of course, HR etc can't query anxiety/autism etc but suppose they're just being arses?! The vegan guy I worked with was quite vocal about it and he was nice in the end about it - but you really shouldn't be forcing your views onto other colleagues!

When I started work years ago, at 17, basically you learned things but you were pulled up pretty sharply if you made mistakes. I was bullied and belittled by a senior secretary in my second job who had a power trip and turned out was bullying the graduates/new starters further up the company too. Because it was me, I didn't really know how to handle her (and had been bullied at school too) so took all her shit from her. She was definitely more unpleasant than she needed to be, so much so that another secretary my age and another secretary who was older and had had her own company both took me to one side and told me "X person shouldn't be doing this to you". This was in late 80s/90s though and there was very little HR processes and bullying at work wasn't recognised then.

The other important thing about us Gen X’ers i think is that we did, on the whole, grow up with technology. So we don’t appear, usually, to be dinosaurs and sail under the radar. I was born in the early ‘70s. We had computers of sorts at home (spectrum anyone?) and games consoles, then PCs, laptops, tablets and portable media of all types. By the time we were teenagers, or at least at uni, we had email and then the various bulletin and chat boards, embryonic social media platforms, we had mobiles and texting. We grew up at the same time, and with, with the internet. Late ‘boomers’ and our generation invented pretty much most of the tech that is in our hands today - in fact, if anyone’s digital native, its us 😂It’s always nice reminding a millennial of that fact ;)

😂

See, I wasn't entitled and I think that's the difference (I was probably a little shit in many other ways, but not entitled). Actually everyone I knew worked like troopers - some of us had 2 jobs and worked 7 days a week. A really strong work ethic and spending any spare cash we had on further training or books or whatever was a very common thing as well. We certainly had our faults but being entitled wasn't one of them and I really feel like we all worked smart as well as hard. I do agree that we are seeing an overly entitled and less hard working generation now, who seem to need to be spoonfed a lot more.

I am a Boomer with a Millennial boss

i get the “Too difficult, not my problem, long outstanding jobs” as they know I will get it sorted and to a high standard

They also know I don’t take sh1t, stand my ground if I believe I am in the right but can discuss things in a professional manner

They know my limitations as to what I will, will not accept.

Works for me as they are a great boss who does not micro manage anyone in the team 👍👍👍

I think it’s a bit difficult to generalise but have observed some common characteristics with Gen Zers and agree with the OP. Whether it’s a bad thing or not, they are often very laidback and give the impression they haven’t quite understood the importance of what they are doing. There’s a sense they are rolling their eyeballs when you point out it’s important things are done a certain way. They’re either genius disrupters or a bit dense, it can be hard to tell. They have a lot more confidence than I ever had at their age and I don’t think their attitude is bad necessarily. Getting obsessed with work isn’t good. It’s just odd when they then expect progression.

No, I didn't miss it, but what I see now, not just on this thread, is people groping for a word to indicate 'you are old, out of touch, irrelevant and you have more things than me and it's not fair' and indicating all of that by calling someone 'boomer' even if they were actually born when the baby boom was a distant memory.

In a few years generation z will say exactly the same thing as OP about generation alpha. Nothing changes including ageism, it seems.

I do understand Gen Zs need for more money and progression though. I started work in 2017 on £17k. The same wage they paid in the 90s for the same position. Everyone is underpaid right now and it often doesn't seem worth it.

'Acting your wage' is what I believe they call it.

I'm generation X and there was and is not anything entitled about me, it's how people are bought up, how they are raised.

There's only so much you can leave at the demography door so to speak.

Each generation has good and bad, I love the young people I work with. Fresh, keen, really caring. I don't disagree that they have their faults - but so did we.
It's that each generation has different "faults" and different strengths.
And the times are different. They can navigate the new world better than we oldies can. What we need is tolerance and a willingness to learn from each other. The young people I work with have been great, (and generous with their time), in helping me. And they have asked for my help with stuff that I can do better than they can. It's fantastic!

Hilarious!! “Looks at is potato” 🤣👏

I am a Xennial (1984) and one of my Millennial work colleagues (1993) could never understand live and let live or everyone is entitled to their own opinion as long as it doesn’t affect work. She was always right about everything and could never be wrong. All this whilst claiming to be so grown up. I haven’t worked with her in a few years but I wonder if she has grown up now.

I'm Millennial & manage some Gen Z. I sympathise with your points but I also look at Gen Z and think they're getting a shit deal, economically.

Housing is stupidly expensive and the pay they are given is relatively worse than I got for the same job at their age.

Hours creep. When i started, a contract was 35 hours. More and more seem to be 40 hours now which is crap.

Employers don't invest in staff. My boss got budget for me to get some extra training on an IT system way back when. Its near impossible to get senior management to agree to it now.

They are saddled with far more student debt than I and peers were, at higher interest.

I wouldn't want to put extra hours in in their shoes either, they never bloody get rewarded for effort.