New Power Playbook
GenZ workers are getting fired in droves. Is it them, or us—or both?
The old corporate playbook for power and control isn’t working to retain GenZ talent—nor is it helping companies re-set for the future of work. Instead, employers might want to take a cue from the computer game Minecraft to kickstart a generational redesign of the workplace.
NEW YORK— GenZ is back in the news. (Mega-shock!)
No, it’s not another pollster’s guess at how 18-27 year-olds will be voting (some for the first time) in this year’s presidential election—now exactly two weeks away.
Instead, the most recent high-wattage spotlight on GenZ involves the workplace. You might have already heard about it— a recent, almost overlooked report that’s now gone viral, saying that 6 in 10 of more than 1,000 business leaders surveyed have already fired many of the GenZ employees they hired earlier this year.
Is it us, or them—or both? And given the tight labor market, can any organization really afford to let GenZ employees go?
People are still buzzing about it, and now Deloitte and other future of work consultants are citing it as being a big mistake. Across sectors, companies are beginning to accelerate their efforts to generationally re-design their workplaces. GenZ is expected to become 30% of the American work force by 2030—just six years from now, and employers, some of them still mired in cultural norms dating back to the ‘80s, now need to be speed-pitching GenZ—and not the other way around, experts say.
“Whether employers like it or not,” says Joy Taylor, the managing director of the business consulting firm, Alliant, “this generation is bringing a Blue Ocean lens to modern work culture, and it’s doing a huge disservice to run away from this now, rather than embrace and adapt.”
What’s Up?
We all know that GenZs and Millenials have been playing a significant role in pushing the boundaries of what is expected from employers over the last decade. So what’s bugging some employers now? According to this new survey by the career advisory firm, Intelligent.com, 75% of the more than 1,000 business leaders polled in late August found some or all of their recent GenZ hires to be “unsatisfactory”—and in a variety of ways, including behaviors that suggest they’re not used to working in a structured environment and are finding some company’s older-style work cultures difficult to navigate.
Half the business leaders surveyed by Intelligent (50%) also said the GenZ employees they fired “lacked motivation” and enthusiasm” and had “GenZ attitudes and expectations” that made them a bad fit for the job. Some 46% of those same company executives said those fired also were missing some of the soft skills expected in a traditional work environment—including how to research and dress appropriately.
And that’s not all. Despite GenZ’s reputed digital wizardry, 39% of survey respondents said most of those fired had exhibited poor communication skills— meaning, they were not very good at sending email (GenZ rarely sends email); are bad at public speaking (but highly talented at digital communication) and sometimes “too shy” when tasked with “in-person, client-facing” communication. (Most people fresh out of college and in their first jobs lack presentation experience and need training.)
But the upshot? One in six bosses said they “are hesitant” to hire college grads again, with one in seven bosses admitting they may avoid hiring any GenZers next year, altogether.
‘Huge Mistake’
Whoa. It’s no wonder this report went viral across TikTok and mainstream media platforms, and received a ton of GenZ and Millennial feedback—as well as responses from professional HR consultants. “It’s a huge mistake,” says Taylor, the managing director of Alliant. Since GenZers now outnumber Boomers in the workplace, “mastering intergenerational workflows and investing in employee training will be crucial to tackling the most anticipated business challenges in 2025, especially culture realignment.”
TikTokers also have been weighing in. Creator @justwaynecreative, who has 10.6 million likes and 340,000-plus followers on the app, works in an organization that hires recent graduates. He and other TikTokers generally agree that GenZ is unlike any other generation before it and needs more training. But some Millennials posting on the platform say they understand that GenZ’s values can be easily perceived as wanting too much, too soon.
“GenZers have a special idea of what is and what isn’t, and what should be and what shouldn’t be,” @justwaynecreative said. While older generations understand that work is not the place to fully express one’s authentic self, he said, GenZ doesn’t see it that way. While companies want to create inclusive spaces, older generations tend to see GenZers as “not yet contributing enough yet to the bottom line to merit the big voice they are demanding in those spaces,” he said, adding: “GenZ employees were in high school during the pandemic, so for them, their high school and college experiences were different—highly specialized, with educators and parents giving them everything they’d need to succeed during lockdown and beyond—so now, it’s hard for (GenZ hires) to be in a general work space when in the past, they’ve always had more specialized access to whatever they want.”
According to Ethan McCarty, the CEO of Integral, an employee experience agency here in New York, GenZers also aren’t yet fully ready, and may never be, to work for companies which fail to reimagine and realign their work cultures to enable a freer flow of communication.
Here’s one way to more fully understand what’s going on—how many businesses are starting to rethink their work cultures to help ease the disconnect between GenZers and the frustrations today’s business leaders are experiencing.
Gaming the System
With a nod to my wise colleague, Henry Timms, the author of New Power: How it’s changing the 21st century—and why you need to know, think of the difference between the two biggest computer games of all time—the block-based game Tetris, which exploded with the Gameboy craze of the 1990s and challenges individual players (mostly Boomers and Gen Xers) to arrange blocks that would fall down from the top of the screen and make them fit into neat regular lines—but which would never enable a player to beat the system—just only take orders. Minecraft, on the other hand (played mostly by GenZers and Millennials), is a game built from the bottom up with players around the world co-creating new worlds together, in social groups, block by block— allowing them to create their own systems, set their own rules and create their own tasks and projects.
Changing today’s corporate work cultures, for many executives, will very likely be akin to changing a top-down, hierarchal game of Tetris into something that works more like Minecraft, Timms says. Game metaphors aside, the goal many companies have now is to be able to re-build workplace culture into one which can help to mobilize the participatory energy of a group of employees by letting them help each other to set their own rules, create their own tasks to achieve common cause and deliver collaborative success. Building engagement is key. Minecraft is all about inspiring increased engagement in collaborative, autonomous, personalized and peer-driven experiences—which younger generations are now craving to make them feel they have more direct input into the way a company works, what it creates and why its work is important.
A 2023 Gartner survey of nearly 3,500 employees found that those who report being energized and excited about their work are 31% more likely to stay at their organization, and 31% are more likely to go above and beyond (discretionary effort) and contribute 15% more. Gartner says employee engagement has 3.8 times as much influence on reducing employee stress as does the location of where employees are able to work—and yet, only 19% of Chief Human Resource Officers also surveyed believe their managers know how to act on employees’ engagement feedback and requests.
"How people experience their everyday work—their feelings of involvement and enthusiasm—matters most,” says Rachel Botsman, the author of the 2017 best-seller, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart, and the host of the podcast, Rethink Moments, about how culturally significant ideas and events often change how we think.
Adds Timms, from a guest lecture he delivered to my grad students not so long ago: “In this changing world, business leaders will soon understand that they can build more successful work cultures if they no longer play Tetris in a Minecraft-inspired world.”
Amen.
Stay tuned.
Marcia Stepanek’s new book due out in 2025, The New Digital Divides (deGruyter), explores the organizational and cultural challenges facing business and new generations of workers during America’s ongoing, seismic, tech-driven shift reshaping the American workplace and the future of work.
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Hi Marcia, I really like the read and the gaming analogy. “A minecraft inspired world” is akin to build your own world. Powerful stuff. Looking forward to hearing and reading more about your new book.