Today: Gen Z career angst, which is No. 8 on Inc.’s list of the best stories of the year.
Every generation joins the workforce with some trepidation, but Gen-Z has had a particularly rough entry, graduating into Covid and everything since. This surprising assessment of the latest data on Gen-Z and careers reveals:
Why Gen-Z thinks of management roles as a “poisoned chalice”
Which supplementary jobs Gen-Z turn to off the clock to fulfill their interests
How Gen-Z attitudes about effort, work-life balance, and more could influence workplace cultures
Do you work with or manage Gen-Z employees? What’s your approach? I’d love to hear your story, and you can always email me at [email protected].
Is Gen-Z’s Commitment to Career Minimalism Hurting Your Business?
The latest workplace meme rekindles debate about how Gen-Z approaches the world of work.
BY KIT EATON
There’s plenty of evidence that Gen-Z workers think very differently about their jobs than their older colleagues, but a fresh report suggests that younger workers think the very idea of a career is alien. It concludes that the newest members of the workforce are quite uninterested in laboriously climbing the rungs of the traditional career ladder. Why? Because their side hustles — which often have nothing to do with their day jobs — are just as important to them, or are a bigger priority. Gen-Z’s thinking, Fortune says, embodies what’s called career minimalism, essentially keeping things clean and simple at the office, without extra frills, fuss and added responsibilities, like taking on a management role.
The report is based on the latest workforce survey carried out by Glassdoor, the San Francisco-based job discussion and recruitment site. It found that Gen-Z workers — people born between roughly 1997 and 2012 — really don’t like the notion of becoming a manager as part of their career progression. In fact, 68 percent said they’d avoid moving into a management role.
The subtlety here is that in July a different Glassdoor report suggested that Gen-Z wasn’t unbossing after all, (by avoiding management roles, for example) and were entering the workforce at a rate that matched their older peers’ habits, and at a pace that means about one in every 10 managers will come from Gen-Z person by the end of this year.
Fortune suggests the new data says that while the draw of a management position still resonates for Gen-Z employees in some sense, it’s not seen as a normal next step, and is only interesting to younger workers if it brings significant perks like titles and extra pay. The Glassdoor data essentially suggest that Gen-Z sees taking on a management role as a poisoned chalice, not an automatic next step for career development, as older workers like Gen-Xers have been conditioned to think.
And if a Gen-Z person actually accepts a management role, Glassdoor’s data show that they still value a better work-life balance than other generations, seeing it as a nonnegotiable benefit — 58 percent of Gen-Z survey respondents said they even work a little less hard in the summer (just 39 percent of their older peers do this).
Anecdotally, this makes sense. Gen-Z as a generation is known for favoring pro-mental health strategies such as conscious unbossing and even quiet quitting. There’s plenty of evidence that shows that taking on a management role can impose new responsibilities that are sometimes thankless.
Instead, Gen-Z’s career minimalism is all about keeping things simple at their main job (which is the one that reliably pays the bills) so they can do other work that they prefer. Glassdoor’s data didn’t look into what Gen-Z is doing with the rest of its time, but Fortune referenced a different survey by Colorado-based flexible working job site FlexJobs that showed some of the jobs Gen-Z were running as side hustles. These included roles like a nurse practitioner (bringing in $56 an hour), or more typical remote work roles like translator, content writer, and graphic designer.
Why should you care about this? These study findings sound like the latest weird and wonderful description of a whole generation of workers that we already know are a little unexpected and unusual.
The point is that Gen-Z is entering the workforce in increasing numbers. And by sheer force of numbers alone they’ll be quietly reshaping workplace norms. If Gen-Z thinks management roles aren’t worth it, other than for the money, then it seems unlikely that you’ll be able to entice a younger worker into this kind of duty by pretending it’s a perk, which is how many older workers may see it. You may have to think very differently about how to encourage your young recruits to take more senior positions.
Glassdoor’s report also shows that you’re going to have to get used to Gen-Z delivering exactly the amount of effort that they want in the workplace, no more and no less. And you’ll also have to watch them clock out and go and pursue a side job that actually fulfills them. Savvy small business leaders may see this as an opportunity to encourage loyalty among Gen-Z staff by embracing their norms, and learning from them.
“Is Gen-Z’s Commitment to Career Minimalism Hurting Your Business?” first appeared on Inc.com.