The failures of Gen Z in the workplace as reported by this article and others are largely due three things in sequence that are hard to outrun one they get into a professional and corporate environment: Parenting, learning paradigm and higher education atmosphere. In these three spheres, Gen Z is one of the first generations to be raised in what I would like to consider an alternate universe. This started with good intent but a lot for the measures were largely understudied.

In the US, gen Z is the probably the first generation who by a large margin were raised without corporal punishment. This may have started with the younger millennials but by the time gen Z got into the picture, getting spanked by a parent in the heat for frustration for your misdeeds was already a societal no-no. This is not the case in much of the rest of the world including Europe. However, have been instances of child abuse, which is the case of parents who highly emotionally unregulated taking their frustrations out on their children. But for people who grew up with corporal punishment, there was an understanding that purposeless mischief came at a price. Ideally, the replacement for corporal punishment is creating room for the kids to learn consequences. Unfortunately, consequences that do not involves physical discomfort do not create a good enough deterrent. However, I would like to add, I am not pro corporal punishment as the main form of correction. As someone who was raised by parents who seldom used it on me, it was about getting me to understand consequences. Once I understood a matter, it was no longer addressed. However, if I was trying to be a jackass which I sometimes was, I got a spanking. The slap did not hurt. It was the humiliation. Something about a bare hand on the skin at velocity just sends your ego through the ground to the bottom of the ocean. What does this have to do with Gen Z? Am I saying Gen Z should have gotten more spankings? I am not a child psychologist so I do not think I have the authority to say as much. But I do wonder whether they were raised with a sense of consequence. Whilst I get the enlightened perspective of raising kids without FEAR (False Evidence Appearing Real) it is important for any living person that is part of the natural environment to understand that there is cause and effect. Actions have consequences. The goal is not to build fear to create a capacity for preparation and adaptation. People who got spanked as kids did a lot to avoid pain/harm so they are wired to comply towards favorable consequences for better or worse. It makes them good employees and for the most part adequately sociable but it could make them risk averse or highly tolerant of unjust authority. However, avoiding this predicament whilst not training your kids to be cognizant of consequence from a place of adaptability may have set their kids further back.

This lack of consequence carries over in the classroom where a parent can be seen scolding a teacher for their child’s mediocre grades. To which, the teacher responds; “Your child did not do the assignment right” and the parents screams “She turned it in. I helped her do it! That should count for something.” You also see this with the coaching team sports such as soccer and basketball. There have been several incidents of parents going to blows with coaches and referees over playing time and foul calls. The parent is always coming from the place of how much they spent on the apparel and how much time they spent with their kids on the sport but seldom the kid’s progress in the game when their number is called. It is as though the parents to Gen Z (largely boomers and Gen X) are trying to insulate their children from their own past traumas as opposed to preparing them for an unfamiliar world.

In truth, when young, your children will enjoy your protection during these tender years. They will cherish you. They will turn to you as a landing. However, should they learn to fly, they will fly far away. Some for curiosity and others for appropriate room to cultivate the resilience they realize they were prevented from developing. One of the hardest things to do as a parent is to be a landing spot for your children while preparing them for the uncertainty of the outside world, while working through your own traumas and programming. Most parents believe it is their job to keep the harm that was done to them away from their kids. That is a very noble aim but as most parents are recovering children themselves, some of what they thought was harm was just preparation or formation and what they thought was good turned out to be either a slippery slope or straight harm. Thus when there is a generation of children whose teachers and coaches are afraid of their parents, what are the odds of these kids possessing the required resilience to handle negative feedback while on their growth journey?

K-12 school environments went from a place for kids to refine the resilience they learned at home to a campus for co-parenting by a defanged authority of single young adults or older adults who were not allowed to scold, admonish or even chastise in the face of negative behavior. They were not allowed to steer these kids in the path of self-regulation but had to endure the full fledged display of the lack of it. Now this is tricky because depending on the perceived social value (race, class, gender, sexuality) the consequences on school grounds would vary. However, it would still be as a result of a home environment that has not prepared them and an unfamiliar and at times uncertain world. What your parents will allow other students and teachers will not. What your parents punish lightly will get you in a fight with another student or thrown out class or detention. And what will get you grounded at home would get you expelled from school.

This gap in consequences at home and a school creates a dilemma by the time you get to college and higher education. College, even at the undergraduate level was largely an environment that required one to have the capacity to self-regulate because the main punitive tool in college is your grades or the dean. If you cannot keep up with the coursework you will simply fail out. If you cannot respect others, you will simply be either reported to the dean on the path to expulsion or if it is a matter of safety you will taken to the nearest police station and treated like an adult with full understanding of the American constitution. College is not the place to learn what is and is not socially acceptable if you are ready to endure the scale of adaptability ahead of you. With Gen Z, they have been subjected to a college environment that for the most part has tried to promise a safety that was not promised to previous generations from the dorm rooms to the classrooms. Certain aspects of college life such as Greek life hazing and party hazards proved harmful to previous generations and the scrutiny was well deserved.

On the other hand, altering curricula in order to appease the emotional sensitivities that have been inflamed by the discovery of how imperfect the world is and has always been, has actually worked against the resilience of the students. I recall an incident at my alma mater, Juilliard where a black student was uncomfortable at an exploration acting exercise set in the early 19th century antebellum southern United States. This was a typical gen Z student during the throes of the Black Lives Matter activism in the early ’20s. Whilst the awareness the movement brought to light was very pivotal, classical acting training retains a requirement for the capacity to imagine yourself in societies and time periods that are unfamiliar and sometimes incompatible with your immediate environment. Early 19th century antebellum south would be more Django Unchained and less Bridgerton. I never followed up on the result of this blowup. However, as a millennial, during my time there, the impropriety of a lot of the period pieces was considered contextual and not reflective of our immediate environment at the time. Across the nation, in some attempt at moral remuneration there were several changes to made to curricula in math, science and the liberal arts as a form of redress.

Unfortunately, these protective measures that may have done a lot to appease the anxiety of the neophytes did severe damage to their professional resilience. The professional world is upheld by practices that yield results that would sustain it or exploit it. There is no room for in between. If company culture does not reward along the line of resilient character and and measurable growth, sooner or later the lack of results will lead to firings at the bottom of the ladder at lay offs at the top. Truth is, Gen Z was thrown into a professional environment and culture that is reeling from two major economic catastrophes. We had the 2008 banking debt crisis that sent shockwaves through the lives of the parents of the Gen X and boomer parents of Gen Z children. Those that survived barely got back on their feet by 2016 – 2018 to then be thrown into the fire of the pandemic whilst their older kids were in college and the younger ones were in middle school. All had to undergo social distancing and classes on zoom for almost two years. We saw business fall apart putting immense pressure in the professional/corporate arena whilst crippling the social adaptability of the youth. A lot of the recovery in post-pandemic era has been focused on corporate and commercial rehabilitation but the social rehabilitation never got on a balanced course.

The professional environment used to help people get up to speed with organizational standards. Increasingly, we have seen work environments go from bringing people up to speed as a modus operandi to sink or swim. You are expected to show up on the job with the required soft skills and at times operating skills of someone who has been there a year or more. Training for new employees is now a link to a page on a secure website instead of a printed folder with graphics. Training is offered by a fellow employee on a similar level instead of a manager or supervisor. Performance is judged on metrics that were not spelled out at the outset. Criticism is sparse or indirect. Consequence is procedural but severe. For those that survive the workplace, the reward system is hard to decipher. The most recent survivors of the landscape, millennial saw a very chaotic post-collegiate professional life that required absorbing the madness in front of them because their survival depended on it. Gen Z on the other hand coming through their helicopter parents and avoidant teachers step into a professional environment that can be read as hostile. The average Gen Z worker getting into the work is probably thinking to themselves: “Am I even wanted here?” Unfortunately, in the professional environments, the answer has largely been; “No!”

by Julian Michael Yong.