The job market is not ready to meet the demands of Gen Z

It may seem naive to think that a guy almost 40 years old is going to come here to take a neutral position on the behavior of the new generations in the job market. If I follow the rule of my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, I will automatically take the firewood down on the younger ones. I’ll say they’re loose, that they can’t take the stride, or that they’re spoiled. I will say that they have no responsibility, that they want nothing to do with anything and represent a lost generation. And do you know why it would be natural, almost expected, for me to do that? Simply because this is the standard behavior of humans as time goes by.

Think with me… who is younger and starts to occupy positions in the market represents a threat to those who came before. Depending on what I do, I can be swallowed up by the younger workforce, which has fewer vices, is much cheaper and usually tends to be more willing… but the pandemic also brought a new normal for the behavior of generation Z, precisely the one that has been spreading across office chairs around the world.

This could even be a conclusion based only on my navel. I am a partner in some companies and I notice a fairly standard behavior in my younger employees. In my experience, I realize that many people don’t like to be charged, they just want to do what they like and are quite immature when it comes to deadlines or any day-to-day difficulty of any function. But what I’m going to put in the next few paragraphs is also based on numbers. Mainly in a survey carried out by the EDC Group, which interviewed 328 Brazilians to reach some conclusions about these young people.

When answering the survey, they themselves assumed some behaviors that for my generation can be seen as a lack of commitment. Of every 8 employees between 18 and 25 years old, at least 1 says he doesn’t even do his own workday, arrives after hours and leaves earlier. And of everyone who was interviewed, a quarter agree that Gen Z is clearly less engaged with their work and that they only do what they were hired to do… no more and no less. An almost robotic way. When we expand this story outside the country, practically 3 out of 4 leaders in the United States understand this generation as actually being much more difficult to work with compared to the older ones, according to a survey by the Resume Builder resume platform.

So far, the reasoning follows that of the older guy who only complains about those who are young and think differently. But now the guy who has ADHD, undergoes treatment for anxiety and talks to his own therapist every week (yes, I’m talking about myself). We live in a Brazil with 19 million anxious people, according to the World Health Organization, and it is undeniable that much of what turned us into a bunch of unhappy and frustrated people was the maxim of “work while they sleep”. I always say that I prefer to “sleep while they work overtime to have more income when I go to work tomorrow within the hours of my contract”. Look… working hard is not necessarily working well, we need to understand that.

Don’t think I’m passing cloth, quite the contrary, okay?! I really think that generation Z, for the most part, is quite problematic. But the world shows that the people who came before are not much of a reference either. How many professionally frustrated friends do you have? How many do not run out of black box? How many complain that they only work and there’s no money left for anything? How many only say they have dreams, but never come true? Is this the generation that knows the real value of work, that has unlocked the secret of a happy life? Is this the mirror of dedication that young people need to see? Because if so, I don’t know if it’s worth it.

The movement that we are seeing in the labor market with generation Z is similar to the movement that we see in moments of great structural ruptures in social behavior. An established pattern of action only starts to move when a lot of people start to force this change. And this “forced” only happens when a group leaves the curve at the same time and radicalizes this behavior. To guarantee more respect for what is different, it takes the open cry of a group that will problematize almost everything.

It’s like a car that has been driving on a strange path for a while, which is no longer getting anywhere. Those who disagree with this route are those who will get into the car and pull the steering wheel in a sudden way, waiting for a hobby horse that will make the route turn completely to the opposite side. Those who were already inside the car hold this maneuver, which ends up being less aggressive. In the end, the direction goes towards a middle ground. Neither remains the way it was, nor changes 180 degrees.

I want to believe that the moment we are living now in the market is exactly this movement of conflict inside the car. On the one hand, we, who claim to have mastered all the secrets of corporate life but go to the bathroom and cry because showing weakness at the office can jeopardize the next promotion we think we want, but it will only make us work harder and with more pressure . On the other hand, a group that doesn’t know how to receive a charge because “they don’t admit to leaving home to work in a place that doesn’t adhere to all the ideals of life that they have”.

I laugh at the videos on the networks saying that generation Z doesn’t understand that working is also doing what we don’t like from time to time. But we forget that many times we’ve seen ourselves doing what we don’t like all the time. And that’s not cool either.

You understand where I’m going, right?! The mimimi, I think, is on both sides. From those who don’t understand that pure idealism doesn’t pay bills and from those who think that taking a beating is mandatory to create a shell. Empathy, for me, is the keyword in today’s market. And those who don’t understand this will always keep complaining about the other. Be it older or younger. Let’s look inside and try to accept the middle of the way? I’m not saying it’s easy… but it’s possible to understand that the best generation is the generation of value for everyone and not just for a specific group.