Gen Z is bringing a whole new vibe to the workplace: anxiety
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
With the popularity of 'hot desking', overbearing micromanagement, unrealistic expectations, and continuous surveillance/activity monitoring.. who can blame people for being stressed / anxious at work?
I think with hot desking, however, the writing is on the wall that RTO will ultimately fail more often than not. And that ya, these people are eventually going to come in 0-2 days a week, and not the majority 3-4 days a week.
When I first entered the workforce there were more people doing the same amount of work than happens today. From 93-2000 I watched tons of companies lay off staff and spread the work to the remaining people. Then the same thing happened in 2008-10. Then the same thing happened over the last 5 years.
The new normal (because of the decades of change):
No one has time or space to focus, everyone is asked to do too much. So no one has time to do quality work so we feel like our work is shitty and we can't take pride in our work - yet we spend most of our waking hours hours doing that work. Which impacts our quality of life and increases our stress levels.
Maybe that's why everyone is anxious.
> But Gen Zers, who are just beginning their career journeys, are having an especially difficult time. In a 2022 survey by the meditation app Calm, 58% of Gen Zers said they felt anxious frequently or all the time — a big jump from the one-third of Gen Xers and one-quarter of baby boomers who said the same. A Deloitte survey of 22,000 people from March found a similar result: Nearly half of Gen Zers said they felt anxious and stressed almost all the time, while only 39% of millennials said they felt the same.
> In a survey conducted by Gallup, nearly half of workers ages 18 to 29 reported that their job had negatively affected their mental health. In some cases, the stress of the workplace manifests as a sense of ambivalence and withdrawal from their professional lives. Another Gallup survey found that Gen Z was the least engaged group in the workplace and the most burned out from their jobs.
The lower end of the cohort has barely worked long enough to be worrying about layoffs or lack of pride in their work. My own career only started at 30. This is the generation that bullied parents and teachers around for years with weaponized psychobabble and made pronoun enforcement a thing (like we live in a goddamn MUSH).
Now they're entering the workplace and finding that being a master wordsmith of Reddit rhetoric doesn't translate to economic value. Their only path to success involves cancelling everyone critical of them to invoke the Peter Principle, and if they can't do that, they melt down.
That’s really all there is to it.
At the root of this is emotional alienation - the fundamental realization that workers are a means to an end, a class of people divorced from one of the core ideas of what makes people human - emotion.
When displaying emotions makes management uncomfortable, I see a great opportunity to dig in and start with five whys. Equally possible, could management simply not experience discomfort?
I don't know what's holding people back from starting the talk about public health effects of the new online 'cigarettes'
Aside from being entitled and incompetent, they've brought domestic violence into the workplace to obfuscate this fact. They know it, and they live in fear of having what they do to others done to them. You see it in prison too-- the tension is palpable.
Post-COVID, the number of bad-faith HR reports I've had to investigate has skyrocketed. People are trying to get exes fired for sexual harassment, bosses fired for criticizing them, colleagues fired for being abrasive...it's driving me up the fucking wall. I get people pulling Sam Altmans too, which is fun. I used to work with professionals. Now I do the dirty work of adult tweens.
I had to listen to similar comments about Millennials.
It's just the current youngest group, who are the least experienced so will be the most anxious. You just grow out of it, and forget how shitty it was when you first entered the workforce.
Or even Michael Easter's "Comfort Crisis"?
Each successive generation has had it easier and easier but...
1) Easy isn't how we evolved
2) The lack of adversity means some emotional muscles are underdeveloped
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...
However it is a well known phenomen that the youngest generation gets picked on by those already in the workforce. Or are you saying that Gen X is still generally worthless compared to the older generations?
The idea that Chris Rock was being a prick and mocking a group of people being unacceptable and rejected isn't any more surprising than comedians making racist or disabled jokes being rejected 30 years ago.
There are plenty of actually funny people who don't need to do that.
Curious why social media is to blame when adults exploiting and denigrating youth is timeless.
When society as a whole turns a blind eye to their future struggles; drill baby drill! What you want to afford a home and a fam? Lol no; hustle culture and technology to fetishize!
Did social media manipulate the economy to deflate GenZ and empower the dying?
Was social media responsible for 2008 crash, money printing?
Government full of entitled people who don’t like what the kids had to say about them, so they retaliated.
Is it tech or is it American Civic Life that’s garbage?
Both of these are extremely complex problems to solve and would require consistent efforts over generations. However the people in power are happily trading the future of humanity for more money and power, and finding support from a large section of the population in doing so.
I can't speak for everyone but this is why I have a hard time working on my next jira ticket after reading the news.
And yeah, seeing the temperature anomaly charts this past summer makes you wonder if anything is even going to matter in a decade or two. I’m ever glad I never wanted children; I can’t imagine the anxiety of trying to raise them in the modern world.
Leaving the social media bubble for the world news bubble is hardly an improvement
I have an article about how Gen X is making the workplace too emotional.
> You can't publish that, Gen X is in their 50's and 60's
I have an updated revision that says that Millennials are bringing emotions and anxiety in to the workplace?
> Millennials are in their 40's Jeff, you can't publish that.
Let me find/replace it with Gen Z so we can attack the new generation who have been entering the workforce for a decade now.
> Perfect.
https://www.aecf.org/blog/generation-z-and-mental-health
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/05/14/on-the-...
This is a "slow day at the news" filler thing, that's just how they be.
Obviously there are questions as to higher rates of diagnosis vs. actual high rates of mental illness. Back in my day we had a lot of anxiety, and drank a lot, to deal with it. Lord knows the Greatest Generation types were often straight up hammered at work.
Doesn't mean we have to accept it, or distribute it.
> diagnosed
And that's the key here, we don't have the stereotype of people with bottles of whiskey in their desk drawers anymore. Kids just get picked on for dealing with their shit better than their parents.
I remember when we were blamed for killing Applebees, LMFAO, good riddance.
Basically this is old people complaining about change. I get it, I am getting old and it sucks. But being the green horn sucks too!
(GenX'er fwiw)
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33916482/