Starting a career has increasingly felt like a right of passage for Gen Z and Millennial workers struggling to adapt to the working week and stand out to their new bosses.
But it looks like those bosses aren’t doing much in return to help their young staffers adjust to corporate life, and it could be having major effects on their company’s output.
Research by the London School of Economics and Protiviti found that friction in the workplace was causing a worrying productivity chasm between bosses and their employees, and it was by far the worst for Gen Z and Millennial workers.
The survey of nearly 1,500 U.K. and U.S. office workers found that a quarter of employees self-reported low productivity in the workplace. More than a third of Gen Z employees reported low productivity, while 30% of Millennials described themselves as unproductive.
I think you’re right. My guess is that as companies get greedier and work offers fewer and fewer benefits, people are less and less willing to work as hard as their parents did. Employers that don’t understand this are either genuinely ignorant or just pretending to be ignorant.
I sincerely doubt the idea that people are working less. I worked at a college with a lot of boomers. Great people, but I was radically more efficient than any one of them. The woman who had my job before (college print shop), would complain about the work load. I only really worked until lunch and caught up on every single thing I needed to do. Watched YouTube and coded the rest of the day. Helps that I had a boss that didn’t care as long as I was caught up.
Alas, the whole campus shut down last August.
Strategic ignorance. You can exert more pressure on someone if you genuinely believe the crazy self-serving things you’re telling them with a straight face.