Opinion: Gen Z can teach us a lot about the workplace – including how to say 'no'

Gen Z are principled and willing to burn bridges in the name of change. Photo / 123RF

OPINION:

August in the city has traditionally meant one thing: farewell breeders, hello youth, in the form of legions of eager work-experience candidates. Post-lockdown, with very many of us still skulking about the home, this annual jamboree is not quite as it was. When my 17-year-old niece - now known as "The Child" (a la Baby Yoda) - came to spend a week shadowing me and my boyfriend, she spent much of the time in her PJs stroking our querulous dog.

A good deal of ink has been spilled over how the world should fear the advent of Gen Z in the workplace; not least by 30-something snowflakes, upset that their skinny jeans, side partings, and avocado obsession have become the stuff of nipperish satire. Forget millennials (born 1981 to 1996), Gen X-ers such as myself (1965 to 1981), or even Boomers (1946-64) - the Zoomers are coming. Behold, the millions of whippersnappers born between 1997 and 2012: aka anyone too young to remember 9/11, for whom Zoom is as natural a state of existence, as existence itself.

For my part, I'm excited. I know how much I have already learnt from Gen Z in the realm of mental health. When my parents were dying, I relied upon Issy, her brother and cousin to tell me how to respond. Obviously, I never made this their responsibility. However, in the matter of emotional intelligence, their guess was as good as mine – better, even; less stymied by the "shoulds" of social expectation.

Coming of age during lockdown, this generation is resilient. True, it's made them more cloistered. Issy had never taken a bus on her own, not having had many places to go over the last couple of years. However, they seem pretty good at the old self-care, less likely to get, in their own way, in terms of stress, booze, lack of sleep and the like, if they can just get off their phones. Still, this tech fluency offers its own support network – they're forever spurring each other on, mutually endorsing.

Complaints about Zoomers have focused on how candid they are, and how blind to traditional notions of status. Personally, I adore this. I've never been good at corporate acting that so many bores deem vital to holding down a job. If their honesty blows all this away with an emperor's new clothes frankness, then so much the better. We'll all waste a lot less time.

Millennials lament that these newcomers are self-centred (irony alert!) and unable to compromise. Put another way, they're principled, willing to burn bridges in the name of change - witness the transformations they made to institutions as part of Black Lives Matter. When critics dismiss them as "woke", what this means is open to, and respectful of, others' differences. My partner's office maintains a "bring your real self to work" ethos. My niece asks: "Who else would you bring?"

"However, they seem pretty good at the old self-care, less likely to get, in their own way, in terms of stress, booze, lack of sleep and the like, if they can just get off their phones." Photo / 123RF

Moreover, unlike their seniors, they don't appear to hate themselves. They can "take the L" - Gen Z speak for accept failure or loss - without self-crucifixion. Where my Gen X self-reprimand tends to be "You don't deserve to live" (and that's me medicated), my niece's exhortation is "Believe in yourself".

Meanwhile, in terms of work/life balance, Zeds are not prepared to occupy the state of extended masochism many of us oldsters maintain. "Ask not what I can do for my job as what my job can do for me," quoth Gen Z, eschewing the 24/7 hustling that has dominated the work cultures of the past. We will all benefit from their refusal to be caged.

Sure, my niece walks so slowly it's as if we're in different time zones, and I felt compelled to lend her a jacket in case she were mistaken for a free-the-nipple protest. However, "believe in yourself" has become our ironic household mantra to be intoned when attempting human flight, or similar. As to what I taught The Child, it can be reduced to the axiom: "Working women need Marmite". It's stuffed so full of vitamin B - even if they won't be needing it for stress.

Literature is not meant to be an 'etiquette guide'

Like many, I'm reading - and relishing - Torrey Peters' Detransition, Baby, the novel that an objectionably smug liberal of my acquaintance referred to as an "the objectionably smug liberal read".

The author has lamented her tale being used as an "etiquette guide" to being a better ally, and one takes her point. To do so would be shallow, reductive and fundamentally unliterary. As Peters has stated about the writer of Sing, Unburied, Sing: "The idea that you would read Jesmyn Ward for credentials is, like, you've missed the point of the beauty of her writing – because you think it's for education. It's not. It's to see yourself in these characters, to identify, to have an experience of melding with another mind."

However, through this very melding, this "first great transrealist novel" will alter minds otherwise fixed, not least on account of being really bloody good - literature's sole responsibility.