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’ve seen that when I first started decades ago. The department I was working on was filled with more senior staff and I was the only one in the department under 30.
There was very little in intentional teaching during that time. I’m not talking about training classes, but even basic things. It was just try your hardest and get comments back on your work. There were also cases where it was easier and faster for me to do certain tasks on the computer, but they weren’t used to that idea.
And so you’ve got a lot of bad teachers in the workforce that have been doing their job forever. And because there aren’t that many Gen X, there weren’t that many in the middle ground to teach new staff.
And I feel like some elder millennials are taking the generational trauma of shitty mentoring and carrying it forward like a rite of passage.
People who never got decent mentoring don’t know what it looks like. It’s rarely intentional, they just believe that’s how it is in the business world.
Right, there’s a weird amount of romanticization going on here, it seems like, about how things used to be. Or some sort of victimization need.
There’s plenty of things that have gotten worse, like average wages, benefits, minimum education requirements, etc. But this doesn’t seem like one of them.