Clickbait headlines and misleading analyses are clouding the conversation about generational change. Here’s what leaders really need to know
Writing: Bobby Duffy
Generational thinking is an incredibly powerful idea – but it has been horribly corrupted by terrible myths, stereotypes and clichés.
The history of academic theory on generations spans some of the biggest thinkers we’ve had in philosophy and sociology. The French philosopher, Auguste Comte, for example, thought that generational change was the key determinant of the speed of societal change. “We should not hide the fact that our social progress rests essentially upon death,” he wrote. It is not a particularly cheery thought, but what he meant was that we tend to get stuck in our ways once we pass a certain age, so “the successive steps of humanity necessarily require a continuous renovation… from one generation to the next.”
These are big ideas: life, death and societal change. So it is a real shame that the level of generational analysis we typically see today is represented by media headlines like: “Millennials are killing the napkin industry” (younger consumers are opting for paper towels, apparently). I could fill the rest of this article just listing things that Millennials are supposed to have killed – everything from marriage to the Olympics to marmalade.
But it’s not just Millennials who get picked on. Baby Boomers also receive a lot of negative coverage – not so much for killing things as ruining them. The peak: an Atlantic piece arguing that they “ruined everything.”
It just keeps rolling on, including to our current youngest adult generation, Gen Z, who are – according to many pieces – “the most annoying generation.” Their behavior in the workplace, in particular, is targeted.
Indeed, the workplace is one of the noisiest engines of these shallow stereotypes, with Gen Z bearing the brunt. They are supposedly “proudly shirking from home, and taking the economy down with them.” They are “entitled” and “workshy staff [who] can’t be bothered to read emails.” TikToks of young women crying after their first day at a 9-to-5 job go viral, and inevitably lead to opinion pieces by middle-aged journalists claiming to explain “why Gen Z can’t cope with the real world.”
As someone who has analyzed generational change for the last 20 years, these shallow and misleading descriptions cause me pain. Understanding real shifts between generations is vitally important, not just for understanding our past or today, but our future. Older generations are always receding, being replaced by younger generations in the workplace or society, so understanding how they really differ is vitally important – but we’re distracting ourselves with misleading commentary, driven by our biases.
Let’s attempt to take a more evidence-based view of what’s really happening.
Explaining generational change
The evidence for the complaints against Gen Z is extremely thin beyond anecdotes from grumpy older bosses. For example, it is true that young people change jobs more frequently than older people – but that has always been the case. The average length of time in a role is no different now for young people today than for young people decades ago. In fact, it’s older people who change jobs more frequently today than older people did in the past – largely because ‘jobs for life’ are harder to come by.
It’s also true that working hours for young people have declined over the past few decades, but that’s because they have declined for all age groups. There is a long-term trend towards a different work-life balance across many economies. But it isn’t driven by younger people.
Here, it’s worth introducing the key framework for understanding true generational change – the three types of effect that explain all societal change.
Period effects The example of declining work hours is what we call a period effect, which is a change that affects all of us to some degree. It can be a big shock like an economic crisis, a pandemic or a war – but it can also be the slower, more gradual changes in norms that reshape societies, such as a work-life rebalancing.
Life-cycle effects Life-cycle effects are those where we change as we age and go through key life-stages, such as getting a job or leaving one, getting married, having kids and retiring. These are also very powerful effects. Auguste Comte didn’t mean we stopped changing entirely as we age – where you are in your life and career will affect your behavior and priorities.
Cohort effects The final category are those effects where one generation is different from other generations in some way, and stays different over time – taking some of that uniqueness with them throughout their life. These effects emerge because our formative years and early careers are very important in shaping our lives. We know that early experience of big disruptions, like an economic crisis or global pandemic, for example, has a bigger impact on those just starting out – partly because they have fewer resources to fall back on.
Many of the stereotypes about individual generations flow from mixing up these effects – particularly for young people, and particularly from mixing up life cycle with cohort effects. Much of the negative press for Gen Z stems from the deeply human trap that we always think the latest generation of young people are the worst ever.
You can go to any era in history and find diatribes against the young people of the day. In 400BC Socrates said, “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, they show disrespect for elders and love gossip in place
of activity.” We tested this exact phrase in a nationally representative poll in the UK – and over half the public agreed it was true for young people today.
We also have a rosy retrospection about how driven and amenable we all were as younger workers. In his 1985 book on the work ethic, the industrial sociologist, Michael Rose, described how managers in the 1970s and early 1980s thought that professionalism, self-discipline and drive
were plummeting among the younger workers of the day.
Those young workers were, of course, the Baby Boomers, who are now so quick to bemoan the work ethic of today’s youth. Gen Z were not the first, and won’t be the last, generation of young people to be accused of fecklessness.
Given these trends and biases, it’s maybe no surprise that by far the most frequent brief I get for corporate away days, strategy sessions or conferences goes something like this: “We’re really worried about how different our young workers are – how do we develop a Gen Z workplace strategy?”
What I try to do in response is to convince the organizers that this is exactly the wrong response.
The real Gen Z shifts
I am not saying that there is nothing at all different about Gen Z – far from it. Generations do change, as Comte recognized. With Gen Z, I see three real shifts playing out.
The first is that their economic circumstances are just tougher, with wage stagnation, hugely higher housing costs, a general cost of living crisis, and little wealth, in an economy where private wealth has become both much greater and much more important to how people feel about their financial situation. They will naturally need to be more focused on wages and benefits than they might have been in better circumstances.
The second big shift relates to mental health, where the extraordinary rise in common mental health disorders seems to have a clear cohort element: it has affected young people at this point in time more than older people. They will need and expect more support on this aspect of life.
Finally, there is a more general trend of delayed adulthood, where younger people are doing things later than previous generations – important things, like leaving education, leaving home, getting married or having kids. They also have less experience of the workplace before their first post-education job, as Saturday and holiday jobs have rapidly declined. For example, in 1997, half of 16-17-year-olds in the UK had Saturday jobs. This had collapsed to a quarter by 2019.
Of course, this way of living is only ‘delayed’ compared with what we older folk got used to from our own upbringings, rather than some natural order of things. I think back to my mum’s life experience. She left school at 15 and went straight to work – not something we could imagine as a sensible progression today, but a move that seemed utterly natural in the 1940s.
In contrast, my daughter is 17 and her only experience of making any of her ‘own’ money is selling clothes on Depop and Vinted (clothes that we bought for her, and sales where we do most of the admin). That feels wrong to us: by that age, I’d already had seven or eight (terrible) jobs. On the other hand, she has a 50% chance of living to 90 and could well work for 50 years, so perhaps a slower start to working life is not such a bad idea.
Generational separation and connection
Employers should be sensitive to these pieces of context – but they should not build an employment strategy around them that specifically targets Gen Z. That’s partly because, while these circumstances are more common among Gen Z, they clearly do not apply to everyone in such a varied generation. Plus, many people in older generations face similar challenges and contexts.
More importantly, setting workplace strategies up as a response to the “Gen Z problem” inevitably reinforces the stereotyping that only serves to divide us. This caricaturing is driven by the really big – and actually true – trend that I see across work generations: separation.
We’re living more separately by age than we have at any time in human history, with young people sorted into cities and large towns, and older people outside of these, to a quite remarkable degree. These are relatively new trends. We may have a sense that this has always been the case, but it’s very recent, with little sign of this separation until the 1990s.
On top of this, our digital lives are also now much more important to us. These remain very separate across the age groups, with different generations doing different things, on different platforms, at very different levels of intensity.
The workplace, then, has become one of the few areas of life where different generations are pushed together regularly. But instead of taking advantage of this to promote intergenerational connection and understanding, we’re fueling a fake sense of conflict. LinkedIn research in 2024 found that one in five Gen Z workers hadn’t even spoken to a colleague aged over 50 during the past year – while two in five of over-50s hadn’t spoken to a Gen Z colleague.
This is a huge shame and a missed opportunity. We know that both older and younger people benefit from greater intergenerational connection. We’re also starting to see evidence that those organizations that find ways to bring generations together benefit from increased productivity and innovation, by promoting better understanding and drawing on more of the available ideas and talent, working together.
We also have an increasing understanding of what works in workplaces to bring people together and achieve broader aims. These include creating meaningful intergenerational networks and groups, which can take a mix of approaches – whether it’s coming together around a defined purpose, such as developing a strategy or product, or purely as a forum for sharing views. We’ve also moved on from traditional mentoring models, through reverse mentoring (which can still reinforce generational distinctions) to more mutual mentoring, where it’s clear both sides can – and do – benefit.
Creating a Gen Z workplace strategy misses all these benefits. Instead, it risks inadvertently reinforcing or creating a problem. Forget the headlines and the misconceptions, and build an intergenerational strategy instead.
Bobby Duffy is director of the Policy Institute at Kings College London and author of Generations: Does When You Are Born Shape Who You Are? (Atlantic Books)
