When I first heard people accusing my generation of not wanting to work, I was incensed. But that’s not because it isn’t true. It is. Only one in 10 Gen Zers want to work from the office full-time. We’re less likely to have ever worked beyond our contractual hours, less likely to have looked at work emails out of hours and more likely to be 10 minutes late. We take more sick days, demand full lunch breaks, and don’t want to do any work during those lunch breaks. We don’t dress in traditional “office wear” and we tend to take the total amount of our allocated annual leave.
To me, this is all totally fair. After all, why would we Gen Zs want to work? I’m a 27-year-old in a traditionally “good” career living in London, and I am still clawing my way out of my overdraft each month. I have to sell my belongings on Vinted to make ends meet. I will probably never own a house. I don’t have dreams of being the highest up person at my company, or in my industry, because it doesn’t seem possible. Not only would that involve working much harder for relatively little financial reward, but all of those jobs are occupied by older people who won’t relinquish them until they literally die. So, yes, why would I want to work?
My generation also don’t like work: according to YouGov, those aged 18 to 24 are way more pro a Severance situation (based on the hit Apple TV+ show where people’s work and personal lives are totally separated) than any other age group. In case that’s not clear: Gen Zs dislike work so much they’d rather a reality where, in their downtime, they have absolutely no memory of their 9 to 5. Sorry to anyone who’s become work friends with a Gen Z recently, but it turns out they might want to forget you altogether.
Gen Z’s resistance to traditional “professionalism” can prove tricky for employers, who lose money to their militant time management and struggle to organise around their flighty nature. And it’s not just boomer CEOs, either. Millennial manager Hannah* is in charge of several Gen Zs as part of her job as a fashion stylist, and says they are “nightmares”. “They will ask for 10 minutes in lieu if they work 10 minutes late,” she says, “which is something, as a millennial, I would never feel like I could do.”
See also: Which generation are you?
Workplace nightmares
Despite this behaviour, Hannah claims the Gen Z employees expect to be handed promotions even when they have been doing the bare minimum. “They don’t have the mentality that a lot of us older people do that if we want a promotion, we need to be already working at that level before we get that job,” she says. “We know we need to earn something. But they think they deserve the opportunity without having done the extra work or proven they can do it.”
As a Left-wing millennial, she finds it all very conflicting. “I believe in standing up for your rights at work, but sometimes I think it’s been taken too far,” she admits. “There’s a lack of drive and passion to exceed in something, to put the extra work in. There’s a real lack of taking pride in your job compared to other generations.”
One Gen Z who refuses to be proud of her job is Rowan*, a 27-year-old planning analyst who works mainly from home in north London. After working 12-hour days to cover for lost employees who haven’t been rehired, she’s become sick of it. “I’m done breaking my back,” Rowan says. “I’m literally just trying to make enough money for myself to live and that’s my only goal at the moment.
“I’m not saving for a house because I can’t. I just want to fund my lifestyle. I want to go out for drinks with my friends and buy nice clothes and maybe go on a holiday at the end of the year if I’m very lucky. But even those things can feel so out of reach that I’m like, why would I go above and beyond to try and afford that?”
Similarly, Gen Z videographer George* gave up on trying when he realised he wasn’t getting a promotion. Vowing to become “the biggest time thief to have ever lived”, he claimed to have weekly dentist, doctor and plumber appointments. He drank alcohol on company time. He used an out-of-office “shoot day” to tour the entirety of London via Lime bike, hitting all the tourist destinations and soaking up the sunshine while he did it.
‘I vowed to become the biggest time thief to have ever lived’
“The projects that could take a couple of hours took a couple of days,” he remembers. “5.30pm finish times became 5pm, then 4.30pm, then 4pm.” But he doesn’t regret it for a second. In fact, he says, “If people give you the opportunity to waste their time after wasting yours, take it!” George isn’t alone. Company loyalty is dying, with 75 per cent of employees leaving their job before ever getting promoted. For many, it feels as though the only way to attain more money is by leaving a job and getting a new one at a slightly higher pay grade. Not that it helps much: 60 per cent of Gen Zs worry they will never be able to afford a home, and they’re struggling to make rent, too.
Plus, it’s hard to see the generation above you going home to their cosy homes and children when you may never be able to afford them. “People on my team can log on at 9.30am and log off at 3pm to do the school run, but I’m expected to be available from 8am to 8pm because I don’t have kids,” Rowan says. “Well, I have a life too. You decided to have kids, I decided not to. But they get off so easily, like leaving in the middle of the workday, but I would never receive that in return, just because I’m in my twenties. One woman used to work 10am until 3pm Monday to Wednesday then I had to do the rest of her meetings. Meanwhile, she was paid triple my salary!”
And even if Gen Zs are working, they might be working smart, not hard. “I’ll often run time-sensitive messages through ChatGPT and ask to ‘make it professional’,” one Gen Z employee at a PR firm tells me. “It’s not about doing less work, it’s about freeing up time to focus on the parts of my job that I really enjoy.” This is not always appreciated by their bosses, who say the use of AI is obvious. “Everything I get now from younger employees is very clearly ChatGPT-ed; meeting agendas, client memos, even the feedback in the 360 surveys we ask staff to complete for their colleagues,” says Jack* a 39-year-old CEO at a tech company. “I reviewed a presentation — supposedly client-ready — that used a different client’s company name throughout.” Jack says he also frequently receives work that he didn’t ask for “because they thought it was a cool idea so they spent Thursday working on it”.
“Managing them is hard because it isn’t as though they’re delivering 80 per cent of what you need and it’s just about improving the 20 per cent,” he says. “They’re literally not doing the 80 per cent, and instead working on what interests them.”
Rule breakers
Then there’s workplace etiquette, which Gen Zs also refuse to conform to. “The grads at my work dress so inappropriately,” says Amy*, who works for the corporate side of a major betting company. “I saw one girl recently wearing knee-high lace-up boots with skinny jeans and a low-cut body suit tucked into the jeans. Another was wearing a pleather PVC skirt with a band tee and big clompy boots. They’ll wear crop tops with their belly out, everything.”
But for Zoomers, the idea of having an unofficial work uniform is yet another hoop they’re not being paid well enough to jump through. “I think for the most part dress codes are bullshit,” says Rowan, a self-professed “office goth”. “Because even if they say it’s office ‘casual’, their casual is not my casual. So even if they say they don’t have dress codes, they really do. I should be able to wear what I want, which is a big pair of boots, my nose rings and have my tattoos out and not be judged because it doesn’t affect my work in any way, shape or form.”
See also: Best trainer socks for Gen Zs and Millennials
And then there’s the mental health talk. While older generations were raised in the ways of the stiff upper lip, Gen Z are fully comfortable with letting it wobble. “They use phrases I hate, like ‘I need to advocate for me’ and ‘I feel that this is not a safe space’,” says Claire*, a 40-year-old TV writer who works with Gen Zs regularly. “But they are much better at being like, ‘This is no way to work and I won’t do it.’ And then of course all the millennials are raging, going, ‘When I was 22 I was on location at 4am every morning for a year solid! I had no days off! I sucked it up and that’s the only way to grow … this lot have no idea what it was like in 2004!’”
All in all, Gen Z aren’t bothered by their bad rep. But would you really expect them to be? As Claire puts it, “They are like the cats of the workplace, they do not give a f***!”
Rowan, for one, reckons that if buying a house, living in a nicer property, having kids or going on more holidays felt tangible, she would work harder and make more of an effort. But until then, she says: “What’s the point?”
*names have been changed
