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A New Lost Generation: Why Gen Z Is Unprepared for the Workplace© Melcher Oosterman for WSJ
The workplace can be a tricky place to navigate. Almost everything we do at work—identifying the experts, managing tough feedback from a boss, figuring out how to work in teams made up of different personalities—comes down to our ability to manage relationships. And to do so, we need savvy social skills.
Most employees acquire those skills over time—by learning from their nonwork relationships, watching how colleagues behave in the office, and by seeing what happens when they stumble in their own workplace interactions.
But the newest workplace generation—Gen Z—is unlike anything we’ve seen. Through a combination of having fewer real-world relationship experiences, spending their education years in remote environments, and learning to communicate largely through asynchronous methods, these 20-somethings have missed opportunities to develop the skills needed to navigate the complex world of work.
The result is that many are woefully unprepared for surviving—let alone thriving—in their jobs.
We already can see what this means for both employees and the organizations that hire them. For one thing young employees are struggling to fit into these organizations. There is a lot of turnover, because new hires who don’t acclimate don’t last long.
What’s more, whether they are pushed out or leave willingly, younger employees often go without a clear sense of what went wrong, so they’ll never get better. And those who do stay often find the experience unfulfilling and frustrating, while their bosses are at a loss, wondering why the new workers just don’t get it.
If the trend continues, we are heading for a crisis: a generation of employees who never become seasoned insiders, incapable of either collaborating or leading. When a generation of workers never acquire the tools they need to lead, the pipeline of leadership falls apart. In time, so too will our organizations.
The perfect storm
How did we get here?
Younger generations—young millennials and Gen Z—have grown up in the perfect storm. First, more than half—56%—of them make it to adulthood having never had a romantic relationship; that compares to more than 75% for previous generations. And these experiences matter in a lot of ways. Early relationships teach us basic social competencies: how to express emotions, cooperate and forgive, and how and when to compete—all skills we use at work. And as adults, there is a direct link between the ability to communicate well with a romantic partner, and the ability to do the same with a co-worker or boss.
Second, online education has dominated their lives. As of 2025, more college students will learn online than in person. Educational environments are workplace adjacent; within them, we learn how to collaborate with peers in teams, as well as how to network to form study groups and friendships. We also learn how to ask for feedback, like in a meeting with a professor after an exam, and we learn norms like how formal we should be in-person versus over email. It’s tough to learn these things without being embedded in the environment—sitting in lectures, working with peers in multiple settings. When school boils down to video calls and breakout rooms, this form of social learning gets lost.
And finally, younger generations—Gen Z specifically—have learned to communicate in a digital world, sending texts and instant messages instead of interacting in person. This makes them anxious when interactions are unplanned and spontaneous, when they have to participate in high-stakes meetings and react to unexpected feedback and demands from the boss.
Dealing with the boss
This deficit in communication skills shows up in all sorts of ways, subtle and big. Take, for example, an all-too-familiar situation: During a team presentation, your teammates speak over you, and now you’re worried your boss doesn’t know how much you contributed to the project.
First, you need to be willing to resolve it in person and get others to do so. But you have social anxiety about face-to-face conflict, which leads to avoidance.
Second, you need to have observed your team members enough to have an accurate understanding of who to approach: the whole team, one person whom you can trust, or the boss? If you go straight to the boss you might violate a team norm, and turn everyone against you. But remote works makes it hard to know anybody well enough.
Third, if you do confront the team, you need conflict-management skills: How will you approach the problem without putting people on the defensive? Deliver the message poorly and they will likely blame you for the problem.
It’s easy to see how someone who grew up in the perfect storm would struggle with this one. More likely than not, the conflict won’t get resolved.
The solution
What should companies do about it?
Leaders need to change how we think about communication for everyone at work with one goal in mind: Make it clear and direct.
First, start by developing new rules and habits that reduce the guessing game for everyone. Organizations have different norms, like whether to be formal to the boss in email but informal in person. Some teams use emojis in their group chats, others don’t (and if you try it, you look weird). Even the insider language we use can change from group to group. People with little experience in organizational settings (or who went to internet school) might not know this. Don’t assume knowledge of these things, but make them explicit. Try creating a list in your teams, and share the list with new joiners.
Second, create rules around how people should communicate for different types of issues. Maybe check-ins or small requests can be handled in a group chat, but interpersonal issues or big decisions need to happen over the phone, Zoom or in person, and right away. If you see a conflict starting on Slack, arrange the live meeting. Conflict-management skills are learned when we interact in real life, and by observing others.
Third, create a culture of asking. Anxiety leads us to retreat, rather than asking how to approach situations. There will be many times when new employees are unsure of whether the criticism they faced was normal or toxic, if they should approach the team first or their boss over an interpersonal conflict, and what “casual Friday” really means. Leaders should showcase asking. Start with established employees doing it—asking for clarity over jargon in a meeting is a good place to start. People should feel comfortable asking, “Was this feedback negative from the boss? I can’t tell.” They will build social connections while learning the landscape.
In the end, it’s crucial for all employees to remember that younger generations have grown up on radically different methods of communication and in different social settings than the people who hire and manage them. Leaders may not “get” their Gen-Z employees, but remember: The employees don’t “get” the leaders, either. To adapt, we need a whole new mindset: Create strategies of direct communication that everyone, no matter what their generation, can get on board with.
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