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Many business owners and managers continue reporting on difficulties they’ve had integrating Gen Z employees into their companies, describing them variously as entitled, aloof, loath to take directions, and insufficiently skilled for their jobs. Now a New York University’s Stern School of Business professor goes even farther with that critique in a white paper published this month, claiming just 2 percent of the cohort born between 1995 and 2009 share the values employers seek from workers they hire.
The “Hiring Managers vs. Gen Z Priorities” paper, co-authored by journalist and MBA program professor Suzy Welch, examines a study that used the Values Bridge personality assessment tool Welch helped to develop. It started by analyzing data from the over 7,500 Gen Zers among the 45,000 people who have used the platform to date. Welch then compared the values that those younger people cited with the most frequently mentioned priorities of 2,100 knowledge industry hiring managers, who were surveyed separately but as part of same study. That revealed a near total mismatch in what Gen Zers and participating HR professionals considered important in the workplace.
“Only 2 (percent) of Gen Z rank all three hiring-preferred values (of managers) in their top five,” the paper said, warning of looming real-world business consequences. “For leading firms, this gap translates into an arms race to identify and secure the few candidates who align. For others, it requires more strategic adaptation, designing teams and roles that maximize partial fits while minimizing mismatch risk.”
The survey of hiring managers determined that their top three priorities were Achievement, or professional success; Scope, or learning and action; and Workcentrism, denoting comfort with hard work. The leading values of Gen Zers, by contrast, were described as Eudemonia, or well-being and self-care; Non-sibi, or helping others; and Voice, which represents authenticity and expression.
Many previous polls have found Gen Zers to be far more concerned with learning, mentoring, work-life balance, and mental health priorities than traditional career goals like ascending executive ranks and earning more money. But the new study’s results not only indicate that values gap is far wider than previously believed, but is often on shaky ground even when sharing did occur.
“Even where overlap exists, Gen Z often tries to dial these values down: 61 (percent) report Achievement is higher in their real life than they want in their ideal life,” it said. “The values gap between Gen Z and hiring managers creates two starkly different realities for employers.”
‘The attitudes are not.’
Given the rather dire implications of those findings for for Gen Z — especially in a virtually flat labor market that continues to tighten as businesses automate many jobs with artificial intelligence — it isn’t surprising Welch’s results have generated strong reactions that reveal stark contrasts. She said as much in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, where she quoted a human resources executive reacting to the results with the lament, “The bodies are out there. The attitudes are not.”
It’s for that reason that Welch foresees larger companies with big budgets competing with each other for the rare Gen Zers whose values entirely match their own. The rest, she predicts, will sift through the remainder for candidates with as many shared priorities as possible, then make their adherence to those through a virtual “values contract” a condition of their employment.
Unsurprisingly, many of Welch’s own MBA students were as dismayed by the findings as hiring managers, but for different reasons. Some of those younger people, she wrote, wondered how they’d ever land jobs in the current labor market if their age cohort has been labeled unemployable to boot.
Others, by contrast, argued that with Gen Z already representing a large percentage of the workforce — which will only grow larger with time — businesses also need to adapt to the values of younger workers to keep pace with the times.
“Maybe they’re right,” Welch said in her op-ed while explaining why she continues sharing the data with disconcerted Gen Zers. “And maybe business will change someday — when Generation Z is in charge. But right now, the marketplace faces a values disconnect between generations that could reshape the future of work… Values, after all, are choices. Like all choices, they have consequences.”
In the wake of Welch’s op-ed, critics have stepped up to take issue with the study’s findings. Most, it appears, aren’t even Gen Zers.
Some detractors have clearly viewed her tough love promotion of the study’s conclusion through the historical lens of her marriage to the late General Electric CEO Jack Welch. His relentless cost-cutting, and ruthless selloff of virtually any less than maximally profitable business units won him cheers from investors at the time. But they’ve more recently provoked jeers after companies that adopted the same strategy, notably Boeing, flirted with financial and industrial ruin from their embrace of his focus on immediate profits above everything else.
Moreover, Welch co-authored the 2005 best-seller Winning with her husband about his successful, no-holds-barred management style, an association some of those critics alleged colored her unflattering findings on Gen Z.
‘Because a boomer said so’
Other observers doubt the credibility of the findings themselves, and question both the study’s objectives and methodology. Some of those commentators have dismissed the results as another gratuitous hit on Gen Z’s beleaguered workplace reputation by older generations with more established positions in business.
Yet another group, meanwhile, flatly challenged the assumption that Gen Z’s values aren’t as legitimate as those of hiring managers or their companies.
“Is this woman really dragging a generation for valuing things like self-expression and altruism?” asked caprazzi in a thread on social media platform Reddit responding to Welch’s op-ed. “Our society and culture [are] diseased, we need a doctor over here.”
“Gen X leader here,” responded Austin1975. “These generation hit pieces don’t deserve anyone’s time. ‘Young people don’t wanna work’ gibberish has been around since the 90s. Today’s articles are purely for money now and full of rage bait and links to propaganda.”
“These same articles were written for Millennials as we were entering into the workforce, too, and during the Great Recession,” agreed Affectionate_Ratio79.
Other redditors also pointed out Welch’s own Baby Boomer cohort doesn’t exactly command the love and respect of younger generations is it sets to retire — often with envious fortunes. That’s particularly true of people still decades away from retirement, and currently facing the high prices, tight labor markets, and rising national debt levels that have spiked under Boomer control of business and government.
“Corporations exist to serve people not the other way around no?” asked the floridly named fartdonkey420, casting doubt about Boomers’ credibility to negatively judge Gen Z priorities. “Why should an entire generation modify their value systems in servitude to corporations?”
“Because a boomer said so,” replied Redd11r.
Those diverging reactions suggest Welch’s findings, much like Gen Z’s work ethic, are both open to debate, and likely to draw contrasting conclusions. But the study also demonstrates that while business leaders continue questioning the cohort’s personal and professional values, countless other observers are ready to defend them against what at times may seem like relentless scorn.
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Bruce Crumley
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