Raising Generation Z
I wanted to write a piece about Generation Z. I am raising two of these creatures and, I reasoned, I would be able to bring unique insights to the emerging consensus among social demographers regarding how these people will behave in the workplace.
I have been an enthusiastic evangelist on the power of generational analysis to help us understand our own predilections and promote harmony and understanding in group settings. You may think of such statements about 20-year cohorts of people as sweeping generalizations. Yet, I have been at times mortified by the extreme fidelity between descriptions of Generation X and my own propensities and choices. I am a congenital project manager, for example, and I have an irreverent streak that compels me to question anything that looks remotely like an established institution or authority. I am stubbornly self-reliant and I balance whimsical creativity with dauntless pragmatism. Like many members of my generation, I am drawn to entrepreneurial ventures like a dutiful moth, and, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, I continue to believe that it is entirely possible to enjoy true work-life balance (sorry, @sherylsandberg).
I enjoy thinking about how world events have shaped each generation’s outlook and how one generation’s adaptive parenting style begets another’s defining traits. Generation X, for instance, was the first generation of latchkey kids. Our Baby Boomer parents divorced at a rate of 50% — the highest of any generation to date — and both of our parents often had to work out of economic necessity. With little supervision, we had to learn to fend for ourselves.
The emerging theory of Generation Z (those born between 1996 and 2010) already tells me how my young children are predicted to behave as employees. According to an article recently published in Forbes, Generation Z in the United States is the most ethnically diverse and multicultural in history. My own children (who are multi-ethnic) do seem to have an evolved relationship to race and ethnicity, rarely referring to other boys and girls by the color of their skin and, when doing so, drawing upon a vast gradient palette of beige and brown.
Whereas I am techno-literate (perhaps even verging on technophile), my kids belong to the first generation of true digital natives. They tap anything that looks like a screen to see how it might respond and they get frustrated when it takes more than two days for Amazon Prime to deliver an item. According to the aforementioned article, the attention span of Generation Z is every bit as short as that of their Generation Y/Millennial counterparts and they are masterful multitaskers. Unlike Millennials, however, members of Generation Z carefully curtail their social media presence and favor platforms (like Snapchat) that allow for anonymity.
Because Generation Z has grown up in the shadow of a world defined by recession and war, they are thought to be cautious and pragmatic. To my relief (as I think about how I might manage life a few years from now with two teenaged boys), this means that they are known for higher than average rates of seatbelt usage and lower than average rates of underage drinking.
We can use what we believe we know about Generation Z to make some educated predictions about what they will want from their future workplace. (The world of commerce, of course, has already placed some big bets on what they will want to buy. Because of their pragmatism, members of Generation Z are generally not enamored with the idea of owning a car, opting instead to use ride-sharing and car-sharing services. As a result, big automakers such as Ford are positioning themselves to be players in these markets.) We can imagine that Generation Z will be drawn to socially progressive enterprises that embrace inclusivity. We can also imagine that they will value technologically sophisticated and stimulating work environments that will permit them to create and connect with others with ease and speed. Finally, we can predict that Generation Z will be drawn to trustworthy employers who deliver on the promise of advancement and stability.
I dearly want to understand my children — their motivations, their perspectives, their gifts and talents. Moreover, as a passionate scholar of workplace issues, I am specifically interested in understanding how they will fare in the world of labor. However, I keep butting up against the limits of sociology’s ability to fully illuminate that for me. Which reminds me that the future is far from written.
I believe that our current predictions about Generation Z are fair and reasonably sound. Yet, it is only in retrospect that we will be able to truly understand who Generation Z grew up to be and explain to ourselves what became of them. Generational theory is a helpful tool for tracing the origins of the traits cohorts of adults appear to share. However, I find myself struggling with the unease of looking ahead to what will become of a group whose youngest members are the six-year-olds born in 2010. The story of their childhood is only partially written, and it seems insincere to excitedly leaf ahead to its ending without also acknowledging the significance of our collective authorship. We are literally in the process of creating the world that will not only define who Generation Z ultimately becomes but also what they will need to face — what we all will need to face — for as long as we live. I want very much to look into the future, but beyond the intellectual fascination of this exercise, I become soberly aware of my responsibility for the present day.
What is it like to be a girl breaching adolescence in the #metoo era? What is it like to be an eight-year-old learning about the murders at Sandy Hook? If we do not ask our children these questions, and if we do not earnestly listen to, consider, and act upon the answers, we leave their future to momentum and chance. Several years hence, we will read an account of Generation Z and languidly marvel at the precision with which the impact of global events drew the silhouette of their collective persona.
If we do engage our children in a dialogue about what is occurring in the world around them, then we accept the present-day invitation to write the story and define the lessons. Even in the face of heartbreak, we teach our children that they always have a choice to grow in wisdom and to heal. We embrace our responsibility to create, together with our children, the safe, egalitarian, and prosperous future that many of us want. If you believe, as do I, that generations of people are defined by the significant events that envelop them as they come of age, then we have both an opportunity and an obligation at all times to help inform who the upcoming generation will grow up to be.
I wanted to write a piece about Generation Z in the workplace. As it turns out, what I needed to write was this.
