Starting a career has increasingly felt like a right of passage for Gen Z and Millennial workers struggling to adapt to the working week and stand out to their new bosses.
But it looks like those bosses aren’t doing much in return to help their young staffers adjust to corporate life, and it could be having major effects on their company’s output.
Research by the London School of Economics and Protiviti found that friction in the workplace was causing a worrying productivity chasm between bosses and their employees, and it was by far the worst for Gen Z and Millennial workers.
The survey of nearly 1,500 U.K. and U.S. office workers found that a quarter of employees self-reported low productivity in the workplace. More than a third of Gen Z employees reported low productivity, while 30% of Millennials described themselves as unproductive.
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In a word? No. Companies need to adapt to changing conditions which includes hiring. An individual person needs to adapt, but the companies need to adapt to cultural shifts. That’s similar to the classic, “if I owe the bank $50k I can’t repay, I have a problem. If I owe the bank $50M, the bank has a problem.”
Nope, this article focuses on just one side however it is and should be a two way mutually beneficial deal, like any successful relationship. Good managers understand their employees and work within business needs to make their people happy.
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Then they can enjoy a high turnover rate as the best of best seek employment elsewhere. I’ll never understand this thinking. How do you expect to get anything other than shit employees if you treat them anyway you want? You aren’t the only employeer on earth
Pay peanuts, get monkeys
Disagree - there is a degree into which the needs of a managers direct report should be taken into account. Ignoring these needs in full comes with the risk of turnover and productivity loss. It’s a balancing act between business and employee needs. Again you’re taking it the the extreme by saying an employer should kowtow to the employee when the reality is that it should be a good balance in an ideal scenario and not entirely in either direction. A balance leads to the best outcomes for both parties.
I think you’re both right. Employees are free to choose jobs they like, and employers are free to hire people they like, for the most part. In theory.
Of course, the economy isn’t in great shape, and hasn’t been for almost the entire adult lives of millennials, so it’s not like people really have much of a choice in practice. You work at Soulless Company A, or you work at Soulless Company B…or you starve. Individual job-seekers don’t control the job market.
Similarly, companies don’t have that much of a choice, either. They can’t just exclusively hire senior citizens. They don’t control the hiring pool. It is expensive to hire and train new employees, and infeasible to replace a large percentage of your workforce on a short time scale.
Anyway, if you have a corporate culture that is hostile to the majority of employees under 40, you’ve got a big culture problem. You can’t just dig in your heels and expect two entire generations to come around to your geriatric worldview.
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He’s just saying these companies need to adapt their culture to fit the culture of younger generations or the companies will die with the boomers in a few years.
Culture changes over time, those that refuse to change get left behind, this has always been the way of the world
Personally I’m ok with a lot of companies failing and being replaced with healthier alternatives. In my mind we need to get back to the economy of thousands of smaller businesses rather than 15 mega corps owning everything on the planet.
Yes, I would encourage everyone to take as little shit from their job as possible. Frequent job-hopping has been the norm for millennials, because it’s typically the easiest way to increase your salary.
I think it’s more useful to think in terms of trends than in terms of individuals. This isn’t about one person or one company. One person can leave one company, no problem. Millions of people cannot leave thousands of companies. There’s nowhere else for that many people to go.
It seems more realistic for a small number of companies to adapt to a large number of individuals than vice-versa. If you have one unproductive employee, then they’re a bad employee. If you have hundreds or thousands of unproductive employees, then you are a bad employer.
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I am assuming at-will employment. But I don’t think unions change the dynamic in principle. They just shift the power balance away from employers. That’s great, but it doesn’t resolve the fundamental issue that there is NOT an abundance of choice.
That fact that you would use a word like kowtow to describe a company being willing to meet its employees halfway says a hell of a lot. This is why “nobody wants to work anymore.”
Who said anything about obligation?
And if no employee is interested in adapting to that employer’s conditions?
"“nOboDy WAnTs tO WoRk AnyMoRe!”
man its almost like it started around the time slavery ended. I wonder what kind of person would say such a thing as though they were entitled to the free labor of others.
your hired! get in the wood chipper… scab.
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Real question? If you like companies so much, why are you on Lemmy?
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Do you make barrels for a living? Do you forge iron with a big hammer? Do you rivet? I would wager not, and this is due to the people who employ people changing with a changing world. Add humans into the equation, and you can see how employers also need to assess that aspect of their operation; changing with the people who themselves change with the world around them.
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And the good empoyees who make lots of profit will happilly choose a employer who caters to their needs.
Companies are competing. Workers just gain advatages if more and more are fed up with shit employers.
Btw https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kowtow
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It’s not a privilege. It’s a contract with two parties. If either one of those doesn’t like it, they can go elsewhere.
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I meant in the colloquial meaning of contract meaning “an agreement between parties to exchange money, goods and services”, not the legal meaning of an employment contract.
That said, it’s unbelievably shitty that most jobs in the US don’t have written documentation about the actual contract that parties engage in and are only word-of-mouth or non-binding bullshit. The US should join the rest of the world in having actual enforceable rights around employment and should quit overregulating unions.
I don’t know if you’re trolling or just don’t get the argument.
If a company needs employees, they have to make the positions that they offer attractive, otherwise their workers will find different jobs. If an employer cannot or will not adjust to a changing labor market, they fail.
Call it Dutch Disease if you want, but that doesn’t change the equation.
Employees aren’t a right either.
That’s a two way street: if a company is fine with getting bottom of the barrel quality of work for bottom of the barrel pay, or with just not filling the positions, it’s their right to shoot themselves in the foot. Outside of legal minimums, no one owes anyone anything.
To quote the great boxer Ivan Drago, “if ‘company’ dies, it dies”. It might be stupid to ignore labor markets, and chasing quarterly profits at the expense of the company’s future is ultimately sociopathic and self-defeating in the long run, but that doesn’t change the basis.
If you are forced to provide a job to anyone that wants one because having any job entirely on your own terms is a right, then you have found yourself in a State planned economy and it won’t be you making the decision on where you work; please report to the Bureau of Labor to be assigned your labor role.
I would say it’s neither.
When a job is required to survive, it’s not a privilege.
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“No society is more than three meals away from a revolution”
A society that cant take care if it’s own people will collapse into bloody revolution
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It most definitely is the responsibility of an employer to keep a revolution from happening inside their company.
Which they won’t be able to if they keep treating their employees as trash.
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Having productive workers isn’t a right. If your company needs productive workers to remain profitable, then pay your employees more so they’ll be motivated to work harder. Simple. Don’t expect workers to lower their standard of living just for your benefit. That is entitlement of the worst kind.
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Capitalism requires people have jobs for commerse to work. The whole system falls apart if people dont have jobs. For the sake of its own preservation, it seems like jobs should be a right.
Everyone has a right to work, but your right to work doesn’t supercede your other rights as an employer to set the terms you are willing to hire under. If your plumbing or electrical breaks or needs upgrading, you get to set the terms you are willing to hire to do the work. If that means no one takes your job or you get shitty and unprofessional results, that’s on you. Bob the janky handyman doesn’t get to say he has a right to work so you are required to hire him at whatever rates he demands. It’s a two-way compact.
If you can demand employment as a right, it eventually won’t be eirher the employer or the employee making the decision where you work or for how much, it’ll be the authority enforcing that right to work. The needle swinging too far in either direction between late stage capitalism and State planned economies is bad, and strong regulation and strong worker’s protections is needed to keep the gauge in the green zone.
A company is not a right, it is a privilege.
If they do not contribute positively towards society, then we should be obliged to burn them to the ground.
Only if the employer is a short-sighted cadre of idiots.
I mean we could all be adhering, still, to the corporate norms of the 1880s but that would be ridiculous.
No because the employers goals are diametrically opposed to the workers in a system that requires infinite growth on a limited resources. The workers create the value. Not the employer.
No, it is up to the employee to so as much as they oblige in their contract.
Because it is not like those employers are going to do more than what is in there either.
The employee’s job is to deliver value to the business. The business’s job is to enable the employee to deliver that value. Mentorship, fair wages, career growth oppurtunities, etc. Many businesses fail on their end of the bargain. Its no wonder the employees are repaying the effort in kind.