HUGH OSMOND: Most of my staff are Gen-Z snowflakes but it’s not their fault. Blame the universities and schools who fill their heads with nonsense
- READ MORE: Endemic inefficiency, shirking from home…
The world of work is changing. And maybe that’s not all bad. As an employer in the hospitality industry, though, I still can’t help being surprised when new hires – often fresh out of school or university – inform me they’d really rather not work Fridays or weekends. ‘That’s the job, unfortunately,’ I have to tell them.
I’m clearly not the only one to have been left occasionally bemused by ‘Generation Z’ – those people born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s.
Channel 4’s chief executive Alex Mahon raised eyebrows this week by suggesting that the latest cohort of youngsters are a menace in the workplace as they ‘haven’t got the skills to discuss’ or ‘the skills to disagree’.
Research carried out by Channel 4 in 2022 also labelled nearly half of Gen Z as ‘Young Illiberal Progressives’, or ‘Yips’ – far more diverse in their sexuality, for instance, than previous generations but, paradoxically, less tolerant.
Of course, older people have been complaining about ‘young people today’ since at least the 5th Century BC, when the Greek philosopher Socrates lamented that the youth of Athens didn’t show enough respect to their elders.
As an employer in the hospitality industry, though, I still can’t help being surprised when new hires – often fresh out of school or university – inform me they’d really rather not work Fridays or weekends
Channel 4 ‘s chief executive Alex Mahon raised eyebrows this week by suggesting that the latest cohort of youngsters are a menace in the workplace as they ‘haven’t got the skills to discuss’ or ‘the skills to disagree’
So is this just the same age-old complaint? Or are Gen Z really impossible to work with?
As a businessman, I come across many bright, confident and sociable youngsters. More than 60 per cent of the thousand or so people working for Various Eateries plc, the company I helped found, are under 23.
But I see both the good and the bad – and Alex Mahon has a point. Today’s new generation of work-starters have a serious set of problems, on a scale I haven’t seen before in 40 years of business.
When they join, many young waiters and bar staff are incapable of using their own initiative or even of smiling and making small talk with customers. So now we often have to tutor them in these basic life skills.
And it’s certainly true that many – particularly those straight out of university – don’t want to listen to views different from their own. Luckily there are few surer ways to find people with views different from your own than by working in a bar or restaurant.
The young people I meet often have a strong and commendable sense of justice, together with a belief that the world should be a fair and logical place. But a few shifts waiting on the general public usually changes those ideas quite quickly.
I remember one young woman who had to grin and bear it after she served a woman her strawberry ice cream, only to be asked why it was pink and told that she was a ‘stupid girl’.
But alas, the customer is always right, even when they’re very obviously not. And to someone weaned on the idea of undiluted justice, that’s anathema.
One of the more remarkable things I’ve observed in recent years is how few of the young people who start work for us have ever had a job of any kind – whether a paper-round, serving in a shop on Saturdays or doing menial work in the university holidays.
They’ve never had any real-world experience to temper the completely unrealistic view of life they’ve been fed at school – and particularly at university.
Sure, schools and universities have a duty to build up a student’s confidence and sense of self-worth. Yet in a society where too many teachers operate in fear of debate or of getting cancelled, and there’s a prioritisation of ‘self-care’, this too often looks like coddling.
As a result, people now enter jobs thinking they can dictate their own terms. That is not how life works, and it never has been.
Everyone, from a bartender and a bricklayer to a barrister and a brain surgeon, has to start at the bottom, which usually means doing the lowliest tasks.
Sure, schools and universities have a duty to build up a student’s confidence and sense of self-worth. Yet in a society where too many teachers operate in fear of debate or of getting cancelled, and there’s a prioritisation of ‘self-care’, this too often looks like coddling
More generally, we need to ask ourselves why the British university system now so often clearly fails to provide a proper, realistic preparation for adult life and the world of work for so many of its graduates
They have to serve their time and earn their stripes by gaining the respect of their peers. That’s the way of adult life.
Time and again, however, we see young people coming in for interviews and acting as if they’re interviewing us; as if our company is there only to meet their needs in terms of pay, hours, responsibilities and flexible working from home.
And they often expect everything at once. A study this year found that 52 per cent those aged 18 to 24 expect an annual promotion, meaning bosses are having to invent new titles to keep them happy.
Even so, it’s surely a mistake to demonise young people for failings for which we, the older generation, must bear much of the blame.
It’s not the fault of the young, for example, that they lost key years of socialisation through the Covid lockdowns and the switch to online teaching that followed. (And there are plenty of young people who are bitter to have given up such key years of their lives to protect more vulnerable older generations – only for those people to turn round and call them ‘snowflakes’.)
But far worse, in my view, is that they’ve been fed a whole lot of nonsense about what they can expect in the world of work – and the blame for that can’t be laid at their door either.
Nonetheless, amid all the gloom about Generation Z, all is not lost.
I’ve seen numerous examples of people who at first struggled with social skills blossom in just a few short months. I’ve seen youngsters who initially shied away from the busiest evening shifts soon start to volunteer for them after realising that they are the most fun and most productive.
I’ve seen many quickly learn that customers may hold all sorts of views they themselves don’t agree with – and come to accept this as a crucial lesson of adult life.
Very importantly, they learn not to take every opposing opinion, or even gratuitous rudeness, as a personal affront.
Young people seem to complain a lot about generational unfairness. But they haven’t had it easy. For instance, the housing rental market has become highly dysfunctional and stratospherically expensive, which in many cases gives them little option but to live at home. This in turn gives them less incentive to find full-time jobs and take responsibility as self- sufficient adults.
READ MORE: The NHS doesn’t need more of our taxes. It needs to start thinking like the private sector: Leading businessman HUGH OSMOND says chronic waste and inefficiency is hurting patients
So I think Alex Mahon’s comments about Generation Z should be taken seriously, but not so much by them as by us, the Baby Boomer generation who have taken so many of the decisions that have shaped their lives.
We need to fix the housing problem so that young people have reasonable places to live at reasonable rents.
We need to gradually introduce them to the world of work so they can learn the social skills that years of lockdown and online learning prevented them from acquiring.
But most of all, we need to ask ourselves two things.
First, why do 50 to 60 per cent of university students study for degrees which do nothing to help their employment prospects?
Second why do they – far more so, in my experience, than people who start work straight from school – hold wholly unrealistic ideas about the workplace and ludicrously inflated impressions of the value of their qualifications?
More generally, we need to ask ourselves why the British university system now so often clearly fails to provide a proper, realistic preparation for adult life and the world of work for so many of its graduates.
All that is down to older generations, not theirs. And if it was all to be put right, then perhaps the young people of Gen Z would not be facing such a painful wake-up call.
- Hugh Osmond is director of the hospitality group, Various Eateries plc.
Source: Read Full Article
