If Appius Claudius Gaecus had got his way, there would be no gen Z. The Roman censor banned the letter Z from the Latin alphabet some time around 300BC, apparently because the shape of the mouth when making the sound reminded him of the “teeth of a corpse”.
Forbidding workers from using a letter is exactly the sort of move that would get a modern manager labelled the boss from hell by younger employees. Fortunately, executives can now call on a new wave of advisers to help them understand how to deal with unhappy young people – the gen Z whisperers.
These teens and twentysomethings will patiently explain some of the features of gen Z culture that may be baffling to boomer bosses, as well as pointing out that, actually, today’s young people aren’t quite as different as some pop management gurus would have people believe.
There’s no shortage of surveys and advice about gen Z, from myths about them being disloyal job-hoppers or having short attention spans to accusations that they are simply idle.
But every generation gets accused of being lazy, says Holly Hobbs, founder of the employment advice agency Apprentivia and one of the new generation of “whisperers”.
And the misconceptions are numerous, says Shoshanna Davis, whose firm, Fairy Job Mother, has worked with M&S, BT, Amazon and Lidl. “Entitlement is one,” she adds, dismissing the myth that gen Z-ers “want to be in the role for four months then get promoted”.
The concept of the gen Z whisperer emerged in the US two years ago as a result of projects set up by two PR firms: Berns Communications Group’s Z Suite of 35 students and influencers, and Edelman’s Gen Z Lab, featuring 250 of its employees, drawn from seven countries, mostly the US. Now the concept has arrived in the UK thanks to entrepreneurs such as Hobbs, Davis and Jenk Oz, who set up a website aged 12 and now, at 19, has his own company, Thred Media, helping Google, Ford and Coca-Cola.
Hobbs, 21, helps employers attract apprentices through marketing on TikTok and other platforms, creating video campaigns and helping potential recruits through the application process. Most employers make droningly dull videos, so Hobbs’ firm, Apprentivia, focuses on what gen Z are most interested in. “Health, wealth or relationships,” Hobbs says. “These are the three things that make someone attracted to read, watch or listen to something.”
Employee advocacy is “on the rise massively”, Hobbs says, because people tend to trust younger employees’ accounts of their experiences. And supporting applications is vital because employers don’t understand how daunting it can be to compete with what feels like thousands of other people for one or two apprenticeships. “The tips on an employer’s website for dealing with that will be ‘drink water’, ‘sit in a quiet space’. That’s not cutting it.”
Once at work, there are all sorts of opportunities for misunderstandings, according to Davis, 29, who set up Fairy Job Mother during the Covid lockdowns. She started by offering advice to young people but has branched out into advising employers as well, and is teaming up with Hobbs to launch a podcast, Future Talent Talks.
“The impacts of the pandemic, the cost of living, mental health – these are things that are showing up at work,” Davis says. Managers can be surprised that some employees turn off cameras during video calls, without understanding that they may be attending the meeting on their bed because their single room in a houseshare has no chair or desk.
“Authenticity” is the buzzword for gen Z as consumers, and Oz believes that firms have relied too much on the belief that giving their product to a few social media influencers would be enough. But too often audiences don’t believe the promotions because they feel inauthentic.
Oz emphasises that gen Z-ers are not a monolithic force; it’s simply that their formative years took place during the global financial crisis and the emergence of social media.
That sort of talk is music to the ears of Prof Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, who is exasperated by parts of what he describes as the “generational consulting” industry. Before gen Z whisperers there were millennial experts, he says, and the sector was worth $70m in 2015, according to his book Generations.
“It is frustratingly evidence-free,” he says. “Workplace research is the noisiest area of generational myth.” He distinguishes between the effects of age, period and cohort, focusing on things that are actually different about gen Z or baby boomers or generation X.
“There’s an idea that we’ve got a socially responsible activist generation who only care about the values of an organisation. There’s really scant evidence of that. In fact, older generations are more likely to boycott products for social reasons – partly because they’re richer, and probably grumpier.”
Yet there are some ways gen Z is different. The economy was kind to boomers but has not been to gen Z or millennials, and one in three 18- to 24-year-olds report symptoms of common mental health disorders – a real cohort effect, Duffy says.
He is most concerned about a third difference. Gen Z have much lower confidence in the police, courts and criminal justice system than any older generation did at their age. “That’s a very unusual pattern in the UK, and I do worry about gen Z’s connection to public institutions. The tragedy is that we’re distracted by all these exaggerated differences. The real ones are not often talked about.”
