It’s no surprise millennials resent Gen Z at work

It feels too young to start stories with “in my day” while in your thirties. But the initial cohort of millennials might justifiably look at their most junior colleagues in the workplace and feel old before their time.

For the few Gen Zs willing to listen, the story – as told by those born between 1981 and 1996 – goes something like this.

Graduating as the 2008 financial crisis tightened its grip on Britain’s job market was tough. Youth unemployment had just hit a record high, the corporate world was one of strict hierarchy and long hours, and competition for well-paid work with good prospects was fierce.

In short, the message was: Forget about working from your bedroom and enjoying shorter summer hours. Abandon hope of a work-life balance. You are lucky to have a job – be grateful, and get on with it.

I know that tale is true, because I was there. In 2009, the year I graduated and one of the toughest on record for UK plc, finding a job was not easy.

The power was entirely in the hands of employers – one of my (unpaid) magazine internships involved pulling discarded pots from the office bins and filling them with compost for staff.

When I had a part-time job spritzing perfume around a famous department store, not wearing a full face of makeup was openly considered a sackable offence.

It is hard to imagine new graduates, or any Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012), putting up with such nonsense now.

Unsurprisingly, millennials who are now managers feel pretty annoyed about this. A 34-year-old media executive I know is fed up with the people in his team who – despite being barely ten years younger than him – have a wildly different attitude to work, frequently calling in sick and leaving early.

Another friend, a 35-year-old charity boss, couldn’t believe the number of times she has been “ghosted” by early-twentysomethings who have been offered a job and never responded.

A 33-year-old advertising manager complained to me about junior staff not wanting to cancel any personal plans – even when there is critical client work that needs to get done.

In some ways, us millennials are jealous. Having spent our twenties labouring in the office until midnight, going to every evening work event going and thinking it’s the norm to be shouted at, an element of envy is not surprising.

“We’ve had a bit of a mare,” admits the advertising manager.

“They definitely have a healthier relationship with work and with boundaries. They also have the sense that they don’t need to work their nuts off, because they can’t buy a house anyway.”

Maybe my generation did get it wrong, but it’s hard not to feel that the pendulum has now swung too far the other way.

While the dearth of jobs after the financial crisis created a generation of people pleasers, low rates of youth unemployment, chronic labour shortages and rising wages risk giving Gen Z workers an overinflated sense of entitlement.

After all, if they decide that a job isn’t quite good enough, they can just pack it in and go get another one.

It’s hardly a surprise that they are fussier than some of their older peers ever were, given so many companies are struggling to fill roles. The UK is facing the largest labour crisis in the West, OECD data showed last week, with only Costa Rica and Colombia suffering bigger falls in workforce participation.

So many people are currently missing from the jobs market that Rishi Sunak on Friday vowed to strip GPs of their power to sign people off work.

Around a quarter of Britons of working age are economically inactive – 9.4 million of those aged 16 to 64 – with a record 2.8 million inactive due to long-term sickness.

As high vacancy rates make it easier to switch jobs, trends on social media typically related to Gen Z – such as “lazy girl jobs” and “quiet quitting” – have hammed up the stereotype that those now entering the workforce have every intention of exploiting the situation they find themselves in.

Millennial bosses are frustrated that a group so close to them in age is causing such a headache.

One manager fed up with so many junior staff clocking off early said he was at a loss for what to do – in an industry with demanding clients, it’s impossible to always be accommodating.

Another executive complains that his Gen Z staff make him feel awkward for sometimes asking them to stay in the office for longer.

He is convinced that his generation has been doubly stung – by entering the jobs market at a time when vacancies were shrinking, but also by their proximity to the previous cohort, Gen X, which gave millennials an aspiration for home ownership just before it became clear that the barriers to buying a property were often impossibly high.

Some managers could be creating their own problems by tiptoeing around their youngest employees too much.

A chief executive in charge of a charity said his rivals are overcomplicating things by trying to bend over backwards to appease new joiners and then resenting it.

His young workforce has to be in the office five days a week, a decision he claims they’re fine with because he made that rule clear when they took on the job and the work is interesting.

Countless studies have backed this argument up, showing that Gen Z are engaged at work if they feel valued, enjoy the job and like the company. They want to raise the bar of working life. In my day, they will one day say, we just didn’t put up with over-demanding bosses.