Work@Attitude

IN November last year, Siddharth Shah, a senior at an Indian venture capital firm, put up a screenshot of a leave request emailed by a Gen Z employee on X. “Hi Siddharth, I will be on leave on 8th November 2024. Bye”, was all that it read. In a demanding corporate culture where employees often write grovelling emails to get leaves sanctioned, this was a radical departure, and it quickly went viral.

What followed in response to Shah’s post was a string of comments by others, usually from older generations, about their own experiences of Gen Zs at the workplace. They wrote about the nature of these Gen Z leave requests, never asked but declared, and often quite suddenly, sometimes over email, but very often informally over WhatsApp. Some would give reasons—“sudden plan with family, on leave today”, or “had a breakup, need to go to the mountains to get over it”—and some, none at all. It was obvious that millennial, Gen X’er and boomer bosses were exasperated.

These aren’t solitary cases. Across the world, the arrival of Gen Zs at the workplace with their distinctive lifestyle and attitudes has been met with disbelief by older folk. In India, where corporate culture is often more demanding and stress­ful, the entry of Gen Zs, who according to some estimates already comprise one-fourth of the workforce, no doubt in junior positions, is leading to frequent clashes at work.

“They are just very high-maintenance,” says a senior communications professional in Mumbai. “It’s like you are walking on eggshells around them. You don’t know what will trigger them. And then they have very high expectations, like big salaries, high apprais­als and promotions, and constant pats on the back.” Despite their best attempts, this professional says very few Gen Zs stick to their jobs for long. It has got so bad, she says, that her firm now pre­fers hiring youths with some work experience instead of complete freshers.

Generational differences have always existed. In the West, the so-called Silent Generation, those who grew up during World War II, were followed by their polar opposites, the baby boomers, who came of age during the counter-culture movement. The boomers were followed by Gen X’ers, and later mil­lennials, the meeting of these generations at the workplace leading to some friction and heat. But these pale in comparison to the rancour set off by a generation that talks about mental health and boundaries.

“The problem with millennials is that they don’t stand up for themselves. They just suck it all up,” says 25-year-old Karthik (name changed upon request), a product manager in a bank in Kolkata.

Karthik, who joined the bank—his first job—a little over a year ago, describes himself as the “most fearless employee” his organisation has ever seen, someone who will be “re­membered for a long time” after he moves on from the job. “Despite trying very hard, till date they couldn’t dominate me, manipulate me, humiliate me and sim­ply don’t have any freaking idea how to deal with me,” he says. He comes from a batch of employees whose college education was disrupted by the pandemic. He had taken up the job due to the profile offered and because it was located in his home city. When he joined, however, the role had been changed—he believes internal office politics and lobbying by people who were already present in the company led to them tak­ing on aspects of his offered job profile—setting him up for a collision course with his immediate man­ager. His older colleagues and superiors deployed, he says, the typical workplace tactic of sweet-talking him about how good this new role was for his career, and later by manipulating and intimidating him. None of that worked, and after rebelling for some time, he got a lot of the old aspects of his promised role restored. “Their first reaction when I didn’t give in was absolute shock. And then later, it wasn’t taken well. But that’s how it is with Gen Zs, we don’t care. And I don’t know what it will be like in the future, but for now, we aren’t—or, at least I am not—afraid of being fired.” His, what he calls, “in-your-face working style” where he “attacks” when necessary, and does not ignore a problem, has got him into trouble. At some point, his relation­ship with his immediate boss got so strained that she stopped delegating any tasks to him. “It was meant to make me scared, but I just chilled,” he says. Then she once turned down his leave request on the grounds that he hadn’t informed well in advance. The next time he applied for a new leave, he sent the request 40 days in advance, sarcastically noting, “Hope this meets your expecta­tions.” The leave was never approved, but he went ahead and didn’t show up at work regardless.

Shveta Raina, the founder of Talerang, a career training platform that focuses on preparing students and young profes­sionals for the workforce, points to the different pri­orities that different gener­ations place on their jobs as the animating force behind these clashes at work. Gen Z, she says, values flexibili­ty and emotional security at work. They want to go to offices where they feel they are respected and treated well, where work-life bal­ance and mental health is taken seriously, and where their jobs feel meaningful. “With the previous gen­erations, it was responsi­bility that really inspired them. Priorities were very different. Getting to be­come a leader, getting that importance in the work­place, that recognition at work, that was what was important to them. If they got those, they didn’t think work-life balance was as important,” Raina says. Gen Zs by comparison, she says, don’t just have differing value systems, they also want to move up the corporate ladder at a pace that seems, to most, too dizzyingly unrealistic. “In our parents’ generation when you joined compa­nies, you would take like 20 to 30 years to rise to the top. But this is a digital generation, they are used to instant gratification. They have seen people like Mark Zuckerberg or Nikhil Kamath who have managed to succeed at a very young age,” she says.

MANY Gen Zs who joined the work­force in India some years back did so at a time of relative prosperity. Start­ups were booming, the economy was flush with venture capital, and there was a glut of well-paying jobs in the market. They were at a relative advantage and could dictate their terms of employment. But as the job market gets more circumspect, this is chang­ing. “Gen Zs were getting what they wanted when the market was good. They had their yoga classes [at work], work-from-home options and mental health deals. Now, while compa­nies are not openly appre­hensive about hiring Gen Zs, they are setting some ground rules about what they expect, about whether there will be remote or flexible work, and things like that. And it’s up to Gen Zs to decide if they want that job,” Raina says.

Nadia Khatib, a 25-year-old social media marketing professional based in Goa, is aware of how grim the job market has become in her line of work. She is hunting for a job that can ideally be done remotely or one that requires her to come in only a few days every week. But so far, she has noticed that firms appear to be avoiding recruiting Gen Zs or are expecting a social media marketing professional to perform a variety of roles. “They’ll expect one person to not just do the marketing, but also graphic designing, advertisements and SEO [search engine optimisation]. That’s an entire marketing department’sjob,” she says.

Khatib, who also runs a popular Instagram account around food in Goa, was previously working for a startup in the Gulf. The job, on the face of it, seemed to be just what she wanted. But a week into the job, although she liked her co-workers, it turned out to be nothing like she had imagined. “It [her role] was something else. It all went upside down,” she says. Khatib gave it one more week, and when she didn’t see any improvement, put in her papers. Many others would have probably given the job a longer timeframe or found anoth­er one before resigning. “I felt why waste my time,” she says. “I can’t trash my­ self. I feel like I need to love my work to work.”

As Gen Zs begin to make up a large base of the workforce, they have also been associated with new workplace trends. From “career catfishing” (accept­ing a job offer, but never showing up for work) to “taskmasking” (creating the illusion of productivity without actually work­ing), these often portray the generation as lazy and unprofessional. But why would someone go through all the trouble of applying and getting a job, and then simply not show up? And isn’t taskmasking just another name for the time-honoured tradition of procrastinating at the job?

Sunirman (name changed upon request), a 26-year-old publicist in Mumbai, says while these trends may not show Gen Zs in good light, it is a response to the current culture at most workplac­es. The job market is long and punishing, he says, with processes that go on for months before an offer is made. In many cases, the jobs advertised don’t even exist—a well-established trend, with companies posting fake job openings to show that they are recruiting and growing or to keep current employ­ees on their toes. “It is such a labour-intensive process these days. Maybe someone got a better offer? Maybe they just changed their mind?” he says.

And what about taskmasking? Hasn’t the illusion of being busy at work always existed? According to Sunirman, the difference between Gen Z taskmasking and the run-of-the-mill workplace procrastination lies in the motivation that drives this trend. “People who came from a culture where work preceded everything, even well-being, it was a way of impressing the boss. With Gen Zs, it is not about impressing the boss. It is about adapting to a work culture that isn’t all that great, that is exploitative and toxic,” he says, as he refers to the case of the 26-year-old Ernst & Young employee (Anna Sebastian Perayil) who allegedly died due to overwork and reported workplace apathy.

The topic of Gen Zs at the workplace is some­thing that often comes up on a popular Reddit forum called IndianWorkplace. One of the moderators of the group, a person who goes by the name of Simply_Param, himself a Gen Z and working at a multinational bank in Mumbai, points out that Gen Zs, especially those whose parents made significant financial gains (after the Indian economy opened up) and belong in the upper classes, come with a bit of privilege since they can take financial decisions without any repercussions. “What Gen Zs here are doing in India is imitating their foreign counterparts [at the work­place] and bringing a lot of what they see happening there. They are changing corporate practices. There is even a little casualness creeping into offices through them,” he says.

The Reddit group he moderates—along with a discord group—he says is becoming a good platform for Gen Zs and their older colleagues to thrash out their differences and learn from one another. He brings up the case of a senior at a firm who shared his experience of trying to recruit Gen Zs for his office on the Reddit group.

“He wanted to hire some MBA grads with an annual package of around Rs 8 to 9 lakh. On the day of the interviews, despite many showing interest in the job, no one showed up. And he was surprised and ranting about it, asking why Gen Zs are so unprofessional and that he had spent so much time preparing for those interviews,” he recalls.

Many Gen Zs piled on the discussion thread, berating the senior for the poor salaries on offer, and Simply_Param even intervened putting a comment to cut him some slack, since he had gone by the advice offered by an HR firm. “That manager later reached out to me and thanked for the help. He was actually saying that he had learnt a lot from the experience,” he says.

While there may be frequent clashes about attitudes to work between Gen Zs and those older, Glynis Fernandes, a 22-year-old publicist in Mum­bai, says that some of them are helping improve the workplace. She talks about the time a Gen Z colleague messaged their boss saying she wasn’t feeling well mentally and was taking the day off. “It was a shocker. And she [the boss] asked what was happening, and how can someone take leave like this,” Fernandes recalls. This however led to people in the office opening up about their own mental health challenges at work.

Since then, the firm has instituted initiatives like giving mental health leaves and partnering with a mental health app through which employees can get access to therapists. “Mental health isn’t taken seriously in most com­panies, and to be honest, some jobs like public rela­tions can be quite tough and demanding,” she says. “So that’s one way change is slowly coming in.”

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