I am a 60-something-year-old former media industry executive who, nearly 30 years ago, realised I hated management and went back to my roots on the creative front line.
It was the best career decision I ever made. At the time, the clients I freelanced for were mostly around my age, which was a bit strange as previously we’d been colleagues, whereas now I had voluntarily downgraded myself.
Today, I still work full time while almost all my contemporaries have retired with their juicy final salary pensions.
I work because I love it, I quite need the money and I hate seeing formerly young, talented, energetic people transformed into dreary old bores grumbling predictably away about Rachel Reeves, small boats and “the woke brigade”.
There’s one thing that is weird, though. Almost all my clients – bosses in effect – are younger than my children, and in some cases not that much older than my eldest grandchildren.
This can lead to funny moments, culturally interesting moments, and awkward ones.
Like the time I asked a start-up company I was working for in Los Angeles if they could do me some business cards as they are still valid currency – essential, actually – in Europe, in China and Japan. My mid-twenties bosses looked puzzled and asked me to specify exactly what it was I needed. Nobody admitted as much, but it was clear they didn’t know what a business card was.
My children are two, five and seven - it's time for the sex talk
Read MoreI was back a month later and they proudly presented me with a box of a thousand cards. They were beautiful, high quality, with the company’s logo, their US address and my email all correct. They even got my UK mobile number set out properly, which I wasn’t expecting.
There was one problem; they were double the size of a normal business card, like cardboard flyers. They were functionally near-useless and I was about to say, “Almost, but not quite,” when I saw the printing shop bill for $600 (£487) in the box. I thought I’d better not embarrass them. They’d probably been ripped off by some wily shop owner of my generation.
Surprisingly, as it turned out, the cards have been rather admired – and the story of how they came to be supersized goes down well with fellow boomers, who will then tell their own stories of confusions between us last-man-standing baby boomers and Gen Z.
Another not-untypical inter-generational glitch: pre the Ukraine war and the freeze in relations with Russia, I was asked to do some work for a London hotel which had hired a superstar chef from St Petersburg. Part of his story was that he’d worked in the Kremlin, and previous to that was a chef with the Red Army.
I was explaining this to a young journalist at one of more intellectual newspapers. “Sorry,” she said, “Red Army? Is that something like a band?”
I was shocked, but it was fair enough, I suppose. I was being a bit of a dinosaur. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation haven’t been known as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Yet on the other hand, I feel she really should have known what the Red Army was. If I have one gripe with Gen Z, it’s that their general knowledge tends to be severely lacking. This isn’t just my old-fart observation. I ran into an eminent acquaintance of my age the other day, who in his non-retirement owns a rather scholarly current affairs magazine. As it’s run on a shoestring, all the employees are recent graduates.
“What are they like?” I asked.
“They’re much cleverer than us,” he said, “More analytical, more academically rigorous, more liberal, more empathetic, all the good stuff. But they know absolutely nothing. Without their outboard brains, their phones and their laptops, they barely know their own names.”
The people I work for are several steps on from being recent graduates, but I’d agree with my learned friend on what I, in dinosaur mode, would call their obsession with the warm fuzzies.
This is not being entirely dismissive, even if their youthful punctiliousness over pronouns and the like are, to us boomers, just a silly passing fashion fad. More seriously, the extent to which Gen Z have internalised the big ethical norms – the complete extirpation from their world view of racism, sexism, classism and almost every other bad-ism, is one of the wonders of the modern world.
It’s as if their very DNA has been changed – for the better. They don’t have a racist or anything else-ist thought in their head. It’s a truly beautiful thing.
Accordingly, I find my Gen Z bosses a lot more friendly, accommodating and easier to deal with than my middle-aged bosses were when I was in my twenties and thirties.
When I was a young dad, telling my managers I was knackered because the baby was crying all night would have marked me out as a total wimp; I suspect today, it would be a lot more acceptable.
Gen Z has been brought up in a far kinder milieu. If I were being full-on cynical dinosaur, I’d say they grow up skiving and avoiding anything inconvenient to their blessed work-life balance, so are naturally tolerant of other skivers, but I honestly don’t think that’s it. They are just gentler people.
But here’s another thing that is almost painful to me: their use of English is in large measure poor and tone deaf.
There’s a weird thing recently where instead of saying “Could you possibly do me a note on X?”, they’ll write, “May you please do me a note on X?” as if they’re praying. I’ve had instance after instance of this ugly, tortuous usage and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a de facto part of the language like the dreaded, “I would of done it but I didn’t.”
There are other horrors. Don’t even get me going on the trend towards pronouncing the eighth letter of the alphabet “haitch”.
I think this unsteadiness with literacy, in truth, may be the reason Gen Z-ers are so much happier communicating on WhatsApp/Slack or any phone-based platform than email, and are quite contemptuous of email – even though email is to my mind so much better. I think they are aware they are in a lot of instances not hugely literate, hence awkward with anything fuller than a text.
There are other Gen Z workplace characteristics of varying amusement or slight irritation to older people.
I find they reply to emails as and when they fancy. If someone answers an email promptly, it’s a sure sign they’re not young. This is probably because of the enormous traffic of online communications back and forth that they have day and night. But I regularly find Gen Z-ers failing to reply even to emails which are to their benefit.
I also find younger bosses more process-driven than we ever were. In what I am forced to call “my day” we just did what we did and were judged on how it went. Today it seems you’re expected to explain how you plan to carry out an assignment before you’ve done the groundwork.
Friends who hire young people say they’re often more interested at interview in the benefits and perks than what the job will entail. When they get there, one small creative agency owner says, “It’s as if they feel they’re doing you a favour coming in to work. And that work is often remarkably sloppy.”
A slightly tricky thing I experience is young executives taking me aside to ask my advice on a career or office matter when they also have hire and fire authority over me. It’s not an insurmountable awkwardness, but does sometimes seem a bit odd.
Another Gen Z thing is the way they will avoid phone calls and opt to interact online rather than speak to people; even a chatbot seems preferable to them than a person. They don’t even seem to talk to each other at work much, possibly because they are in touch all the time with their own “friendship group” – an authentic Gen Z term.
I have to say that if I were still heading a department, I’d be driven nuts by knowing all my team were in private conversations with their friends outside the office – the grown-up equivalent of talking in class. Less serious a charge, but more an oddity to those of us who for their entire career regarded the restaurant and the pub as an extension of the workplace. I think there are two reasons for that. Because of the friends-in-a-box world via their social media apps, they are not inclined to socialise much in the office. But also, restaurants and pubs are far too expensive for them. I have a young relative on a six-figure salary who brings in a packed lunch from home.
Yet despite these misgivings, the phenomenon of the young, and possibly slightly knowledge-lacking, boss is far from a deal breaker for me. I’d rather be in the race any day with these smart, refreshingly liberal and good-hearted people calling the shots than grousing powerlessly with my contemporaries from the sidelines about what they’d do to that Sadiq Khan if they had half a chance.
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