Workplace or TikTok Set? Gen Z Workers in San Francisco Get a Rude Awakening
“Gen Z workers were texting and taking voice calls during meetings — even during job interviews. ‘When you do that, you might as well walk out the door,’ he said.”
They FaceTime at their desks, show up in sweats or other inappropriate office attire, and expect a promotion by lunchtime. Some of them even bring their parents to job interviews.
To put it mildly, their older coworkers aren’t impressed. The latest crop of Gen Z workers is attempting to redefine workplace norms, and they’re running into some resistance along the way.
There are several possible explanations for why Gen Zers are struggling to adapt to the corporate workplace. Perhaps it’s because they’re the first generation to grow up entirely online. Or maybe it stems from a lifetime of being coddled—made to feel exceptional by parents, teachers, and other adults. The disruption of remote learning during the pandemic certainly didn’t help. Whatever the cause, many Gen Zers are entering the workforce with little understanding of how to behave in a professional environment.
In a recent article, The San Francisco Standard’s Zara Stone took a closer look at this startling behavior — and how bewildered Bay Area bosses are scrambling to deal with it.
Stone noted that “the generational divide has become starker in the past few months, as return-to-office policies have brought in Gen Zers for the first time — in many cases after years of working and attending school remotely.” Uncertain about how to navigate this new workplace reality, Stone reports that many Bay Area employers have brought in etiquette experts to train young employees in basic professional conduct.
Stone spoke to Marin-based etiquette coach Rosalinda Randall who has seen a spike in inquiries over the last couple of months.
The requests come from tech campus managers, winery execs, and even country clubs. All are a variation on the same complaint: Gen Z employees are treating the office like an extension of their homes.
One supervisor told Randall a new hire repeatedly left food wrappers scattered on the communal lunch table, assuming janitors would clean it up. “Their manager didn’t know how to handle it, as they didn’t want to sound like a parent,” said Randall.
According to Randall, this niche has become quite lucrative.
She charges clients up to $2,500 for 90-minute workshops for employees, covering everything from how to make eye contact to where to stick your name tag (always on the right) to how to ask for — not demand — things from your boss.
She tailors her presentations toward clients’ biggest complaints. One Bay Area tech firm asked her to address personal hygiene, because two new hires did not shower or change their shirts for weeks. “They didn’t want to deal with it, so they hired me,” said Randall. She made her presentation to all new hires and added slides to hammer home the hygiene point.
Etiquette coach Melissa Franks has also experienced an uptick in business. Employers often feel like they’re being forced into “parent mode” by many new hires, she said. They resent what they see as “special accommodations and extreme levels of hand-holding.”
Franks encourages companies to develop “cultural blueprints” for young workers — basically, a playbook that details everything from appropriate office attire to email signoffs and gets as granular as outlining ideal “meeting behavior”: 70% observing, 25% asking clarifying questions, and 5% contributing ideas.
Randall said this conflict isn’t confined to the corporate world.
Hospital managers have told Randall that newly hired nurses are showing signs of apathy and entitlement, that they bristle at overly chatty patients or try to shirk “dirty” tasks. “They demand to be released from bedpan duty,” she said. “They don’t like it, so they think they shouldn’t have to do it.”
Stone noted that some companies have set up in-house etiquette training programs. Additionally, a handful of local universities have begun holding etiquette seminars for upperclassmen who will soon be entering the workforce.
While it’s great that employers are finding ways to deal with these problems, I’m still marveling at the fact that Gen Zers need to be taught not to take voice calls, or respond to texts, during job interviews.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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judging by the picture its
gen zzzzzzzzzzzz
Hahahahahaha!!!
I had etiquette training in elementary school in the late 60’s. This also included learning to waltz and square dance. Modern schools are total failures in every aspect and parents aren’t far behind. You can’t raise children well if you babysit them with electronics all the time. This is so sad.
“Stone reports that many Bay Area employers have brought in etiquette experts to train young employees in basic professional conduct.”
First high schools were teaching the socially promoted how to read and write and count.
Then it was colleges.
Now it’s employers.
When an employer’s duties include potty training the new hires, take me Lord, I’m done here.
It really is pathetic, isn’t it?
1960 …….. Miss Jones …. taught us all that and more.
The last two generations are untrainable. They have no ethics, morals or skills.
Wife said she remembered that. How to set a table, how to curtsy and so on. Now she sits on the hiring committee of a large multi location company and said she has had someone show up for an interview with her mother, Guys come in wearing shorts and sitting slouched with legs spread wide, girls wearing spandex and belly shirts. It’s pretty amazing stuff.
The worst one I had was a very nice blond, an applicant for a law enforcement job, who asked to bring her boyfriend in with her for the interview. We talked a bit, and I consulted with my second line after which she decided not to do the interview. And this was in 1987 or 1988………………………………
One of our customers was AOL. I worked extensively with their startup crew. Top notch professionally, casual dress but crisp. Then I lost touch after I was moved to national customer service. A couple years later, I revisited as a fly-in troubleshooter. I walked into a room full of people with so much face hardware, tattoos, and street garb that I thought it was a waiting room for rehab. My AOL contact explained that all these people were interviewing for level one phone support jobs, and no one would actually see them. I began to understand why level one phone agents were so brain-dead. And this also was late ’80s.
Agree. The schools see their roll as protectors of the students from the real world, rather than doing the job of preparing them for it. It’s just jaw dropping to see how backwards they are.
This is something that apparently should be taught in High School since so many parents haven’t bothered.
No one had to teach me how to behave and not behave in a professional setting. It was self-evident after years of attending school and plain basic common sense. Obviously their schools had no standards and let these kids do whatever they wanted.
Another failure.
I’m guessing that you had teachers who came to school dressed professionally, and acted professionally and respectfully. You probably didn’t know (or even think about) their sexual preferences, either.
Especially if they were nuns.
There are few social niceties online, which is like the Wild West due to anonymity or the fact they just don’t care. Face to face interactions are far more judgmental and curb this sort of behavior.
And the kids are spoiled rotten. Glad to see someone making a buck over it.
You are so correct.
Even I have been belligerent on these posts because I believed I was dealing with a GenZ troll. Only to find out that JR, tv1156, and many others are supposed to be adults over 40.
Who knew?
It’s not the schools’ fault, it’s the parents. Schools shouldn’t have to be in the position of teaching what used to be commonsense etiquette.
Our kids were not raised like this, and we always got compliments on how well-behaved they were (we homeschooled). Then again, spouse and I are Gen Jones/Gen X, with a strong Korean cultural influence.
FTA: our kids are Gen Z.
Same here. However, we actually parented The Boy and taught him manners and respect for others and himself.
In their defense, perhaps they understand at some level (to the extent they can understand anything) that A.I. will soon render them superfluous in the workplace anyway, so why bother?
What’s with the ‘stick your nametag on the right’ advice? My automatic reaction is always, always on the left.
Same.
Military I think is on the right though.
I believe military is. Your branch is on the left, your name on the right. Police are the same. Badge on the left, name on right. Polos and such for sports teams and organizations have the team/organization on the left. I always figured it was so your branch or organization was closer to your heart, both symbolically and literally, and showing that the organization is more important than the individual.
But if there’s no organization to represent, I don’t see a reason not to put your name on your left/over your heart.
The heart is not positioned strictly on the left, as many people believe. It’s actually located almost at the center of the chest, slightly tilted towards the left.
So…. you put your name tag in the middle? I’m not sure of how you think this contributes to the question at hand.
What? The better question is why would anyone actually care about this? Let alone pay someone, well anything, for such advice.
670-1 states on the flap of the right pocket.
When people shake hands, and the name tag is on the right, it helps retain the other person‘s name.
I always thought right but that’s from the Army I guess. I didn’t know there was a standard location across companies, I thought it was company specific.
The whole point to having the name rag on the right side (of the wearer’s perspective) is because the person addressing them sees the tag (from their perspective) on the left side. The person addressing then “reads” the person from left to right as is done in English language so the first data they gather is the name tag.
“Their manager didn’t know how to handle it, as they didn’t want to sound like a parent,”
No. Like most modern managers they don’t want either responsibility or accountability so they rather let a problem fester, God forbid you pin the blame for some action on someone. You might actual have to then do your job to correct the behavior or fire the person.
None of this crap involving managers is new. It goes back at least 45 years and accelerated with the introduction of more women into the work place and eventually women managers.
I’m guessing the managers just don’t want to be accused of being racist/homophobic/sexist or whatever. Particularly in San Francisco.
That kind of set me off, too. Sounds like the company needs new managers.
How does one graduate from third grade without knowing the basics of sitting up straight, paying attention and putting on a clean shirt in the morning? (Also washing behind their ears, brushing their teeth, and saying a prayer before bed at night?)
What kind of parents LET their kids grow up this way?
Wait, their parents allow them to behave like that at home?! Do they have a maid or something? I can just hear my father saying “Your mother is not a maid; you made the mess, you clean it”.
You ever been in a public restroom? I hope they don’t act like that at home.
Oh, you poor sweet summer child Milhouse…. Many families don’t concern themselves with “house cleaning” et al. Cleanliness may be next to Godliness, but many couldn’t find either even with the help of Google Maps.
Some years ago our company decided to transfer a lower-mid level manager at company expense.
When the moving company showed up to take their household good, the moving company workers refused! to touch the stuff. Given two weeks to clean up, the company sent a second moving company who were unaware of the first fiasco… and their workers also refused.
We told the manager that the transfer was still required, but that he would have to move their own things (with reimbursement). The employee ended up resigning.
Maybe that employee’s work space reflected the home and the resignation became the “happy ending” for the employer…
As a police officer I found that many of my visits to people’s homes happened to occur on the “maid’s day off”, so to speak. That thin layer of civilization often spoken of is probably a lot thinner than many of us want to believe.
A mother in the local PTA ran a “manners” course and offered it to the 7th and 8th grades each year. My parents signed me up without even consulting me. Learned to dance (waltz, 2-step, foxtrot,swing…) as well as how to ask someone to dance and we had to wear ties and jackets… circa 1955…. We still laugh about it at class reunions (those of us still able to attend). Our grandchildren are the Gen Z crowd.
The lethal combo? Gen Z and Ivy League degree. HARD PASS.
1st step:
Get rid of the harridans in “HR”, and replace them with a “Payroll” department.
2nd step:
Let the managers who will be responsible for the work being done by the employees do the hiring, and make it clear to any prospective employee that they are on strict probation for the first 6 months, with zero expectation of any promotion and are liable to be fired with zero notice for literally ANYTHING their boss doesn’t like.
3rd step:
Try like heck to find prospective employees who were home-schooled for the first 9 years of their K-through-12 schooling. By the time they enter high school they should be pretty well immune to the collectivist indoctrination of the government brainwashing centers. They will typically be polite, self-motivated, well-educated, and hard-working as well.
And if you’ve got to pay them twice as much as the usual ruck of prospective employees you should bear in mind that they will probably be 4 times as productive, so it’s a win-win situation.
You would force nearly 1 million women out of work.
You know, the “I demand equal pay for equal work” measured against men who don’t work in air conditioned buildings Monday through Friday, 830 to 430.
The same ones who get at least 8 federal holidays off, unless they actually ARE federal employees, then they get 11.
I see them lurking around the halls of the hospitals, waiting to nab someone who actually works to produce something or saving lives.
The “you said something that offended Dustin (the cafeteria kid with the septum ring, multiple earrings, and the misspelled tattoos that match his hair coloring.)”
These women will not go quietly.
Well it’s San Fran…. the fact that they are potty trained is where the bar is set.
I deal with 18- to 26-year-olds, generally, in my college classes. Some students are a little younger because of dual enrollment. Certainly since the pandemic, students are more often absent or late to class, turn maybe 50% of the work in, use their phones continuously, back talk, have their moms (!) send me nasty e-mails, and the list goes on. I’ve got six more years but am not sure if I can make it, given the quality of students and the rise of AI, which means they’re doing less original work that usual.
Grr. *than
Wow. Though this aligns with what a local primary school teacher (I’m British) tells me, children come in at four socialised by iPad and what we learnt from our parents, please and thank you, taking turns, no shouting out, sitting quietly and listening has to be taught by school.
I think very soon we’re going to have to go back to school and college work done on paper in exam conditions
Yes. I have my face-to-face students complete most of their work in class. The online classes are another matter, although usually students who are cheating with AI also miss deadlines, in which case I don’t have to prove AI use because they have enough zeroes to result in not passing the class. Also, about 50% of the time they’ll do something dumb like include the ChatGPT “conversation” (e.g., “Sure, I can help you with that!”) when they paste the garbage into an assignment, so they out themselves.
And they want starting pay $100k. And they want to be billionaire by age 25.
Gary Larson’s Far Side summed up where this is going.
Picture an audience filled with dinosaurs sitting in an auditorium looking to the speakers podium. The dinosaur presenting told the crowd he had good news and bad news. The good news was that the planet was getting hotter – the bad news was that they had brains the size of walnuts.
The generational rot runs deeper every year.