Starting a career has increasingly felt like a right of passage for Gen Z and Millennial workers struggling to adapt to the working week and stand out to their new bosses.
But it looks like those bosses aren’t doing much in return to help their young staffers adjust to corporate life, and it could be having major effects on their company’s output.
Research by the London School of Economics and Protiviti found that friction in the workplace was causing a worrying productivity chasm between bosses and their employees, and it was by far the worst for Gen Z and Millennial workers.
The survey of nearly 1,500 U.K. and U.S. office workers found that a quarter of employees self-reported low productivity in the workplace. More than a third of Gen Z employees reported low productivity, while 30% of Millennials described themselves as unproductive.
Everyone has a right to work, but your right to work doesn’t supercede your other rights as an employer to set the terms you are willing to hire under. If your plumbing or electrical breaks or needs upgrading, you get to set the terms you are willing to hire to do the work. If that means no one takes your job or you get shitty and unprofessional results, that’s on you. Bob the janky handyman doesn’t get to say he has a right to work so you are required to hire him at whatever rates he demands. It’s a two-way compact.
If you can demand employment as a right, it eventually won’t be eirher the employer or the employee making the decision where you work or for how much, it’ll be the authority enforcing that right to work. The needle swinging too far in either direction between late stage capitalism and State planned economies is bad, and strong regulation and strong worker’s protections is needed to keep the gauge in the green zone.