Gen Z isn’t bad at workplace communication—your company is bad at explaining its rules
Source: Fortune ·
A text about being late can signal respect for a manager’s time to one worker and indifference to another. How to tell?
From the source
For all the talk about generational differences at work, some of the biggest differences show up in surprisingly ordinary moments. Take being late for work. A Gen Z employee in her 20s I spoke with works at a small, locally owned café and restaurant run by an older Gen X owner. When she realized she was going to be late one day, she texted him. He was frustrated. To him, being late was serious enough to warrant a phone call, and a text felt too casual and impersonal. She saw the exact same interaction very differently. “He’s super busy, so I felt a call was going to take up too much time,” she told me. “So I texted. I thought it was more considerate.” Both thought they understood what respectful workplace communication looked like. They just had completely different definitions of it. I study workplace culture and communication, and I see this type of misunderstanding as increasingly common in multigenerational workplaces. And this is becoming more pronounced as Gen Z moves further…