There’s a very specific niche in pop-culture for the journalist-MBA type who claims they’ve identified some deep truth about human psychology. This person will usually burst onto the scene with professional-sounding credentials and make the rounds on media platforms doing interviews about their given topic, positioning themselves as an authority on the subject. Once they’ve established a reputation as the de facto expert, they’ll usually write the definitive book on the topic and make a ton of money off it. I’m thinking of Angela Duckworth with “Grit”, I’m thinking of James Clear with “Atomic Habits”, and I’m beginning to think of Suzy Welch with her presumably upcoming book on Gen Z’s hireability and “workplace values”.
Welch has popped up in a few pieces recently about Gen Z’s alleged unemployability, positioning herself as a kind of cultural interpreter for Boomer and Gen X bosses who are bewildered by Gen Z’s apparent reluctance to throw themselves into wage labor. In her features, she highlights a difference in “values” as the main sticking point between prospective Gen Z employees and their older bosses. Welch and her co-researchers primarily use Values Bridge, a survey tool eerily reminiscent of the oft-maligned Enneagram and Myers-Briggs personality tests. Values Bridge invites users to “invite a partner, friend, or colleague to take the tool and see where your values align—or diverge”, to survey and identify differences in values between Gen Z respondents and hiring managers. To no one’s great surprise, Welch is a co-creator of and investor in the paywall-accessed Values Bridge tool, which she lists under the “products” section of her personal website.
The common thread between these authors (Welch has not yet published her book at the time of this article’s writing but trust me on this) is that while they claim to cut through the noise to highlight some objective truth, the frameworks they propose are built on oversimplifying human psychology and the world around them. Grit eventually received these critiques following initial rave reviews, and Atomic Habits was a study in egregious oversimplification of behavior and habit-forming. These authors depend on marketing their frameworks as scientific even while they misuse statistics and rest their persuasive power heavily on the power of the anecdote.
Welch’s assessment of the difference in values between prospective Gen Z employees and older hiring managers is limited to the “16 Human Values” identified in the Values Bridge tool. She blithely interprets these values as preferences so limp and superficial in Gen Z minds that the same traditional waged-labor workplace could produce them satisfactorily without changing. The common “values” Welch highlights as characteristic of Gen Z include “‘eudemonia’, or self-care or well-being; ‘non-sibi,’ or helping others; and ‘voice,’ or authenticity of expression”. There is no consideration for the possibility that these values are in direct contradiction with those of the waged-labor workplace, and that they arise out of contempt for its existence. A crucial mistake Welch makes is in assuming that these “values” can be adopted and effectively co-opted by managers; that eye-rolling bosses can hack Gen Z brains into blissful productivity by appealing to their collective sense of “voice” and “eudemonia”.
On Gen Z Values
Contrary to the impressions of dismayed corporate hiring managers and would-be business psychology gurus, it’s not that the younger generations are lazy, apathetic, or simply desire a change in values in the corporate workplace. As a member of this younger generation, the reality is much closer to a feeling of being sick of the excuses for why we cannot all have what we need. We have known for a minute now that there are more than enough resources in the world to meet everyone’s needs, perhaps multiple times over, and yet we are continually expected to swallow the old logic that the best way to go about the distribution of said resources is to entrust 99+% of the bounty to a microscopic group of people for safekeeping, and then spend most of our waking hours working to further enrich them in exchange for our share.
We’re expected to believe that this arrangement ensures that resources only go to those who “earn” them, and that that is supposed to be a good thing. We’re expected to accept the cynical moralism of this logic, that work itself is a virtue no matter how pointless or harmful it is, and that a human being who does not wish to spend their life working for someone else’s enrichment does not deserve the means to live a secure and happy life. The people who stand to be enriched even further beyond imagination depend heavily on a popular sense of moral disdain for “freeloaders,” entitled people who want “something for nothing.” A lot of young people find this logic unconvincing and uninspiring.
When I entered this world, I was engulfed in the profoundly unconditional love of my parents. I got “something for nothing”. In my daily life, I crave opportunities to give “something for nothing”. I crave the opportunity to give my time, my skills and abilities, my love—in short, to be useful—for nothing in return but the simple pleasure of having chosen to be useful, pleasure that is contaminated by the exchange of a flat rate for my usefulness. We are tired of the overblown emphasis on “survival of the fittest” logic that justifies industrialized mass suffering and deprivation. We’re tired of applying pseudoscientific and economic analyses to the worth and contributions to society of real people, which are blind to nuance and often function as thinly veiled proxies for ableist, racist, sexist rhetoric beneath scientific veneers.
I know I am not alone amongst young people when I say that I would rather support a billion people who “take” more than they “give” in an economic sense, than accept the systems currently in place that facilitate massive accumulation for a “deserving” few at the expense of the rest. I, among many others of my generation, am prepared to hospice the tired old notion that resources should go (or presently go) to those who “earn” them, and not to those who need them, because ultimately the people who hoard those resources are the ones who decide what “earning” them means. Spoiler alert: it always involves sacrificing ourselves for their enrichment.
So no, it’s not that young people simply want our workplaces to be more “dynamic”, “inclusive”, or “horizontal”. We will certainly take those qualities over “rigid”, “dehumanizing”, and “hierarchical”, but we grew up in an age of global pandemics, fascist ascendency, and looming ecological collapse—we are skeptical as to the long-term viability of the traditional 9-to-5. For someone to paint the younger generation’s desires as being slightly more humane versions of the same inhumane and dysfunctional systems they have inherited is to project onto them the same myopia that afflicted many of those in the generations before them. Give their collective imagination the credit it deserves. Give them the trust and space to remake the world around them and you might just like what they come up with.