Mother in Law: Check your entitlement, Zoomers

This article has been rumbling around in my head, as they all do, while I’m going about my day job. But this one is particularly tricky to commit to words as I’m at risk of sounding less like the cool, young hipster you all know I am and more like, well, a bitter old lady. This article is about entitlement. In our current no-time-for-nuance news cycle, I hope it can be appreciated that I can think all sorts of things about prioritising wellbeing and nurturing staff, while also thinking that we are all getting a bit entitled. And I don’t really mean ‘we’. I mean the younger of the people I work with.

Twenty-odd years ago I read Man and Boy by Tony Parsons in which the main character reflects on his dad’s generation. They had started adulthood in wartime and subsequently ‘looked after their children, had early nights, and if they also had their own home and a fortnight in a caravan in Frinton, they had considered themselves lucky’. On the other hand, his own generation had ‘grown up with our own individual little pile of happiness at the top of our shopping list’. From one generation to the next, families had become much smaller so kids had more attention, the threat of war had gone, and being chauffeured around by your doting parents in their own car had become the norm. He uses this to explain divorce rates skyrocketing – prioritising one’s own happiness became the done thing.

So, if (forgive me) this is a reference to the ‘Boomer’ generation, what about the ‘Gen-Zers’ who are now coming up through the ranks? The kid who became entitled because his mum could drive him to the video shop, versus the kid who can stream it on their phone without leaving their bed, without even having to interact with another human or be grateful to their mum for the lift? I’m wincing as I type this because I know I’m not avoiding sounding old, but here is some advice for that Gen Z kid. For the avoidance of doubt, this kid has no additional responsibilities outside of work.

1.    You don’t know it all, because you haven’t seen it all. Absorb advice from colleagues who have been doing the job for years. The good news is that no one expects you to know it all. Unlike the pizza you can order from your phone, becoming experienced just takes a long time.  

2.    Absorbing advice and learning lessons from others’ experience works better if you are working physically near them – sitting in on meetings, shadowing counsel at court, and just overhearing phone calls are the quickest ways of learning. You don’t really get this when you are working from home.

3.    There are good and bad reasons for working from home. These are bad:

a)    Your bestie’s dog isn’t well;

b)    Parking near the office is expensive;

c)    It’s raining.

    Working from home is a privilege. Work comes before your bestie’s dog. Soz bruh.

4.    Accept feedback. It is how you get better.

5.    I’ve written countless words about presenteeism and the fact you should be able to get all your work done in your normal working hours. However, there will be reasons why you may have, or want, to work outside them IN ADDITION TO YOUR NORMAL HOURS. These include work, quite genuinely, being urgent. They include the fact that you might get satisfaction from the amount you can get done when the office is quieter. They include (wait for it) wanting to do more to reach or exceed your targets. Pay rises and bonuses are also a privilege. When I started this job, the partners would leave early to go to the pub and the employees would stay late. Now, it is the other way around.

Lots of these Gen Z kids will have had some of their formative years disrupted by the pandemic. There are so many ways this may have affected them. And I know that post-pandemic the rules about things like coming into the office with the sniffles have changed regularly. Other things have changed too – I see a lot of people prioritising their lunch break, for example. I’m not expecting everyone to immediately know how to get the balance right. But if I’m thinking that I want to see some elbow grease, grit and resilience from the young people I work with (and, as mentioned above, I’m actually incredibly young and cool myself) your boss could also be thinking the same.

Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article