Weak-kneed managers are enabling lazy Gen Z staff

Companies bending over backwards to meet unreasonable demands from workshy staff are encouraging entitlement

I‘They need to know that reading your emails is part of the job, as is hard work’

t’s that time of year again when the world’s elite descend on a luxury ski resort in the Swiss mountains in an attempt to solve society’s existential problems. They arrive in an endless squadron of private jets to pontificate with a straight face on issues such as climate change and inequality, in between interminable cocktail parties, dinners and champagne-soaked private bashes.

So it is strangely reassuring to learn that this year’s crop of delegates are no less out of touch.

One of the major themes for 2023’s jamboree in the Alps is the post-pandemic workplace and how attitudes to work among younger people are changing rapidly.

Or at least, that’s how the human resources department might put it. Put more simply, a generation of younger workers appear to be growing up with a desperately workshy approach to life. Some view the office as an extension of their social life. In the most extreme circumstances, it isn’t working too much that is seen as the problem but work full stop.

What’s worse about this phenomenon is that rather than push back against attitudes that most reasonable people would consider lazy, or even rude, some big companies are doing the opposite – bending over backwards to accommodate increasingly unreasonable views and demands.

It is no surprise that this form of appeasement is on full display at Davos. Speaking on the sidelines of the conference, Thierry Delaporte , the boss of IT giant Wipro, has told The Daily Telegraph that his senior leaders have to contact some staff on Instagram because many “don’t read emails”.

I’m sorry, but what? When did responding to emails become optional, or rather not responding to them become acceptable behaviour? What next – responding to colleagues altogether? Turning up to work full stop? “Sorry, didn’t really fancy it today. Had to go to Whole Foods.”

It won’t be long before entitled Gen Z-ers are refusing to communicate at all unless it’s a conversation that takes place in the metaverse, or through the medium of a 10-second Tiktok dance.

Wipro has 250,000 employees and as many as 20,000 “don’t check even one email per month”, says Delaporte. “They’re 25, they don’t care. They don’t go on their emails, they go on Snapchat, they go on all these things.” There are millions of people that have Instagram accounts – many of them old fogies like me – but that doesn’t mean they’ve lost the ability to interact with colleagues in a normal way. Has Delaporte stopped to consider that in perpetuating and enabling this nonsense he and his fellow bosses are part of the problem?

The idea that businesses need to quickly “adapt their policies, procedures and benefits” in order to accommodate these people, as one executive thought-piece ventured at the weekend, is absurd.

On the contrary, surely the correct response is to demand better standards. Bosses shouldn’t be blamed if someone brings a workshy attitude into the office. Nor should they be afraid to challenge those that do.

Sadly, it seems Delaporte isn’t an outlier – at least, not at Davos, anyway. Speaking on one panel, Anjali Sud, chief executive of video site Vimeo, likened emails to “instruction manuals” that were “outdated”.

It is hardly a shock to hear these sort of apologetic views coming from the tech world, where employees have become so mollycoddled that some appear to have forgotten the reason why they go to work in the first place.

Many of the company perks that have become commonplace were introduced in an attempt to physically keep people at work. The first wave of Facebook employees understood that there was a trade-off involved. Now it seems that many just take it for granted and don’t realise that such benefits come with expectations. Others want a form of cakeism where they can work from home, do the bare minimum, but still enjoy all the rewards that come from some of today’s lavish corporate offices.

There’s a view that in a world of labour shortages, employees feel empowered to speak up and demand more. According to one recent survey, wellness rooms, pronouns and lots of time off top the list of expectations.

Yet there are risks that come from being too cocky. Even in the cosseted world of Silicon Valley, the pushback is already under way with superheavyweights such as Google and Apple ordering staff back to the office and Elon Musk scrapping free lunches for Twitter employees because there were “more people preparing breakfast than eating breakfast”, he claimed.

A round of vicious blood-letting is taking place too after investors called time on the tech industry’s era of excess and now want to see real results. Yesterday’s announcement of 10,000 job cuts at Microsoft is just the latest cull to reverberate through the industry.

Still, the message is yet to reach everyone, it seems. Tiktok videos of young interns at Facebook owner Meta apparently spending their days eating “fro-yo”, drinking coffee and working out have spawned an entire genre.

One subject compares the company’s headquarters in California to Disneyland as she describes a day consisting of food from the “barbeque pit”, exploring the campus on bikes and visiting the nine-acre rooftop garden in between working on “different design-thinking activities”.

This sort of entitlement should not be normalised, and in pandering to it, managers are making a rod for their own back. The new generation of workers needs to know that reading your emails is part of the job, as is working hard.