WHAT WORKZ
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW THE CORPORATE CULTURE THAT GEN Z DESIRE, LOOK AT WHAT THEY’RE BUILDING.
WHEN CHARLIE DURBIN took a job in investment banking after graduating from Princeton in 2019, it felt more like something he was expected to do than what he wanted to do. With his economics degree, and his history playing on Princeton’s lacrosse team, Durbin couldn’t have been more of a dream target for a global firm focused on strategic merger and acquisition deals. He was happy to have the job, but M&A work wasn’t exactly his passion; he’d been a member of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council and became interested in crypto in 2017. Soon his reticence proved prescient. The hours were crushing due to what he calls “a massive culture of face time.” No one felt they could leave work in case anyone more senior needed anything.
He didn’t love how assignments were made, either. “The work is distributed based on the perception of how busy you are,” he says. It had very little to do with his existing assignments, his body of knowledge, or his interests. “My whole life had been school and sports, and then work,” says Durbin, 26. “I’d never had time to explore my passions.” In 2021, Durbin was promoted to senior analyst, but he quit soon after to cofound Decent, an NFT infrastructure protocol that helps artists earn money from their creations.
Durbin’s story (which echoes that of cover subject Kyla Scanlon; see page 40) encapsulates a trend reverberating through the business landscape: Talented Gen Z employees are leaving, often to start their own businesses. According to Linkedin data, 72% of Gen Zers are considering quitting their jobs. Gen Z currently make up just 8.5% of the labor pool, and if bosses are having trouble managing Gen Z now, what happens when that number swells to 30% by 2030 as the rest of the approximately 70 million members of this generation follow suit and as baby boomers continue to retire?
“The methods and strategies that worked for past generations and corporations—consolidation, homogeneity, and perfectionism—are huge turnoffs for this generation,” says Jackie Berardo, 26, a researcher at Meta who also helps advise startup founders and other operators on how to lead Gen Z employees. This extends to how companies define and reward productivity: time-based, where more equals better? Or task-based, where efficiency is prized, which Gen Z prefer?
What do Gen Z really want from work? To get an unalloyed answer to that question, one has to spend time with the Charlie Durbins and Jackie Berardos—the talented and ambitious faces of our future, who’ve come of age during a precarious time and are demanding a new and better world because they can. Not all of their ideas may scale, nor will all of their startups survive. But they’re telling everyone the corporate world they want by building it.
IF THERE’S A CONSTANT THAT RUNS through Gen Z–built workplaces, it’s the ways in which they’re a reaction to what Gen Zers disliked before going out on their own. Nik Sharma, 26, whose Sharma Brands helps companies such as Eight Sleep, Jim Beam, and Milk Bar maximize their digital commerce revenue, says 50% of his company’s culture was motivated by trying something different from all the places where he and his employees had previously worked—and hated.
Building a workplace where Gen Z employees can thrive starts on their first day. The pandemic upended their socialization process, so employers need to provide more training. “They require more handholding and overcommunication—rightfully so, since they spent most of college behind a laptop, and there’s a gap in their social skills,” says Sharma. “I spend an average of 15 to 30 hours talking to a new hire.” He’s also developed an impressive set of training materials for those employees, complete with comprehensive checklists, tastefully punctuated with emojis.
But the culture is more than just a handbook dotted with pixelated palm trees and umbrellas. Ultimately, the goal is to build a workplace that feels like a community, one where feedback is bidirectional. Sharma admits that he originally wanted everyone to work in person Monday through Friday, but he was outvoted. The company convenes in
person Tuesday through Thursday. Meanwhile, at Cloud Studio NYC, a brand marketing firm with largely Gen Z employees, CEO Youme Lin, 28, uses her quarterly check-ins with her team to get feedback on her leadership and the company’s direction. “We’re learning and growing together,” she says.
Those sessions have inspired programs backing social causes important to her employees, such as eliminating waste and promoting sustainability. After one beauty client had excess inventory, Cloud Studio’s employees vetted several nonprofits and succeeded in encouraging their client to donate the goods. That’s now become standard practice for the agency. Lin’s feedback system also led to her team offering free consulting sessions to female and minority founders as a way of sharing expertise and building long-term value.
Gen Z founders are running a ribbon of freedom through the policies they implement, premised on the idea that they can trust employees instead of police them. Jonathan Yip, a Gen Z VC who also invests in Gen Z–founded companies, says his firm offers an “‘unlimited’ personal growth budget” that entails everything from subscriptions to travel and helps employees to “get a feel” for potential new markets. Although this sort of perk seems ripe for abuse, it’s an expression of confidence in their colleagues.
Similarly, Nadya Okamoto, the 25-yearold cofounder of August, a company that makes more sustainable tampons and pads, started offering her employees unlimited time off last year. This isn’t a new perk, but Okamoto sees this policy as part of a grand reimagining of work. She trusts her employees not to misuse PTO because they are passionate about their jobs. In turn, she wants to create a world where employees don’t have to choose between taking a personal trip or visiting family or working through illness or exhaustion. “If we miss a deadline because we’re sick or tired, it’s okay,” she says. “The world isn’t going to end.”
Though Gen Z has little reason to trust the large organizations that make up the backbone of America, its members want to be trusted and are eager to find solutions to the problems that lie ahead. These kind of policies foster that belief.
THE COMPANIES THAT INVEST IN GEN Z’S future will see a return, even if it doesn’t look like the long hours and loyal tenures of the past. Ben Collier, cofounder and CEO of the Farmlink Project, a Los Angeles– based not-for-profit that connects farmers with surplus or unmarketable produce to food banks, trains student volunteers to be future leaders in the food distribution industry. Earlier this year, Collier, 25, built a three-phase fellowship program for a group of 10 to 15 students, who learn at Farmlink before being placed at a site in the food supply chain and are then given an independent project where everything they’ve learned is put to use. By bringing more talent into the field and then developing them, Collier accelerates his mission, which has already delivered more than 85 million pounds of food to those in need in less than three years. “Agriculture, food banking, and the supply chain are old spaces that haven’t changed much,” says Collier. “The impact is from training and bringing together so many young changemakers.”
The corporations that can harness Gen Z’s vaunted entrepreneurial spirit will create new opportunities to excel. Sharma, for instance, actively looks to hire potential entrepreneurs because they’re innovative and ambitious. He makes a point of asking employees about their goals and tries to give them the experience they’ll need to become founders by exposing them to operations and finance, areas that most firsttime CEOS have to pick up on their own.
He accepts—even expects—that they will one day leave to start their own companies. “I can’t afford to keep raising [a star employee’s salary] every quarter, six months, a year,” he says. Eventually, they’re going to want to explore the potential for a much greater payoff, both monetarily and in terms of their own mission.
Instead of feeling threatened, Sharma believes the trade-off is worth it. He recently had an employee leave to start her own company, and he’s sharing both knowledge and potential investors with her as well as putting the first check into her startup.
“Instead of me missing out,” Sharma says, “it’s good for me, it’s good for them.”