Gen Z and the Goodness of Work

College career service offices are shifting gear due to Gen Z’s expectations on work, deadlines, and personal time. That’s the word, according to a great new piece from Laura Pappano in the Washington Post. (I had just written for The Stream about declining study habits among college students when I came across it!)

“New college graduates are starting careers at a time of sharp generational disconnect over how the workplace should operate and how younger employees should inhabit it,” Pappano writes.

Gen Z craves flexibility and mental health over working their tails off to get ahead. That’s not entirely a new thing. Former Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) wrote about it almost a decade ago in his bestseller The Vanishing American Adult (which I reviewed for The Stream). He told stories from his time as president of a small college, when younger employees were asking to leave in the middle of the day for yoga classes and the like.

The difference here is that Gen Z lost a couple of years to the pandemic. It’s not just that they weren’t learning much from their teachers on Zoom (that was bad enough). It’s that they lost the chance to develop emotional maturity, resilience, and social skills, like how to interact with authority figures. As a college president put it in a conversation with me a few years ago, “The 18- and 19-year-olds coming in are like pre-pandemic 15- and 16-year-olds.”

So how are career service offices adjusting?

Gen Z Priorities Mental Wellness

They’re accepting the fact that Gen Z prioritizes their mental health over everything else, but they’re challenging them to better understanding how the adult world functions. Again, the effects of COVID isolation were hardest on those under 18 — for whom COVID restrictions comprise more than 10% of their lives by this year. But it could be other things too, says Pappano: political divisiveness, race-related tensions, school shootings, online social pressure on steroids. Whatever the cause, it’s indisputable that many Gen Zers struggle with anxiety, depression, and self-image.

And they want to be able to talk about it at work, writes Pappano. That creates challenges, especially when their managers are 50 or older; Gen X and the generations that preceded them don’t have much of a category for “mental health days.” Pappano reports that a 2024 Intelligent.com survey of managers found that half of them (51%) were “frustrated by Gen Z employees.” About one in four (27%) would avoid hiring them altogether.

They also have a different understanding of deadlines. Many Gen Zers are used to receiving deadline extensions for just about everything. I recently had a student, a graduating senior, who’d miss class for a couple of weeks without explanation or prior request, then email me to ask if she could complete the assignments she missed for full credit. Brazen requests like this have become more common in the workplace as well.

Student absentee rates are still quite a bit higher than they were pre-pandemic. If attendance, punctuality, and due dates are more like suggestions, you start to think that’s the norm. That’s when a sense of entitlement can sneak in and labels like “snowflakes” start getting used. Shannon Anderson, a sociology professor at Roanoke College in Virginia, teaches a course called Internship Planning and Prep. She reports that when students get that first job and are told, “You have to get things in by the deadline,” their response is often anger.

What Gen Z Gets Right and Wrong

But like every rising generation, Gen Zers need training on the moral goodness of work. God is a worker (John 5:17), and we’re made in His image to work — that is, to create and distribute products and services that enrich the lives of others, promote order, and relieve suffering. In the Garden of Eden, before sin entered the world, God assigned work to the man and the woman (Genesis 1:28). Christian writer Dorothy Sayers, in her classic essay “Why Work,” spoke of work as a “way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God.”

Recreation — while valuable — is not the point of life. Like sleep, we need some recreation, but it’s not something to center your entire life around. Recreation is for restoring our mental and physical capacities to once again offer ourselves in service to God and neighbor in fulfillment of the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:37-29). God didn’t save us by good works, but for good works which He’s prepared for us to walk in (Ephesians 2:8-10). As Martin Luther put it, “God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does.”

Faithfully showing up on time, day in and day out, giving our best effort — in other words, working as unto the Lord (Colossians 3:23) — is an expression of respect to others, especially our supervisors. Flexibility is a nice perk, but logging time in the office when others are there is hugely beneficial, especially for new hires and junior employees (like Gen Z).

We all have personal ups and downs and days when we’d rather be elsewhere. But no successful person always does what they prefer in a given moment. They delay gratification, pushing through for the sake of the goal or because the team depends on them. In so doing, they develop grit, perseverance, and strength of character, while earning the respect of others.

This is the way.

Alex Chediak (Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley) is a professor and the author of Thriving at College (Tyndale House, 2011), a roadmap for how students can best navigate the challenges of their college years. His latest book is Beating the College Debt Trap. Learn more about him at www.alexchediak.com or follow him on Twitter (@chediak).