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They want to be promoted after only a few months, treat the office like their bedroom, show up in sweats or skimpy office-siren fits, FaceTime friends from their desks, and ghost their managers.
This is the gist of employer complaints about Gen Z workers, who seem to be having a uniquely hard time getting along in the office — much worse, managers say, than the generations before them. In a December 2024 survey of 1,000 employers by Intelligent.com, 12.5% said a Gen Z candidate had brought Mom or Dad to a job interview. The bosses are fed up.
Gen Zers, meanwhile, see things differently: From their perspective, millennial and Gen X managers have no work-life balance. “No cap. My manager Slacks me at 10 p.m.,” said Kevin, a 23-year-old engineer who lives in SoMa. “That’s not OK.” It appears to be a common theme. “Still waiting for that work-life balance they promised us,” one young person tweeted in response to a complaint about Gen Z employees.
The generational divide has become starker in the past few months, as return-to-office policies have brought in Gen Zers for the first time — in many cases after years of working and attending school remotely. In the Bay Area, the culture clash has led employers to a new solution: hiring etiquette experts to train young employees in basic workplace manners.
Rosalinda Randall, a Marin-based etiquette coach, said inquiries have risen 50% over the last two months. The requests come from tech campus managers, winery execs, and even country clubs. All are a variation on the same complaint: Gen Z employees are treating the office like an extension of their homes.
One supervisor told Randall a new hire repeatedly left food wrappers scattered on the communal lunch table, assuming janitors would clean it up. “Their manager didn’t know how to handle it, as they didn’t want to sound like a parent,” said Randall.
She charges clients — they include Stanford Research Park and Big Tech firms — up to $2,500 for 90-minute workshops for employees, covering everything from how to make eye contact to where to stick your name tag (always on the right) to how to ask for — not demand — things from your boss.
She tailors her presentations toward clients’ biggest complaints. One Bay Area tech firm asked her to address personal hygiene, because two new hires did not shower or change their shirts for weeks. “They didn’t want to deal with it, so they hired me,” said Randall. She made her presentation to all new hires and added slides to hammer home the hygiene point.
Melissa Franks, founder of On Call COO in Petaluma, was also flooded with “How do I manage Gen Z?” calls this spring. The most common tension: new hires questioning instructions. Employers feel like they’re being challenged by their young colleagues, said Franks; she urges the bosses to think of the pushback more as youthful curiosity than as insubordination. “Give them more context about why things are done a certain way, and you’ll get more respect,” she said.
Another common complaint from staff who say they’re forced into “parenting mode” with Gen Zers are the special accommodations and extreme levels of hand-holding that young workers expect.
Franks encourages companies to develop “cultural blueprints” for young workers — basically, a playbook that details everything from appropriate office attire to email signoffs and gets as granular as outlining ideal “meeting behavior”: 70% observing, 25% asking clarifying questions, and 5% contributing ideas.
The friction isn’t limited to corporate offices. Hospital managers have told Randall that newly hired nurses are showing signs of apathy and entitlement, that they bristle at overly chatty patients or try to shirk “dirty” tasks. “They demand to be released from bedpan duty,” she said. “They don’t like it, so they think they shouldn’t have to do it.”
Though independent coaches like Randall are in peak demand, some organizations are doing their etiquette training in-house. In 2024, Jenny Simmons, VP and global head of onboarding and employee learning at Salesforce, revamped the company’s processes for new workers to beef up the training of soft skills. She added classes on presentation, emotional intelligence, and Slack etiquette; for example, not spamming channels with streams of consciousness but threading like a civilized human.
In May she rolled out an AI onboarding agent that surfaces FAQs, events, and new-hire skill matches, in an effort to build social connections. “They don’t know what they don’t know,” she said of younger employees. “We’re wrapping it up in a bow for them … so they don’t have to hunt things down.”
With unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds at 6.6%, well above the national average of 4%, and entry-level roles in short supply, Gen Z can’t afford to screw up. An investment in training at the beginning of an employee’s tenure can be a net gain: 77% of companies report that soft skills training increases productivity, according to a January Future of Jobs report by the World Economic Forum.
Jim Rettew, interim CEO at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, takes a stern approach when it comes to Gen Z. “They’re great at challenging authority and the status quo, but sometimes I just want someone to buckle down and follow orders,” he said. “They want to be mentored, not managed.”
Instead of outside training, Rettew leans on radical transparency: AMA (Ask Me Anything) town halls, open financials, and one-on-ones. Gen Z workers “bring moral clarity, which is refreshing — but nuance is a muscle they’re still building,” he said.
Local universities are trying to help. After hearing from employers like PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Dell that new graduates were flunking basic manners at work, San Jose State University hired Syndi Seid, the Marin-based founder of Advanced Etiquette, to run a 3.5-hour “etiquette dinner” for 100 students. Seid has run similar events at the Barowsky School of Business at Dominican University.
Across the Bay, Cal State East Bay hospitality professor Thomas Padron revived his pre-pandemic etiquette dinners this spring, citing similar complaints from employers, such as that Gen Z workers were texting and taking voice calls during meetings — even during job interviews. “When you do that, you might as well walk out the door,” he said.
The good news, workplace etiquette experts say, is that young people are trainable and eager to learn. “Presence and presentation is everything,” said Padron. “Once they realize that their bosses aren’t mind readers, they put in the time.”
