Just five years ago, Elon Musk was tweeting how “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”, suggesting a work week of 80-100 hours. “Pain level increases exponentially above 80,” he warned. The young workforce responded with cheer and admiration — after all, they were part of a millennials-fuelled hustle culture punctuated by #ThankGodIt’sMonday hashtags.

Things are different in the post-pandemic world. Today’s youth, the infamous Gen Z, don’t react kindly to 77-year-old billionaires or anyone else telling them to work 70-hour weeks. Their priorities are different, to say the least: they don’t want to be 9 to 5 “corporate mazdoors”; they’ll avoid working overtime unless “the world is falling apart”; they’ll talk to the director of the company as casually as they do a co-worker; they all seem to have side-hustles, or at least side-dreams that they nurture in anticipation of future fruition. All in all, there’s a sense of limitless possibilities. As one Gen Zer put it, there are so many choices that it’s paralysing because “we could be so many things right now”.

The flip side, however, is that the retention rate for Gen Z employees tends to be quite poor. Most stay on at companies anywhere between one and five years — the number often being closer to one. This generation is also the most susceptible to ‘corporate despair’ (videos of youngsters screaming in panic rooms, for instance, are doing the rounds on social media). According to data from LinkedIn, 94% of Gen Z professionals are considering a job switch in 2024. Their top priority, the platform found, is work-life balance, with 20% listing it as their main career goal and 36% leaving their current jobs for it.

It’s important to acknowledge, as many of these Gen Z professionals do, that they are part of a relatively privileged minority. Even as unemployment among the rest of India’s youth is rampant, almost touching 46%, with every new day bringing news of job cuts and digital disruptions — like Reliance Industries reportedly cutting 42,000 jobs in FY 2024 — this select group of highly educated youngsters float above it all. Their parents, benefiters of India’s steadily growing GDP over the last 20 years, have acquired sufficient wealth and security that their children can now afford to demand better, raise the bar higher, and if not met, quit jobs that don’t suit them.

Employers, for their part, are having a hard time dealing with this new, ‘high-maintenance’ generation. Very few are equipped for these fresh-from-college graduates talking about mental health, toxic work culture, and choice of pronouns.

Clash of the generations

Part of the “COVID-batch”, Nadia Khatib’s college years were spent online. Amid Zoom classes and Google Meet study sessions, the 24-year-old started creating food videos and offering restaurant reviews and recommendations on Instagram. Before she knew it, she had become a social media influencer for all things Goa. Her job as a social media marketing associate at MindShift Interactive, a digital marketing and branding agency, was an extension of this — and it was great. The job was remote, the company was filled with Gen Z employees, and Khatib’s boss was open to creative ideas, even when it involved luxury clientele such as Taj who usually have strict, staid brand guidelines. The company also had no problem with Khatib being a ‘creator’ on the side. “There were so many days that I worked from an event with my laptop,” she recalls.

Nadia Khatib

Eighteen months later, she moved to a different marketing company (the workload not aligning with her health), but this time around, her experience was very different. She was the only Gen Zer there, the rest being millennials. There was a lot of micro-managing and doing things the long way. “Gen Z, we like to close our work as efficiently as possible. But I find that millennials will have doubts, will rethink things, and end up doubling the work,” she says. (On the contrary, Khatib’s former boss, Marilyn Pinto, 31, believes Gen Zers tend to overthink, especially since, for many, it is their first job.)

She also felt like she was judged for drawing boundaries: not working late, not working on weekends. But why should she? “They only pay us for work hours and I have a life beyond work.” For now, she’s managed to squeeze her content creation and freelancing projects into the weekend, but she’s looking for a switch, preferably to a Gen Z-heavy company.

Others are more jaded. In Bengaluru, Bani S.* has worked at three different start-ups in the last few years spanning a variety of sectors, all of which have had a “crazy pace” of work — “My output was what two people would have produced anywhere else”. But one of them was the worst. “It was the most toxic job that I’ve ever had, and I didn’t last more than six months,” says the 24-year-old, describing it as a “daftar from the 90s, where to prove your loyalty to the company, you had to sit in front of the boss from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.”, apart from working Saturdays, sometimes Sundays, and always being available. “It felt like such a fundamental difference. The things they considered important, that level of micromanagement, I just didn’t get it,” she says. She soon moved to a new company, and her expectations this time were more modest. “All I’m looking for is flexibility. If you give me more control over my time and the same deliverables, I’m okay with it.”

Focus on money and growth

Bosses, sitting on the opposite end of the spectrum, come with their own perspective. Nayla Pandit, 37, has worked at an American multinational technology company for eight years, and has encountered her fair share of Gen Zers. From her experience, they want two things: money and accelerated growth. “There are freshers from IIT, BITS, and NIT who join with insanely high packages, like ₹18-₹19 lakh per annum — it’s almost as much as I’m getting paid after all these years. And within three months, they’re talking about appraisals and asking for promotions,” she says.

Nayla Pandit

The company does its best to retain them, but often can’t keep up with their expectations. Pandit divulged that they hired 40 freshers in 2019; of them, 38 have left. Some leave for better packages elsewhere, but she’s also seen a few quitting the corporate grind altogether to do “whacky” things: start restaurants, and, in one case, join the Padukone Academy to become a professional badminton player.

Even the ones who end up staying are clear that they’re doing it just for the money. “They all want to retire by 35,” she says. This requires avid financial planning, and Gen Zers seem on board. According to a recent Financial Times article, the last few years have seen a frenzied enthusiasm for trading among the country’s Gen Z cohort, courtesy cheap brokerage, and a band of ‘finfluencers’. The benchmark Nifty 50 index of large Indian companies has doubled over the last five years, beating Japan’s resurgent Nikkei 225 and even America’s S&P 500. Looking at today’s employed youngsters, Pandit can see why. “Even before they’ve walked into their first job, they have their financial planner on board with them. SIPs, mutual funds, everything is in place,” she jokes, a stark difference from her own generation (millennials) who never had that level of financial literacy.

Her company has recently taken to discouraging employees from hiring freshers, in favour of someone with two to three years of experience. They want someone well-versed with the ins and outs of corporate culture. Most significantly, one often has to pay a fresher as much as someone with two to three years of experience. It’s no wonder that job listings have now started specifying requirements for “freshers with 2-3 years of experience”. How someone with three years of experience qualifies as a ‘fresher’, or what real freshers with zero experience are to do, remains to be seen. Even the BITS graduate Pandit hired this year has a year’s experience, and in spite of it, has been hired on a contractual basis.

Can Gen Z and corporates play well?

This gap, between Gen Zers and the companies they work for, is real. A few organisations are trying to bridge it, working with young professionals to get them job-ready while simultaneously training corporates on how to deal with, and retain, their Gen Z workforce. Shveta Raina’s Talerang is one of them.

Shveta Raina

A Harvard Business School graduate and former McKinsey employee, Raina has experienced first-hand how university doesn’t prepare you for the corporate grind. At Talerang, they start students off with an assessment to gauge how job-ready they are. Depending on the results, they are provided training in a set of hard and soft skills followed by mentorship. “If you look at Gen Z as compared to Gen Y or X, they expect a lot of communication, recognition, and respect for how they’ve done their work. They’re also big on authenticity. Whereas corporates are used to keeping things very black and white,” says Raina. So, on the one hand, Talerang works with young graduates to temper their expectations, and on the other, they work with corporates on how to get Gen Z adjusted into their organisation.

The most effective way of doing this, Raina has found, is through internships. “All initial teething issues get brought up at this stage, and we can work through them.” After every internship, Talerang gives students feedback on what the company said about them. “This ensures that when they get placed, they’re not ‘learning on the job’. They’re prepared.” Interestingly, the latest Union Budget has adopted a similar approach with its new internship scheme. Under this, 500 top companies in India have been encouraged to hire 21- to 24-year-olds as interns, where the government will offer a monthly allowance of ₹5,000 for 12 months. This is expected to make the country’s vast youth work-ready, paving the way for easier employment.

Saurabh Misal

An employee-first ethos

In spite of all that’s said of Gen Z, there are instances of them settling into organisations seamlessly. Much of this has to do with workplace culture, proving that good organisations with an employee-first ethos are more than capable of flattening generational divides. Gauri Bansal, 27, spent the first three years of her professional life working for Twitter as a product manager, and by her own admission, it “spoiled her in terms of culture, access, exposure”. Organisations like these don’t have a stereotypical ‘Indian-company mentality’, she says, but instead, treat you like an adult. “This means that I don’t have to report every single thing I’m doing to my manager. Our teams operated on a great deal of trust,” says Bansal.

Gauri Bansal

There were times when she was the only Gen Zer and the only woman in a room full of older men. For instance, she remembers when they were debating a safety feature that allowed women to report harassment. Bansal felt that her global counterparts were adopting a feature-first approach that put the onus of providing information on the woman. “If someone has just experienced harassment, it might not be the best time to ask them for a detailed report on what happened. It might end up adding to their trauma,” she had noted. Suggestions like these, based on lived experience and empathy, were well-received, and more importantly, she felt like there was a space to offer them. The perks were good, too: increased medical health insurance during COVID-19, a productivity allowance (money to set up a home office), and a wellness allowance (to take up a sport or hobby). Had it not been for the massive layoffs initiated by Elon Musk when he took over Twitter, she had intended to continue there.

“I think it’s important to have a culture where, if you’re having a bad day, you should be able to tell your team ‘I’m going to take the rest of the day off’, and still be trusted to deliver once you’re back,” concludes Bansal.

* Names changed for privacy

The writer is based in new Delhi.