The Dark Side of Being a Digital Native
Gen Z’s anxiety at work is through the roof. Here’s what we can all do to help.
Jack, a twenty-two-year-old first-year analyst, gets an email from his boss. The last sentence — “That’ll be fine.” leaves him anxious. The period that punctuates it seems to dominate the screen, a black bead, a micro-bomb, lethal, suggestive and — Jack would swear — disapproving. Did he screw up? Or is he merely overthinking it? If he’s not, how can he work for a boss who’s so oblivious about the implications of a period?
I was recently speaking with another one of my Gen Z clients, Ethan, who switched jobs right at the start of the pandemic and has been working remotely for the last year. Ethan shared, “I’ve never actually met anyone on my team and haven’t even had a one-on-one video call with my manager.” He often spends hours reading emails over and over again because in Ethan’s words, “The best way to guess my boss mood is based on if he closes his email with ‘Thanks!’ or ‘thx’ — and that’s about it.”
As a younger team member, Ethan was eager to prove himself. Bill, Ethan’s new manager, naturally sets the tone of their communication style. His emails were as terse as haikus. How different was “Send a brief on this client” to “Fog rolling into shore. Clanging of the red buoy”? Mirroring his…
