The following article would be too “out there” to be accepted in our industry but for the revelations occurring in the last few years that have given the majority pause to question the conventional wisdoms that have lulled us into accepting, with sinking heart, the inevitability of non-optimum situations.
Take, for instance, the recent article by Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge, bemoaning the unemployability of Gen Z candidates (20-somethings)*—a frustrating situation for Gen Z itself as well as those Gen X managers (45-60 year-olds) who find themselves dealing with concerns such as I want 80K to start…, I don’t get up before midday, or I didn’t do four years of college to start at the bottom.
This mindset adds to the friction already introduced into the workplace by the prior generation, the millennial/Gen Y generation (30-44-year-olds), whose moniker as the “me-me” generation provides some insight into how the mindset of Gen Z developed in the first place. The result is a continuing struggle for companies to make staffing quotas and to build a team that can service clients and customers well.
*Disclaimer: These generalized labels are defined loosely based on the economic, social, and political factors existing during the formative years of each generation; these have posited a stereotype that is broadly accurate as long as we recognize that each describes a mindset more than an age bracket and that many exceptions exist within each bracket—I, for one, have received good and caring service from many Gen Zers.
If we look at the general attitudes toward work of different generations from a management perspective, the silent generation (born 1928-1945) considered it their duty to turn up and work hard; the baby boomers (born 1946-1964) were not driven by duty so much as their conviction that working hard and well was the right thing to do, even though they championed the notion of questioning authority; Gen X (1965 – 1980) grew up in a society where the family unit was falling apart more and more and so brought cynicism and disaffection into the workplace, and a determination to achieve personal gain to justify working for others; their children, Millennials and older Gen Zers, grew up in the digital world of social media and experienced a disconnect from the real world, as well as the hostility of two recessions—and so they have become divorced from any real awareness of others and the need for teamwork and the relevance of group goals in their life—in effect, while being money motivated, they do not connect with the need for them to contribute in order to receive the money to which they feel entitled.
The collapse of the American workforce engine over the past 125 years has witnessed a dwindling spiral of employee motivation, from an understanding that playing one’s part in keeping society servicing itself with a desirable standard of living, all the way down to the narcissistic Gen Zers sporting a sense of entitlement that is divorced from any concept of the need to contribute. A typical story is told by a friend at the tail end of the boomer generation who has come out of retirement as a military man to work part time as a banquet waiter for a well-known hotel chain. He has seen streams of Gen Y and Z colleagues stay a few months and move on, managers included, year after year. Without his steadfast-if-intermittent service, there would be no continuity or standard of service in his hotel.
Judging from the cross-section of responses to Tyler Durden’s article about the woes Gen-Z creates for HR and employers, there is much finger pointing—many complaints no doubt being real and many of the reasons identified no doubt having validity, but none of them actually solving the multiple problems that have brought about the Gen Z nightmare so we can keep our economy and thus society running.
The following complaints have been noted about and by Gen Zers in the workplace:
Gen Z and HR are both doing dirty deeds to each other during the hiring process resulting in distrust, disrespect, and wasted effort. As an example, Gen Z uses AI to send numerous applications that misrepresent their qualifications and does not follow up in person, including not turning up when offered an actual job because they had accepted one elsewhere; for its part, HRs advertise fictitious positions for a variety of reasons and either do not follow up or send automated rejections that claim the applicant is not a fit—all of which makes the job-search soul-destroying for applicants;
Gen Z lack people skills in interviews to the point where 20% now bring their parents to the interview; they have unrealistic salary expectations and tend to be offended without cause. When they are hired, they lack professionalism and work-ethic/motivation/initiative (being far more interested in their phones/social media), including 20% being unwilling to stretch beyond their job description; they pretend to be at work when they are away; they arrive late or not at all and prefer shortened work weeks; they use inappropriate language and dress, and cope with the “stress of Mondays” by coming in late, working the bare minimum, and focusing on activities that benefit themselves—all a fast track to being pink-slipped in pre-Gen Z times—so is it any wonder that 60% of employers today, who have products to produce and budgets to meet, say they are offloading Gen Z hires;
Investors, companies and governments have contributed to this personnel mess by going along with woke philosophies, hiring from minority demographics to satisfy a disruptive communist, social-engineering philosophy and exploiting illegal migrant labor; and before that, boosting profits in a culture of maximizing profits quickly and cheaply by outsourcing to Asia, asset stripping, low investment, failing to maintain infrastructure, corporate monopolies destroying small businesses, industry cartels, & the primacy in governance of lobbies/vested interests and socialist rhetoric over common sense —such as Obamacare, which has made it difficult for employers to pay decent wages (and for doctors to be doctors when controlled by insurance-company finance-filtered diagnoses & scrips). And finally, drowning Gen Z in student debt for a thoroughly useless education, and demanding collateral or insurance against embezzlement to hire a Gen Zer: hence the increasing presence of parents at some of the job interviews.
The following reasons have been voiced for the bad blood between employers and Gen Zers:
An education that encourages a victim mind-set and turns children against their parents, society, and its institutions and the notion that one has to work, while focusing on completely useless skills such as pronoun use and gender studies, etc., all while misdirecting their passion and social/environmental concerns into non-existent issues such as reducing CO2 that is in fact vital to the growth of vegetation, and so forwarding programs that destroy the economies upon which their lives depend; and removing from the syllabus the skills needed to operate in and contribute to society, such as mathematics, people and communication skills, trades, how to handle finances, apply for and hold down a job. And if that has not been bad enough, teachers teaching to the test as opposed to teaching the subject to competency and then lowering or removing passing standards all together leave us with low-IQ “graduates” who don’t know and cannot apply what they have been taught, who cannot even write sentences with their 400-word vocabularies or read and understand much of anything, and who cannot move beyond indoctrinated ideas to thinking and speaking for themselves;
Being brought up by parents who themselves are the product of the same education system already in decline and so have failed to introduce them to notions of self-discipline, hard work, and exchange—the result? Lazy, spoiled teens who think they are special and entitled;
A disconnect from life as today’s youth operate in the virtual, digital world of computer games and social media where no effort, tradeable skill, or production are required in the real world, and where short attention spans and lack of real-world motivation also disadvantage them;
A culture that lauds drugs, promiscuity, and destructiveness while withholding inspiring and constructive role models results in no moral compass to guide them and a lack of social cohesion to support them;
Having to struggle through the dis-ease caused by toxins in the environment, food, and water, medical and psychiatric drugs, EMF & 5G destruction of human cells, and in the latest assault, a depopulating DNA-altering jab with cancer-causing ingredients masquerading as a mandatory vaccine that causes a large percentage of youth to have chronic health conditions while in the prime of their life;
Two recessions, an impossible job market where there is a disconnect between a viable wage and the cost of living and particularly housing prices (with homes becoming investment vehicles rather than habitations so 50% of Gen Zers are still living with their parents—offering a temporary safety net that encourages disloyalty and disrespect to employers who themselves have ceased being loyal to employees, such as helping them develop their careers), as well as inflation driven by governments and their criminal policies and activities (as is being revealed finally by the likes of DOGE).
In sum, Gen Z is too angry and confused to be in a mood to contribute to society. What society? they ask, perhaps rightfully so. Whatever the problem Gen Z presents to the workforce—and whatever the anticipated problems Generation Alpha (currently under-12s) will flood society with when they begin to work—is factually a problem for all of us; unless we (in hospitality) work together to find workable solutions and implement these, we can predict too few staff who are providing sloppy, uncaring service to increasingly dissatisfied and rare guests.
The existing solutions seem to be bitching about Gen Z or HRs and employers, hiring illegals or H1B workers for a pittance, or buying oxymoronic hospitality robots (that are devoid of the soft/personal touch so central to the core concept of hospitality).
This Gordian Knot calls for some brute force to undo (such as DOGE) that is combined with intelligent assessment of the basic causes and creating solutions that are possible to implement within existing resources.
Whatever generation we consider, they all have one thing in common: The members are each one a human being and generally have a desire to do well in life and to be appreciated or even admired for work well done. This is the key capital we have to work with for all 143 million citizens in the US workforce.
Solutions Do Exist
As one boomer observed, Though some companies are launching pre-employment programs designed to teach Gen Z hires better work habits, there will need to be a sea change in how American youth are prepared for the adult world. He offers boot camp as a solution to bootstrap youth, but 77% of Gen Z are too unfit, drugged, or mentally unstable to qualify for the military.
In truth, it takes a broad approach to fix this multi-faceted problem, so let’s look at some key areas that, if addressed, will go a long way toward creating an employable and motivated workforce:
America had the best education system in the world 150 years ago: all citizens could read and would discuss the Constitution, for instance, whereas today less than 0.1% understand it. The destruction of education began with German psychologists and globalists 135 years ago, and accelerated with the Secondary Education Act of 1965, when psychologists and social workers were introduced and soon out-numbered actual teachers; and the curriculum was turned into social engineering, dumbing down everyone, as opposed to enabling them in the real skills needed to live in a modern society. Maybe President Trump’s administration can sort this out despite entrenched teachers’ unions and syllabus creators—if not, we are swimming upstream without a feeder line of well-educated next generations;
The same macro-handling is needed to provide a feeder line of a healthy, not a sickly, workforce—well fed, free of toxins and street and psychiatric drugs that hinder clear thinking, alertness, and any connection or empathy for life and other people. The workforce health went off the rails around the same time as did education, after Rockerfeller obliterated natural and effective medicine in favor of drugs and allopathic medicine made from the oil he wanted to sell. Maybe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement can help put us back on track;
Meanwhile, re-educating the individuals currently in the job market is our task: Freeing Gen Z and soon, Gen Alpha, from the false information they have been fed at school, home, and social media so they are sufficiently uncluttered mentally to be able to receive and adopt the real data and skills needed to operate in life and particularly in the workplace. Education cannot change ideas, and behavior will not change when they collide with earlier false information received from “authority/role models” that these youth are holding onto dearly to help them hold at bay the confusions of living. There is an effective procedure called false data stripping that can help unravel disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, and any such false data;
Hotels and chains can combine forces to establish a trade school and internship program. First create a clear career path and the perception of viable remuneration to make hospitality an attractive option and then promote the school, selecting those who primarily demonstrate a basic awareness of and caring for others, and secondarily, those who have higher aptitude, leadership, personality and IQ test scores; (Note: Those who have been poisoned with drugs and chemicals from geo-engineering, street drugs, psychiatric drugs, toxins in their food and water, etc. are not hopeless: They have simply become bio-chemical personalities, not caring for others and even secretly harboring a hostility toward them. Many can be salvaged by removing these toxins with an effective detox program and then accept them for training);
Concurrently, educate the workforce as follows:
Teach them how to study—believe it or not, like any subject, if an individual does not know how something is done, it won’t end well for them; and surprising as it may sound, today’s teachers do not teach their students how to study because they do not know how to do so themselves;
Teach them soft skills, such as the different components that add up to the right mindset for servicing others—that others do matter and how to make this their guiding principle; this includes providing a real understanding and ability in the vital skills of emotional engagement, a poorly understood subject in the industry;
Teach them the skills of the position they are interested in pursuing;
Apprentice them on it, including helping them understand their position fully by clearing its purpose, the products they are meant to be producing, and having them explore and align the vectors in their life. The end result will be a person who is a stable and a contributing member of an organization and the greater society.
The Gen Z problem will not evaporate magically but the decline is reversable; it is within our capabilities and resources to create the workforce and society we need—if not us, then who—some amorphous “them?”
*Reprinted from the Hotel Business Review with permission from www.HotelExecutive.com.
Steven FerryInternational Institute Of Modern Butlers
