Kiyota. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. Gen Z can be credited with a few things, an upteck and climate awareness, the ability to work any kind of technology, and the revival of straight leg jeans, just to name a few. However, recruiters across the ditch in Australia have spoken out about gen Z graduates demands on employers, saying their arrogant expectations are living a bad taste in their
boss's mouths. The oldest of the generation, born between nineteen ninety seven and twenty twelve are twenty seven years old, so they are set to stick around in the workplace for quite some time. So are they in the wrong with their approach to work or are they actually onto something?
Today?
On the Front Page, recruitment agency Robert Walters, CEO of Australia and and Z Sha Peters joins us to discuss the impact of our youngest generation of workers. First off, Shay, what can you tell me about gen Z's in the workplace?
Gen Z quite a unique generation of individuals we've found entering the workforce. They've come through at a time when the global labor market has seen significant change. They've been coming through university through COVID times. What that presents is a generation of individuals that's done a lot of remote working compared to their predecessors. They've seen a lot during that time. They've seen a depressed labor market during COVID
with the world panicking. Then they've seen a boom labor market where supply definitely didn't meet the levels of demand that global workforces required at the time post COVID, and now we're seeing a macroeconomic situation that's really contracting the labor market once again, and the leverage of the power dynamic and the employment relationship is shifting. So they're seen a lot in the space of two or three years.
I've read an Aussie recruiter quoted as saying they've had kids saying to them, I'm not getting out of bed for less than one hundred K. Is this your experience?
Not so much in New Zealand specifically, and New Zealand has they've always had lower salary expectations than Australia. I haven't really seen that come through in Australia so much. In the one hundred grand space for newly qualified brads that would typically be highest paid grads. Well, probably you'll probably see them in the areas of real school shortage.
Like the professions, Legal is always one that's got a very high starting salary for grads, and then you see if they might go contracting and tech and they might get somewhere near that on an hourly ray. But these are that's really outside the normal. I haven't really seen one hundred k being expected by too many graduates.
What are some of the key differences between gen Z and any other employee?
Do you think level of expectation of flexibility for one, because they came through a post COVID time. Also probably level of expectation on leadership. It's a very different generation that doesn't necessarily respect leadership for a job title. Gen Z are far more purpose driven, and so what we're seeing is that they're really looking for leaders to be truly inspiring and visionary and having a lot of empathy towards their staff and not all cases. Is this quite the reality in the workforce?
Have gen X and millennials just put up with awful bosses for too long? Do you think?
Ah, I don't know. I don't think so. But I do think that if you think the baby boomer generation and then gene X, they kind of come through slightly more hierarchical times and they're used to they used to hierarchy and working in those situations. But gen Z's didn'tly not seeing that didn't millennials put up with awful bosses. I'm going to say no because I'm one of them, so I'm gonna buyas for you on it.
They're not bad, they're different, that's all.
Like they're growing up in a world where they're probably not going to buy a house, you ever going to be able to afford it.
They've gone through COVID.
I think they've just.
Got a bigger sense of yolo than were And that's not a bad thing.
It's just different.
So I think older bosses are like, no, I worked a horrible job all my life.
You should too, And the kids are saying no.
There are reports of gen Z wanting the big bucks, like we've already said, maybe not in New Zealand, but making demands like working from home. Some apparently even state that as a condition of employment on their cvs. Do you think a kid just out of UNI with no work experience could be trusted to work from home.
I don't know if it's a trust thing, but what they will miss out on is learning. You can't learn and develop if you're working from home full time. It's just impossible. Real workings in a job, as we all know, come from being on the desk, sitting, listening and hearing to others actually doing the job. That's the real stuff. You can't get taught that stuff in online classrooms. So I think the level of expectation around staying from home
one hundred percent of the time is just ridiculous. I think that is a throwback to when they're working, they're doing university full time, but that's just not the reality of life, and there's a real risk in that for that generation. So there's so many studies coming through that point to the fact that AI will take over a lot of hard skill roles and that's just the reality of what we're going to see. The real skill of an employee moving forwards are probably going to be their
soft skills. So employers are now looking for employees with advanced soft skills because that's to be required from the next generation of working.
And what kind of skills are those.
Things like influencing relationship management, stakeholder stakeholder relationship management, being able to sit down and actually add value in a conversation and advise and partner. That's where the real value and an employee is going to be moving forwards, because if AI is going to and algorithms are going to do all this other hard skills stuff, the employee has to evolve. And it's almost like employee going back to
the future. If you think about going back twenty or thirty years when technology was in his advanced and people had to use soft skills to be able to advance themselves and advance their own organizations and the global economy. I think that's what we're going to see moving forward. So if you're working from home full time, you're not going to have very good or advanced soft skills.
Public Service Minister Nikola Willis has asked government departments to call their staff back to the office and to enforce stricter rules on working from home. She issued guidance to the Public Service Commissioner setting an expectation that working from home arrangements are not an entitlement and should be made by agreement. The overall theme is that good employers are taking active steps to ensure that working from home policies
are fit for purpose. Do you support this? And should working from home kind of be viewed as a privilege rather than a right?
Look? I support Nikola Willis in that statement because I'm of the same view. I'm all for flexibility in the working environment. I'm all for working from home in the environment when it suits both employee and employer. But I think that moving forwards, I think we're going to see the workforce far more likely to be working the likes of four days from the office and maybe having one day's flexibility. We're already seeing global technology giants calling all
of their workers in back in full time. So I think the trend now that we're going to see is that instead of working from home two or three days a week, I think working from home will kind of be reduced down on the Norman and the majority to about a day a week.
Don't you agree though, that other generations could learn just a little bit about the importance gen Z put on a healthy work life balance though that's something that they really cherish.
Hey, yeah it is, and like I do believe there is value in that, and I suddenly do. But it's got to be a balance, and I think that that's where the gen Z generation they've got to be very careful because the balance seems to be it's not a work life balance, it's a life work balance for them. And yes, well, that may manage stress levels, that's not the reality of what people have to put up with on a daily basis. There is, you know, if you think about in anxiety, that needs to be managed very
carefully and is very serious. So I do completely understand and support ways to be able to manage that, but I think the balance has to be way more in the middle rather than skewed one way or the other.
It's kind of difficult for employers, though, isn't it to kind of give back some of that balance, because for generations they've been used to paying for that forty hour a week, five days a week, nine till five, whatever, whatever it is. Do you think that employers will make the decision to kind of hand back a little bit of I want to say life back to employees.
Yeah, And I think we've been seeing that for a significant period of time. You know, for instance, our organization has a head of wellbeing and I think that's not uncommon now. So I think that the organizations understand the importance of wellbeing, whether it's physical or mental wellbeing, to ensure that they're getting the best out of their employee. So I think that organizations are pretty well advanced now. So I don't think that message or the importance or
significance of that will be lost. I just think it just needs a correction of balance, and I believe the correction of balance is coming through you think about where the leverage and the employment relationship is, and this tends to swing with market. And we saw during COVID that all of a sudden, all the leverage came back to the employer, so the employer was kind of calling the shots.
But then it became a boom labor market, and so then everything's swung way back in the employees' favor to the point of what I would say almost ridiculousness in terms of you look at salary and wage inflation during that period of time. But now that's having a net effect and the labor market is now swinging back more towards the employer, where job security is becoming far more important in terms of where the priority sits in the modern to employer, and I'll bet it'll only be for
a little while. But it's all around where that leverage and the employment relationship sits at a certain period of time. How that it's back in the employeers favor. I think we will see employees being far more reasonable with your demands.
I'll tell you why you're wrong, because there is no real long term data for all of your bold claims about you know, we're more productive because we can go to yoga and have a fennel pasta for lunch and then go back to it.
Not our own time, our minds happier if they get to work flexibly. People value it so much they would be as happy to get eight percent pay rise as they would to be able to flexibly work two or three days from home. That's huge, and that's something that employers, if they don't have the money, they can say, look, i'll give you a pay rise, but you can work more flexibly.
And gen z are set to outnumber baby boomers in the workforce by the end of this year. Hey, is this just the future?
Absolutely? And you know one of these things I don't I certainly don't want to come across as old school and I'm progressive of my thought process because what we do have to understand is gin z emlannials extra offer a lot. Their level of I think their level of sophistication and understanding of how technology can help move organizations forward is far more advanced than what a baby boomer
generation will be, and that's just natural. But I also think they come with an inherent confidence that can be used in a positive way. That level of confidence coming into the workforce and almost a surety of their own belief system is far more advanced than what other generations will be. So I do think they've got a lot to offer. The level of intelligence is very high, and they're quite well advanced in terms of sophistication in a
number of areas. What I think they're lacking is the ability or the skill set around soft skills, because it tends to be they're digital natives. And if we're understanding that they're a digital native, and that's absolutely cool. They understand that world very well. But if they're not going to move forwards and try and advance their soft skills, which I think will be of value moving forwards, then
they might find themselves in trouble. So making sure that they evolve over a period of time I think is going to be really important. And time in the workplace, the aising with other employees is going to be very important to help advance that soft skill base.
I mean, yeah, how else would they know to talk about the weather next to the water cooler?
Yeah, the weather, or what happened on Friday night drinks or anything like that. They're missing out on a lot.
And I mean nine till five workday, five days a week. Do you think we're going to be seeing the end of it? I mean, who even came up with the nine till five work day, five days a week? Anyway? What's that about?
Yeah, that's gone. Like I am a firm believer you need flexibility. So I am a firm believer in flexibility, Like I approach kids sports teams and stuff, and that helps me with my own kind of balancing my mental well being and my role. So I do think there has to be flexibility to allow people to actually lead their lives. So completely understand the importance of that, but are just just making sure that there's a balance in there. So flexibility and working from home are two different things.
In the generations coming through have to understand that you might have flexibility within the working day, but the employer might need to have you in the office four or five days a week, but give you time when you need it to go and do things to help balance your work life. So I think making sure that everyone understands that there's a difference between flexibility and working from home.
Thanks for joining us, Shay, no worries. That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Seals. Richard Martin is a sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines. S