Gen Z is bringing a whole new vibe to the workplace: anxiety

When Emma Malcolmson worked retail in high school and college, she never experienced anxiety. "Retail is no walk in the park," she told me. There were angry customers, long days on her feet, and constant rushing around, but when the store closed for the day, she found it easy to shut down and leave work behind. After graduating from college, she began working remotely in digital public relations. Now, at 25, she said, "There's elements of every single day where I at least have some anxiety."

There's the constant stream of laptop notifications, the faceless coworkers whose messages are hard to interpret, and the invisible clients she's trying to impress over email. "You can't tell the tone of how someone says something when you're working by yourself," she said. "You just spiral and think of every possible meaning when, the majority of the time, it probably means nothing at all."

From small talk by the coffee machine to presentations over Zoom, the workplace can be a hotbed for anxiety. Pandemic lockdowns, followed by the instability and relentless upheaval of the past several years have heightened these feelings. Remote work, Malcolmson said, "can make everything feel so much more intense." She added: "It's much harder for me to mentally let go of any stresses from the day."

The turmoil of the past few years has made workers of all ages more stressed: In Gallup's 2022 workplace survey, 52% of workers in the US and Canada said they felt stressed at work daily — a record high. In the UK, work-related stress, anxiety, and depression are up 14% from 2020, according to Health and Safety Executive statistics. But Gen Zers, who are just beginning their career journeys, are having an especially difficult time. In a 2022 survey by the meditation app Calm, 58% of Gen Zers said they felt anxious frequently or all the time — a big jump from the one-third of Gen Xers and one-quarter of baby boomers who said the same. A Deloitte survey of 22,000 people from March found a similar result: Nearly half of Gen Zers said they felt anxious and stressed almost all the time, while only 39% of millennials said they felt the same.

It's clear: Gen Z is anxious. While anxiety is affecting all aspects of their lives, the impact on the workplace has become particularly acute — and it's starting to get on their bosses' nerves.

The remote generation

Gen Z's entrance into the professional world has been anything but typical. Like generations before them, they have brought a new perspective to the office that has shaken up workplace dynamics. Unlike prior generations, however, Gen Z's first steps into the workforce came at a time when a huge swath of the world was rethinking their relationship to their jobs.

The rise of remote work means that instead of settling into professional life by watching how their colleagues behaved in the office, Gen Z has been largely left to their own devices. That lack of on-the-job coaching, combined with layoffs and the effects of inflation, has left many Gen Zers feeling on edge.

In a survey conducted by Gallup, nearly half of workers ages 18 to 29 reported that their job had negatively affected their mental health. In some cases, the stress of the workplace manifests as a sense of ambivalence and withdrawal from their professional lives. Another Gallup survey found that Gen Z was the least engaged group in the workplace and the most burned out from their jobs. To cope, Gen Z employees are taking significantly more sick days than their older peers — often due to mental health.

"Anxious teams, as has been well documented, can be less likely to take risks, to innovate, and have low psychological safety," Morra Aarons-Mele, the author of "The Anxious Achiever," said. In a 2021 workplace survey by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 56% of surveyed employees said that anxiety affected their job performance. Half said it had negatively influenced their relationships with coworkers, and 43% said it had affected their relationships with superiors.

By 2025, Gen Z is poised to represent 27% of the workforce in leading Western countries and a full one-third of the global population. If a significant majority of the cohort remains too stressed to effectively participate in the workforce, experts say there could be devastating consequences — not only in economic terms but also from a social and broader societal perspective. Already, missed work and lost productivity cost the US economy over $47 billion each year.

'I don't really know the protocol'

When Cloey Callahan graduated from college in 2020, she began working remotely as a contracted reporter for various newspapers in upstate New York. Now at 25, she works as a senior reporter at the media company WorkLife — and is still remote. "When I was in college, I did a lot of internships, so I feel like that did help me prepare a little bit," she said. But without any other in-office experience, she said she got anxious about things such as not knowing how her peers went about their days.

"I'm emailing people all the time. I'm Slack messaging people all the time," she told me. "Then I get anxious: 'Am I being too much? Am I slacking someone too much?' I don't really know the protocol, as I have never been in an office."

Instead of using meetings with her manager to focus on career progression, Callahan finds that she spends the time comparing herself with other people and listing the worries that have been on her mind. While Gen Z's openness about their feelings can be helpful in some cases, some bosses say that it is also getting in the way of younger employees' development.

A millennial boss told Business Insider that one of her biggest challenges with young employees was their many feelings about work.

"On the one hand, I applaud his willingness to share how he feels, and I marvel at how comfortable he is in saying what he thinks," she said about one of her reports. "But on the other hand, as a boss, it's not my job to help him work through all his feelings — only the ones related to work."

Being open about feelings can also lead to oversharing and leave managers struggling to help anxious new hires keep calm. Callahan herself acknowledged that focusing on her anxieties during her manager check-ins was probably not the best use of her time. "I'm trying to be more mindful of it and set boundaries with myself," she said.

Lou Ali, 41, who manages Malcolmson and another Gen Z employee at the PR agency Honcho, said she was puzzled by what she saw as the paradox of Gen Z's workplace anxiety. On the one hand, Ali told me, many Gen Zers come across as confident. "I feel like that is a lot of bravado," she said. But underneath the strong exterior, Ali has noticed that many younger employees are struggling to find their place, saying: "Actually, they've got a lot of self-esteem issues or uncertainty about career progression." Ali has noticed that if career progression doesn't happen right away for her younger reports, it knocks their confidence, saying: "They wonder what they've done wrong."

Despite the frustrations, most managers grant their young workers some grace. "I used to go to the office every single day, five days a week," Ali said. "I could speak to my peers about my anxieties, whereas younger workers don't really have that." She added, "You don't know what you don't know. If you're not surrounded by people and picking up on little things, how do you know to ask?"

Grappling with uncertainty

The core of Gen Z's worries about work comes down to uncertainty, experts told me. The natural uneasiness that comes with starting a new chapter of life was compounded by the shift to remote work and the chaos of a new work paradigm.

"Anxiety is driven by uncertainty," Ellen Hendriksen, a clinical psychologist and the author of "How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety," said. Because they grew up in the digital age with nearly unlimited amounts of information at their fingertips, Hendriksen said, Gen Z has the least experience with uncertainty. "When you need to know where to go, you can pull up Google Maps," she said. "If you are going to a new restaurant, you can look at the menu ahead of time. There's a lot of certainty in this world now which didn't exist before."

But at work, there's often a lack of certainty — which gets exacerbated in a remote workplace where it is easy to avoid confrontation. "Anxiety is maintained by avoidance," Henriksen said. "Our first reaction when we are anxious is often to avoid the thing that is making us scared, and so if we are anxious about speaking in a meeting, we might remain silent. If we are anxious about taking phone calls, we'll let those calls go to voicemail."

The lack of experience navigating uncertainty has contributed to what Michelle P. King, the author of "How Work Works," calls the "ambiguity skills gap." King said this showed up in two ways for younger generations: "First, it is ambiguity in tasks, like solving problems that don't have a clear-cut solution, working on complex tasks with a high degree of novelty, and creative thinking on the fly." As a result, a number of Gen Zers are struggling to manage how their work gets done and lack confidence in making decisions at work without all the necessary information.

The second impact is on social interactions. This year King, in partnership with OnePoll, surveyed 2,000 Gen Zers in the UK and US. In the study, 30% of respondents ages 18 to 24 reported increased stress over ambiguous relationships at work, with nine in 10 saying they avoided in-person events because of social anxiety, and nearly one-quarter saying they were uncomfortable speaking up in team meetings and sharing their ideas.

"In the new world of work, we have to manage how we work with others," King said. "That is, knowing how to interpret other people's feelings and intentions so that you can manage your informal interactions with them. Whether sensing when a presentation has gone on too long or understanding the subtext of what someone is saying, managing how you work is a fundamental skill."

Bosses, who had plenty of practice building their soft skills in the office, have their role to play in helping their youngest workers. "Managers need to close this skill gap by providing ongoing coaching and feedback that equip graduates to do their jobs without having all the information, respond to constant changes at work, and learn how to adapt their communication style to connect with different people," King said.

While anxiety at work may be nothing new, the workplace itself has been turned on its head in recent years. "I definitely think there has always been a 'young person in the workforce wanting to do well' anxiety," Malcolmson told me. "But I think now it just feels so much more intense."

Eve Upton-Clark is a features writer covering culture and society.

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