Gen Z at work:
it's not working
Plus, vote in our poll: has Gen Z been unfairly labelled as 'lazy'?
Gen Z at work:
it's not working
Plus, vote in our poll: has Gen Z been unfairly labelled as 'lazy'?
UQ Mythbusters
The 'lazy generation’ accusation gets thrown at every new cohort entering the workforce, and Gen Z have been no exception.
But when we look at what the research has to say about Gen Z at work, what emerges is a far more nuanced picture: young people today are carrying a level of housing stress, job insecurity and global anxiety that’s genuinely new.
Professor David Solnet has been researching young workers for close to 20 years. Alongside his research partners and co-authors Dr Malinvisa Sakdiyakorn (Mahidol University International College) and Dr Maria Golubovskaya (Griffith University Business School), he helped Contact bust some myths about what younger workers are really bringing to the table – and where the contemporary workplace is letting them down.
Their key takeaway? Yes, Gen Z does want to work hard. But with different motivations than prior generations – and a radically changed outlook.
First, take our community poll:
Professor David Solnet
Professor David Solnet
Is there any evidence that Gen Z values work differently from previous generations?
Yes, but in unexpected ways.
Our research looks at the “formative years”, roughly your mid-teens to mid-twenties, when a lot of your lifelong values get baked in. Gen Z came of age with climate anxiety, political chaos, school bullying playing out online, social media in their pockets and the pandemic arriving just as they reached the workforce.
One value stood out for this group more than older cohorts: universalism. That is, the concern for fairness, for other people, for the planet and for the wider world beyond yourself. Older generations tend to lead with things like achievement and security. Gen Z care about those too, but they layer something extra on top: a sense that work should connect to something bigger.
Another value that surprised us was benevolence – caring about the people closest to you. A lot of young workers weren't chasing success just for themselves. They talked about supporting parents, helping siblings, giving back to the people who had sacrificed for them or simply making life a little easier for those they loved.
People say Gen Z are less willing to work hard. What does the research say?
This is the myth I’d most like to address.
In our research workshops, young workers talked constantly about wanting to grow, stretch themselves and prove what they could do. One told us, “I can make things happen.” Another said, “I don’t complain about what happens to me because I crave it as an opportunity to grow.” That is not the voice of someone avoiding effort.
What they push back on isn’t hard work. It’s pointless hard work. Long hours, no recognition, no growth, no reason. As one participant put it, “I totally dislike the structure of working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Life is a marathon, not a sprint that makes you burn out.” They will absolutely run hard. They just won’t sprint themselves into the ground for nothing.
And there’s a whole group working hard for reasons that have nothing to do with money or self-interest. For many young people, especially those from migrant or working-class backgrounds, work is about family. One said it plainly: “Our parents have struggled to raise us, so it’s an opportunity for us to show some gratitude.” That’s effort driven by duty and love, not laziness.
How much of this is really about economic conditions rather than attitudes?
A huge amount. Just think about the backdrop. Housing is out of reach for a lot of young people. Early-career work is increasingly casual and insecure. The old deal – work hard and you’ll get stability and a clear upward path – doesn’t reliably hold anymore. We describe this stretched-out, unstable stage between study and secure work as “new adulthood”, and it’s genuinely precarious.
Young people were sold a promise that education plus effort equals security. For many it simply hasn’t delivered. So the short-term, “what’s actually in this for me” mindset that people love to criticise is often a completely rational response to precarity. It’s not a character defect. Blaming the generation is convenient, because it lets the conditions off the hook.
The exact same critique was levelled at Gen Y when they entered the workforce: demanding, impatient, wants instant rewards. Recent research has tended to back up the hunch that most of it was rhetoric: large reviews pooling together findings across many studies keep finding that generational labels explain almost nothing about how people actually behave at work.
Every generation gets this treatment. It’s worth asking why we keep telling the same story about each new one.
Why do younger workers seem more willing to walk away?
Partly because the bargain that kept older workers loyal has broken.
Loyalty used to buy you security and promotion. When that exchange disappears, staying somewhere that doesn’t fit stops making sense. One participant explained: “If my job no longer fits who I am, I’ll find something new. It might impact my CV, but it prevents burnout.” Leaving is self-protection, not flakiness.
When people describe Gen Z as "job hopping", they're usually seeing the end of a story. Many young workers had already spent months – sometimes years – trying to make a role work before concluding it never would.
They’ve also watched people pour everything into a job and get made redundant, or sacrifice their health in the process anyway. One participant told us they had watched colleagues burn out badly in their thirties after years of putting work first. "I don't want that to become my life," they said.
What do employers get wrong about this generation?
A few things, but the biggest is painting Gen Z with a single brush. Our research emphasises that a middle-class graduate chasing a flexible, creative career and a young migrant worker sending money home to support family want very different things from a job.
Work doesn't begin when young people walk through the office door. Two people of the same age can arrive carrying very different responsibilities, pressures and opportunities. That's one reason generational stereotypes are such a poor guide to understanding what really motivates people at work.
The second mistake is reading their interest in meaning and balance as entitlement. It usually isn’t. They watched what burnout did to the people ahead of them and they’re trying not to repeat it.
Meaning is often misunderstood too. Employers sometimes assume it means everyone wants to save the world. Most don't. More often it just means seeing how their work helps someone, or feeling that what they do actually matters to another person.
So, how much do salary and job security really matter compared with flexibility, culture and fulfilment?
Security matters, and after the pandemic it matters more, particularly for young people without a financial safety net. For many from working-class and migrant backgrounds, a stable income to support family comes first, full stop. One participant put the reality bluntly: in a world where you have to earn enough to survive, work isn’t always a free choice.
What’s shifted is the weighting. Relative to older generations, Gen Z values flexibility, workplace culture and fulfilment more heavily once the basics are covered. The trap employers fall into is thinking they can offer purpose instead of fair pay. You need both. Purpose doesn’t pay rent, and a paycheck on its own won’t keep them. The young workers we spoke to wanted enough security to stop worrying about survival, and enough meaning to make the work worth doing.
The bottom line is this: we've spent years asking whether Gen Z wants to work. A better question might be whether we've built workplaces worth working hard for.
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