The internet is divided over whether Gen X doesn’t know how to manage Gen Z — or whether the younger employees are just not cut out for the workforce.
Millennial boss Rachel Lynch took to TikTok to detail her recent experience at a sandwich shop where a Gen Z teenager was reportedly berated by her older boss.
Lynch said that she placed an order with the young waitress who, 15 minutes later, admitted she had forgotten the orders she had taken. She said that the boss “starts yelling” at her and the Gen Zer began crying and “panicking.”
While she said that neither party was in the wrong, Lynch believes that bosses shouldn’t react as harshly to their younger staff members.
The Australian said that she’s noticed that Gen X managers are “vocal in their outrage” and Gen Z doesn’t handle that type of confrontation well.
“You need to learn to work with younger people, especially different generations,” Lynch said. “Gen Z is more soft, more fragile, they want to work more collaboratively. You can’t just f–king yell at them. That doesn’t help them.”
Many commenters were not sympathetic to the workplace strife.
“I am an elder millennial manager with a lot of Gen Z staff — they are an awful entitled generation with no work ethic or common sense — they need yelling at sometimes. Fight me,” one brutal commenter said.
“Gen Z have a sense of unwarranted entitlement and get pissed when people call them out,” another added.
However, some felt that the employer was at fault for not training the staff member well nor giving her a notepad to write down orders. They believe that workplace anxiety is just a part of growing up and getting a first job.
“I remember being young and lacking resilience too and crying at work over silly things — I think it just takes time to build confidence! Not necessarily a gen thing,” a commenter wrote.
“This isn’t new. People have always cried after getting yelled at, we just didn’t have the social media to let everyone know,” one empathetic person commented.
Some simply believed the teen was just a bad employee and not which generation she was in: “That’s got nothing to do with boomers, Gen X and Z. That’s just an employee not cutting it.”
