For Gen Zs, adaptability is key to thriving in today’s workplace

Sometime in 2023, I received a call for a possible job opportunity. The person on the other side of the call invited me for an ‘interview’ that would land me a job if I was up for it. I had just resigned from a digital marketing job and was basically jobless.

This would be great if only I agreed to work at the office. Among the issues that made me reluctant to take up the job was that there was no room for remote work.

The person sitting next to me, the managing director of the company, argued that it would be tough to work remotely because of how demanding the job – news gathering and writing – is. At the time, I did not agree with him. I never took the job.

Now, while I do not regret my decision (although I struggled to secure a job for months), I realised that my issue was not the lack of remote working opportunities, as much as this is important to me, but the fact that the job was super demanding, with some employees getting little time for socialising outside of work. I couldn’t adapt to their style.

Let’s be real for a minute, though. We all want better working conditions. Better pay. And a good life. And I believe we will get there. Our problem is not that we are too entitled. It’s not even that we are lazy. Our values are centred on empathy, mental wellness, and authentic relationships, and these can be a hard adjustment for many employers.

In an ideal world, there should never be demands from Gen Zs or their employers. The only demands should be from work itself. Whether it is adapting to emerging technologies, changing work environments, longer shifts, just to mention a few.

Think of it as dating. The demands of dating, rather than the person themselves, might knock you out of the game. If they want to go on dates, receive flowers, spend time with someone, and their hands held and you fail to do so, they might not stay too long.

This is the reality today. So many employers attract highly skilled Gen Z employees but their ‘talking stages’ do not last long. The problem here, if you ask me, is that both parties do not create room for each other to thrive.

If we want to survive and eventually thrive in a workplace that was never designed for us in the first place, we need to first adapt. We can only change something we are part of. It is why the #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests were impactful. Change starts with us.

So, instead of hopping from one job to another and creating no change, we might as well stay and fight for our rights while in there. Even as we do this, let’s be keen to ensure our mental health is intact and that we are all standing up for ourselves for however long it might take.

Unless we build our own workplaces, we might have to compromise on a few if not many things. As the social media lexicon goes, ‘poverty is the enemy’. Let that be a guiding compass for achieving better working conditions. However, if these working conditions do not favour you, a Gen Z, in any way, it is time to call out your employer.

— The writer is the founder of Tabasamu Concept, a community that creates spaces for Gen Zs to network, unwind and spread positivity-