By Zhao Hao

The recent hashtag #MillennialsDisruptingWorkplace has recently been trending online in China, bringing younger professionals into the spotlight. This generation has gained a reputation for refusing to work overtime, exposing employers’ absurd management measures online, and quitting at the first sign of being at odds with their bosses. At the same time, many expect that Gen Zers will break the existing unreasonable workplace rules and build an employee-friendly environment.

With more and more Gen Zers entering the workplace, will companies really rid themselves of overtime culture and hierarchical differences? And, will organizations become highly mobile and culturally inclusive to allow employees pursue their interests and passions at work? 

When delving into the defining features of Gen Zers, we need to exclude the inherent characteristics of all young generations who are keen on pursuing ideals and detest bureaucracy in the workplace.

It comes as no surprise that Gen Zers dream of making a difference in the real world. However, when they find themselves grappling with family burdens and financial stress, will they stay true to their aspirations? In such cases, we have to look beyond what young people have in common and focus on the characteristics that set Gen Zers apart from their predecessors to shed light on their particular strengths in transforming the workplace.

Distinct features of China’s Gen Z

First, China’s young workforce has become more “valuable” as a result of the country’s declining birth rate (the post-90s population is 11 million fewer than the post-80s, and the post-00s population is 47 million fewer than the post-90s). The decrease in the number of young workers has posed hiring difficulties in some industries. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China in 2021 suggested that around 44% of companies saw recruitment as their biggest headache.

Many companies are involved in a battle for young employees. Foxconn, for example, tried to lure young singles to its factory with salary raises, bonuses, and even monthly matchmaking events. Non-manufacturing companies are also scrambling for young talent in more diversified ways. For example, Chinese domestic brands Genki Forest and Ideal Auto touted their workplace environment as “efficient, transparent and collaborative” in their recruitment ads; while cosmetics brand Perfect Diary simplified its recruitment process to encourage internal referrals and alumni recommendations.

China’s demographic changes have led to a battle for young talents across a range of industries. With strong bargaining power, young employees in some sectors are able to negotiate a better job offer with their bosses and have an increased voice.

Second, born and raised in affluent families, Gen Zers are not afraid of standing up to their bosses. Most Gen Zers’ parents and grandparents are born in post-70s and 50s, respectively, and grasped opportunities for social development (such as reform and opening-up, globalization, urbanization, the boom in real estate and stock markets, and the rise of the internet and mobile internet), so they are well-placed to provide their children with material wealth. Therefore, a large proportion of Gen Zers, who’re the only child in their families, are endowed with spacious housing and handsome family savings, and are not under much financial pressure. As the urban-rural gap narrows, they can still enjoy a quality life even if they return to their hometowns from first-tier cities. Hence, many Gen Zers refuse to scrape a living at the expense of their ideals as they put a premium on psychological and spiritual needs.

According to a survey on the spending habits of post-95s workers in 2020, more than half of respondents had less than 1,000 RMB monthly savings, and 7.4% were in debt. For one thing, post-95 employees face no pressure in mortgage and child upbringing; for another, their parents are generally willing to provide them with additional financial support to make their life easier.

According to a report in 2022, 40% of employees would resign if they were unsatisfied with their annual bonuses; this proportion was over 50% amongst post-95 employees and reached 60% amongst post-00 employees. This “impulse” to give up their job for higher bonuses speaks volumes about the audacity of Gen Zers: They will quit if they are unhappy with their jobs.

Third, Gen Zers are strong champions of individuality and defiant of the rat race. Since childhood, they have come under immense pressure from cutthroat competition and fallen victim to some unreasonable and unfair rules, such as the lottery for admission to primary school, one entrance exam sealing one’s fate, and inconsistent cutoff college entrance exam scores. These experiences have made them resentful of many workplace phenomena before even starting their careers.

Moreover, as Gen Zers grows up, their parents are becoming more open-minded and willing to support their children’s ideas by drawing lessons from their own experiences. A more free and democratic family environment together with a flexible and pleasant school education has rendered Gen Zers more equally treated by their parents and teachers. As a result, Gen Zers are more self-aware, less obedient to authority and more assertive.

Fourth, growing in tandem with the evolution of the internet, Gen Zers are a force “not to be messed with”. With a strong ability for capturing information, this tech savvy generation can often make independent judgments about whether a company’s regulations are legal, and are capable of digging deeper into employee rights protection cases online.

Being familiar with online social networking, they are also inclined to speak up and seek help online when they face injustice in the workplace. As their posts go viral, they leave the public with an impression that Gen Z employees are “not to be trifled with”.

In addition, the internet has strengthened the bonds between Gen Zers and given them the opportunity to speak out in unison on some social phenomena, such as the 996 working hour system (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) and the rat race.

Fifth, Gen Zers have matured as they have lived through and benefited from many important events. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, online classes, and work from home mode has made Gen Zers accustomed to working alone and handling various matters online, without the ear of teachers or bosses, nor the help of classmates, colleagues or friends. They’ve thus developed stronger abilities for time management, multi-tasking, and self-regulation skills, which have allowed them to take on challenges at work and cope with various tasks independently and proactively.

Obstacles to disrupting the workplace

Nevertheless, Gen Zers see a bumpy road ahead to disrupting the workplace because some new challenges have loomed large before most of them have graduated or started their career.

First, college graduates have faced a grim job market in recent years. According to Chinese-language media outlet The Paper, as of April 2022, the job placement rate amongst college graduates across China stood at only 23.6%. Industries such as education and training, real estate, automobile, tourism, catering, transportation and logistics plunged into a downturn due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Waves of layoffs have even swept across much-coveted big internet companies. Even the application ratio for national civil servants has reached 68 applications for every position.

Competition in the job market intensified in 2021, when the number of overseas students who came back to China to seek a job exceeded one million for the first time. Though the younger workforce falls short of demand, a structural imbalance has emerged in the job market. Gen Zers may find it difficult to land a job amidst fierce competition as they are all eager to enter popular industries such as the civil service, finance and internet. In this sense, Gen Zers may lack the energy and bargaining chips to disrupt the workplace.

Second, the changing international political and economic landscape has posed new challenges. In recent years, a number of foreign-funded enterprises have relocated or pulled out of China due to supply chain and trade disruptions, such as Canon, Samsung, Airbnb and Kindle. At the same time, crackdowns by western countries on Huawei and others will make it more difficult for more Chinese companies to go abroad. Restrictions imposed by overseas universities on Chinese students will also dampen Chinese students’ interest in studying abroad and reduce their likelihood of working overseas.

The changing landscape may lead to a rise of some traditional Chinese values of hard work, frugality and altruism and exert subtle pressure on Gen Zers.

Third, Gen Zers need more time to gain a voice. Disrupting the workplace is in essence a process of transforming managers from outdated managerial thinking. Violations of employee rights run rampant in the workplace not because no one speaks up, but because managers fail to abide by laws or pay little heed to worker rights. With little working experience, most Gen Zers occupy entry-level positions and are unable to steer company policies. While standing up against violations of employee rights, they can try to climb up the ladder to an executive position by learning the ropes or starting their own business.

Only when they play a management role in the workplace with a greater voice will they be able to put their ideas into action. I hope Gen Zers will then adhere to their aspiration when dealing with a younger generation of employees.

Fourth, inertia across hierarchies may lead to slow progress in exploring a new organisational model. A large organisation undoubtedly puts in place systems and hierarchies. As the number of employees grows, systems become complicated and rigid, leading to a greater level of hierarchies. As a result, making changes is no easy task, and may take years or even decades to produce results.

In addition, strict institutional management is inevitable in specific industries (e.g., precision manufacturing and logistics), and difficult to phase out as it involves every facet of the organization or even collaboration across the entire industry chain.

Therefore, traditional organisations cannot be eliminated at one go. Instead, Gen Zers need to see through hierarchy and bureaucracy to dig into the root causes of organisational problems and the various parts that affect each other. By so doing, they will know how to disrupt the workplace, and how much effort is required in this process.

To sum up, the expectations for Gen Zers reinventing the workplace are not likely to come true anytime soon. Nevertheless, considering the peculiarities of Gen Zers, I believe they will press ahead with the transformation of the corporate management process. Business leaders at the helm are also gradually adjusting their management models to understand, accommodate and attract young people.

The grim job market will take a turn for a better, and new opportunities for economic growth will arise. A flexible, employee-friendly workplace that values employee happiness is the shape of things to come. In the next twenty years, when middle-aged Gen Zers make it to the top management of their organisation, they will also run into the problems of that era and deal with a new generation of young people. If, by then, they still have the courage, wisdom and vision to transform their organisations, our workplace will truly go through change.

Zhao Hao is a Professor of Management at CEIBS. For more on his teaching and research interests, please visit his faculty profile here.