Can your management style survive Gen Z?

It’s clear that Gen Z (the demographic currently between the ages of 14 and 29) is changing Singapore’s employee culture. Recent studies like one done by talent agency Randstad have shown that they tend to rank work-life balance above benefits, expect flexibility to be the norm, and would quit a job if it didn’t give them a sense of belonging (a whopping 67 per cent).

Singapore’s work culture has long leaned on Asian values: respect for hierarchy, group harmony over individual needs, and knowing your place in the pecking order. It’s a system built on patience and deference. But as the world’s first digital native generation, Gen Z employees expect fast feedback and constant dialogue.

“Gen Z is used to immediacy,” says Krystal Clavier-Choo, an applied psychologist and creator of The Dimensional System, a precision approach to building psychological foundations. “There’s barely any time at all between something happening to them, and them expressing how they feel about it. This sounds impatient, but to them reads as authentic.”

Being in an office setting is often their first experience with slower feedback, and where instant reactions can come across as rash, uncontrolled and immature. “When a senior leader keeps a calm face through a difficult quarter, a Gen Z employee might read it as being inauthentic rather than composed under pressure. And when that same employee is asked to hold their own composure through a difficult moment, it can feel like a betrayal of self rather than learning a professional skill,” she explains.

The difference between millennial & Gen Z workers

Carol*, 42, works in research and manages a large team within her organisation. She rolls her eyes when asked about Gen Z employees. “I have very little patience for their shenanigans, especially when any kind of feedback can be counted as an affront to mental health,” she says, only half-joking.

It’s a stereotype many managers have of Gen Z. Krystal believes it comes down to how differently millennials were raised to see work. “Many millennial managers were shaped by a workplace where you put your head down, proved yourself slowly, and communicated upward in a formal manner,” she explains. “Their internal sense of safety was built around being competent, restrained, and not asking for too much.”

This is different from Gen Z, she says, whose “internal sense of safety is built around being seen and engaged with as a thinking person rather than a task executor”. This can lead to millennial managers feeling that their authority is being challenged, and the Gen Z employee feeling excluded.

Hadya Sim, who is 20 and has worked a series of internships and work placements, agrees.

How to bridge the generation gap between millennial and Gen Z workers

Despite the generation gap, working together is possible – with some strategies in place.

“A concrete tip that works for both sides is to have a 15-minute conversation about communication,” says Krystal. “Specifically, how often will we touch base, through which channel, and what counts as urgent? Most managers never have this conversation because they assume their preferences are obvious. Most reports never ask because they assume their preferences are an imposition. Naming it once, explicitly, removes about 80 per cent of the daily friction.”

Krystal also believes that Gen Z employees need to stop seeing work as a primary source of self-actualisation. “Some of that is good – asking work to be meaningful is a higher standard than previous generations held employers to,” she says.

“But there’s a hidden cost when the bar gets set there and stays there forever. Then, every ordinary professional moment, the boring quarter, the difficult colleague, the project that doesn’t go anywhere, becomes evidence of an existential mismatch rather than just a career experience. So the spiral starts: ‘Am I in the wrong job? Am I failing my own values?’ Often, the honest answer is: No, you’re just having a typical Tuesday.”

This is something senior leaders need to know as well. “A piece of tough feedback isn’t just feedback, it becomes proof that they’re in the wrong career,” Krystal explains, advising managers to “name the ordinary” to manage expectations.

“Say things like, ‘This project is just admin, it’s not meant to be inspiring’ or ‘Everyone has slow quarters. It doesn’t say anything about you’. This sort of plain language gives an employee permission to relax into the normal rhythms of work, instead of treating every task as a test of who they are.”

All this isn’t to say that millennial managers don’t see value in their younger employees. “If you assign them the right task, they can be super brilliant,” admits Carol.

She wryly adds that she has something to learn from them as well: “The way they clearly draw lines between work and personal life is a good reminder to workaholics like me that work isn’t, and shouldn’t, be everything.”

*Name has been changed upon request