Gen Z communicates differently in the workplace, but older colleagues can still decode them

For all the talk about generational differences at work, some of the biggest differences show up in surprisingly ordinary moments.

Take being late for work. A Gen Z employee in her 20s I spoke with works at a small, locally owned café and restaurant run by an older Gen X owner. When she realized she was going to be late one day, she texted him. He was frustrated. To him, being late was serious enough to warrant a phone call, and a text felt too casual and impersonal.

She saw the exact same interaction very differently.

“He’s super busy, so I felt a call was going to take up too much time,” she told me. “So I texted. I thought it was more considerate.”

Both thought they understood what respectful workplace communication looked like. They just had completely different definitions of it.

I study workplace culture and communication, and I see this type of misunderstanding as increasingly common in multigenerational workplaces. And this is becoming more pronounced as Gen Z moves further into the workforce. The oldest members of Gen Z are now approaching 30, while the youngest are in college and high school.

What’s distinctive about the older members of Gen Z is that many went through college, internships or their first jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, when much of our communication moved online and masks often covered half our faces. And there’s a new twist now, as artificial intelligence changes how we communicate all over again.

The result isn’t necessarily that Gen Z employees communicate better or worse with their bosses and colleagues than previous generations did. I argue that they have simply learned to do so in a very different environment.

When a text means something more

The café example is an easy one to dismiss as younger workers preferring texting and feeling that phone calls are for important occasions only.

But that misses what I think is the more interesting point: The employee wasn’t trying to avoid her boss. She thought she was respecting his time.

For her boss, by contrast, the phone call itself carried meaning. It communicated that she understood the seriousness of being late.

Neither one had explained that expectation to the other.

Managers shouldn’t assume employees attach the same meaning they do to a particular form of communication. If being late requires a phone call, they need to say so. A two-minute conversation about expectations can prevent both people from walking away from an interaction believing the other was disrespectful.

Another common stumble concerns openness, which might feel like oversharing.

One Gen Z worker I spoke with had recently started a job at a large New England company in a blue-collar industry. He was struggling with severe anxiety and decided to tell his baby boomer manager. The manager was sympathetic, but also uneasy.

“It made me feel uncomfortable, if I’m being honest,” the manager told me. “I didn’t want to downplay his anxiety, but I’m not sure I needed to know.”

That distinction matters. His reaction wasn’t that anxiety wasn’t real or that his employee should simply get over it. But he questioned how much of it belonged in their professional relationship.

Many older workers learned that professionalism is about setting clear boundaries between personal and professional life. Members of Gen Z are coming of age during a period when conversations about mental health and personal well-being are considerably more public. What feels like honesty to one person can feel like oversharing to their boss.

This doesn’t mean that managers have to become therapists, and employees don’t have to disclose everything happening in their lives. But both may need to recognize that their comfort level around disclosure isn’t universal.

Learning to read a room when the room disappeared

Some workplace communication is never spoken at all. Think about how people traditionally learned to read a room. They watched faces around a conference table. They noticed a change in a manager’s tone. Someone caught them after a meeting and quietly explained what had just happened.

Now think about someone who was 18 or 19 in 2020.

At exactly the age when many young people would have been developing these skills in college, internships and early jobs, the room disappeared. Classes went online. Internships became remote. When people returned in person, masks sometimes made facial communication more difficult.

That doesn’t mean members of Gen Z can’t read facial expressions, but we should be careful about assuming everyone had the same opportunities to learn the unwritten signals of professional life. If feedback matters, I believe managers should say it. A disappointed expression on a Zoom call is a poor substitute for a conversation.

I thought that was understood

Imagine a manager telling a young employee: “I need this by Friday.” The employee sends it back at 4:30 p.m. that Friday afternoon. The manager is annoyed because they intended to review it that morning, make changes and send it along to someone else.

The employee is equally confused. The deadline was Friday, and they met it.

This deadline mismatch gets at something I have repeatedly encountered in my research with Gen Z workers. In a survey I conducted of 250 Gen Z professionals across industries, clear structural expectations emerged alongside fairness and empathetic engagement as recurring themes.

If an employee wants clarity, it shouldn’t automatically be confused with hand-holding. An employee can want autonomy and still want to know exactly what success looks like. “Friday” and “Friday by 10 a.m. because I need three hours to review this” communicate very different expectations.

Artificial intelligence may make this issue even more important. We can now produce polished emails, summarize meetings and generate information faster than ever. But more communication does not guarantee more understanding.

I believe that may be the larger lesson for every generation working together. We tend to mistake the workplace norms we learned for common sense. They aren’t. They were taught to us by the workplaces, technologies and moments in history in which we began our careers.

Gen Z is learning theirs in a very different world.

Jeff LeBlanc does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.