Myth-busting: Is it a Gen Z thing or a young person thing?

“Baby Boomers are conservative narcissists.”

“Gen Xers love the status quo and hate change.”

“Millennials are entitled and overconfident snobs.”

“Gen Zers are lazy snowflakes that hate work.”

Suffice it to say, there’s no shortage of stereotypes (or headlines) about generational differences in the workplace. But while it’s commonly acknowledged that such typecasting is reductive and hurtful, we’ve found that people rarely question the concept of generations itself.

We take the division of society into generational categories as natural. In many ways, they are – in the sense that they are a natural byproduct of our limited cognitive load as human beings. As Daniel Kahneman explains in his book Thinking Fast and Slow:

A general "law of least effort" applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action [...] Laziness is built deep into our nature.

Broadly speaking, categorization arises from our impulse to find mental shortcuts (heuristics) that help us quickly comprehend a complex world. Heuristics can be helpful for minor decisions, such as deciding which hand soap to buy. But, as Kahneman notes, “By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases."

At Culture Amp, we’ve long questioned the legitimacy of generational differences in the workplace. We recognize their importance as part of the lexicon and cultural norms that characterize our society (and yes, we’ve written about it, too). But we also know these norms can quickly devolve into plain stereotyping and blame games. As Pew Research pointed out, discussions of generations focus far more on differences than similarities, leading people to “assume or exaggerate intergenerational divides that may actually be quite small.”

Out of curiosity, we decided to compare some of the seemingly unique aspects of Gen Z now to those of young millennials 10 years ago. We zoned in on what we’ve found to be the most-criticized “Gen Z trait” in the workplace – lack of commitment – with the hypothesis that an employee’s level of commitment is most greatly determined by life/career stage rather than generational categorization.

This is what we learned.

Our methodology

This study examines generational differences in the workplace by comparing Culture Amp data from 2015 and 2024.

To ensure consistency, we applied Pew Research’s current generational definitions to the 2024 dataset (N = 4,028 Culture Amp accounts, 1,242,514 users) and matched age cutoffs for the 2015 dataset (N = 187 accounts, 33,258 users).

We analyzed employees in the same age range who had crossed generations over the last 9 years. This allows us to disentangle the impact of generation from age/life stage:

By analyzing the employee survey results of these users, we were able to surface differences in workplace perception and experiences across generations and life stages.

The Gen Z reputation: Why won’t they commit?

In the roughly seven years Gen Z has been in the workforce, they’ve developed a reputation for being uncommitted and lacking initiative.

Gen Zers have been criticized for being difficult to work with, constantly arriving late, avoiding workplace social events, and spending time on their phones instead of working. Moreover, despite being vastly “unprepared” for the working world, HR leaders and hiring managers have found that Gen Zers dare to constantly change jobs, too.

Members of Gen Z may agree on this last point. One survey by ResumeLab found that a remarkable 83% of surveyed Gen Zers identified as job hoppers, and a 2024 study by HR Block found that nearly 1 in 3 Gen Zers changed their jobs the previous year.

Some explanations we’ve seen for this trend include:

• No-tolerance attitude towards toxic workplace cultures
• High levels of burnout and overwork
• Desire for flexibility and purpose at work
• Prioritization of life over work (“work to live, not live to work”)

Looking at this list, we felt these reasons aren’t unreasonable or unique. As younger Millennials working at a company with the mission of “building a better world of work,” we admit we’re slightly biased. But we also know that the “kids these days” belief is a perennial feature of humanity and that every generation has always “lamented the decline of the present generation of youth relative to earlier generations.”

For these reasons, we hypothesized that Gen Zers job hop not because they’re Gen Z – but simply because job hopping is what people do when they’re young.

The question: Is lack of commitment a uniquely Gen Z trait?

We first approached this question by testing whether our data supports the notion that Gen Z lacks commitment to their companies. When we analyzed our 2024 benchmark data, we found that Gen Z is indeed the least committed generation. This was especially notable when looking at short-term commitment – only 50% of Gen Z respondents agreed they rarely think about looking for another job, compared to 70% of Boomers.

However, to test our hypothesis that life stage matters more than generation, we needed to look at how Millennials fared when they were around the same age as Gen Zers today. We looked at the same two commitment questions for our 2015 benchmark data and saw an almost identical pattern of low commitment.

On top of that, when we compared the employee engagement results of young Millennials in 2015 to Gen Zers in 2024, we saw that while overall results are pretty similar, Millennials in their youth were even less committed to staying at their companies than Gen Z are now.

Our verdict: Low commitment is a young person thing more than it is a Gen Z thing

Our data suggests that low workplace commitment correlates more with being young than with belonging to a specific generation.

While our 2024 data supports the notion that Gen Z is the least committed of all generations, we found that “lack of commitment” isn’t necessarily a trait unique to Gen Z. Once we analyzed our 2015 data, we saw that both Gen Zers today and young Millennials 10 years ago display lower levels of commitment compared to older generations.

A lot of this makes intuitive sense. Young adulthood has always been when most people, free from family responsibilities and mortgages, start building their careers and seeking opportunities for advancement. Moreover, as Pew Research found, today’s young adults reach key life milestones later than their predecessors. Delays in marriage and childbearing, the rising cost of homeownership, the increased cost of living, and changing societal attitudes towards traditional family structures have all increased the length of time today’s young adults can spend prioritizing growth over stability.

If we had data from 30 years ago and could test how Gen X responded when they were 20 to 27, we hypothesize that we would see a similar trend of low commitment – but perhaps over a shorter period of time and ending earlier (i.e., mid or even early 20s).

Looking forward, we might also predict a similar pattern of low commitment will emerge when young gen-Alphas enter the workforce. Like their generational predecessors, these young professionals will also spend their early 20s jumping from job to job, searching for better opportunities and growth. It is just the young, enterprising thing to do before larger life commitments loom, like marriage, house hunting, or family planning.

The early-career employee experience: What else did we find?

While the primary focus of this blog was low commitment among young employees, our research surfaced other aspects of the employee experience that appear to be true of early-career employees regardless of generation. Specifically, we found two other areas where Millennials 10 years ago and Gen Zers responded similarly:

• Manager favorability
• Career optimism

Early-career employees feel pretty satisfied with their managers

Both sets of our benchmark data suggest that young employees have the most favorable views of their manager. Across all our survey questions related to management, we found that the older employees are, the less favorably they view their manager.

This makes intuitive sense. In the early stages of a career, people will naturally rely on those who are more experienced than they are. For one, they are still building their skills and experiences, and will thus trust and defer to their managers’ perceived expertise. Secondly, they simply haven’t worked with many managers before, and may rate their manager highly because they have no one else to compare them with.

We expect that as early-career employees become more confident in their abilities and experience more management styles, they develop higher standards for what they consider a “great” manager. If this interpretation is correct, we would expect Gen Z’s views of management to steadily decline in the coming years.

Young employees are generally more optimistic about their careers

Next, we examined career optimism. Specifically, we wanted to understand whether career optimism is an aspect of youthfulness that all generations once possessed or if it’s unique to Gen Z.

For both data sets, we looked at questions about career optimism (as measured by favorability toward growth and development) to see how optimism varies across generations. As expected, we found that career optimism is highest among a company's youngest employees and declines in each successive generation.

This finding should not be surprising, and we find that most people would agree that youth and optimism go hand in hand. Generally speaking, young people both have and feel they have more time to achieve their goals and more exciting pathways to explore. At a very concrete level, they also have fewer responsibilities, meaning they can make meaningful, life-changing decisions with greater ease and flexibility.

Combined with our insights into commitment, our data strongly suggest that young people, regardless of generation, are more optimistic about where their careers could go and are more willing to leave their current company to achieve their career ambitions.

How leaders can retain and engage early-career employees

Our research suggests that low commitment is a shared characteristic among young employees, rather than some uniquely Gen Z trait. However, this doesn’t mean organizational leaders should give up on engaging and retaining their young employees.

By providing motivating career development opportunities and fostering a positive workplace culture, organizations can create a culture where young employees want to stay and grow their careers.

When focusing specifically on engaging early-career employees, our people scientists recommend:

• Providing clear, personalized career paths. Demonstrate career potential with transparent career paths that illustrate possible avenues for growth within the company. Then, work with each employee to build a personalized and actionable career development plan that reflects their professional goals and ambitions.
• Train managers to have more effective development conversations. Upskill managers in the art of development conversations, and encourage them to make development a regular topic in their 1-on-1 meetings with direct reports. By ensuring that development isn’t treated like a one-off checkbox conversation that happens only during performance cycles, you create a culture where employees feel their growth is a priority.
• Ensure performance processes are fair and transparent. While providing growth opportunities is essential to retaining and engaging employees, it’s equally vital that employees can trust that their performance is being fairly assessed. It’s not enough to know that the opportunity to become a manager exists – employees must trust that they are being fairly recognized and will receive a promotion or pay adjustment that reflects their efforts. We highly recommend implementing performance review calibrations and general pay/performance equity audits.

Build a company culture that engages and retains all employees

Learn how Culture Amp can help