Why Gen Z approaches work differently and what that looks like on your team.
Gen Z is often criticized for how we approach work: wanting too much flexibility, questioning every decision and expecting careers to work differently than they did for the generations before us. At 27, I can understand where some of those perceptions come from, but I think they are often treated as personality traits instead of responses to the world we entered. Every generation enters the workforce under a different set of circumstances, and those circumstances shape how people think about work. Gen Z is no different. We were shaped by a different economy, different technology and different ideas about what a career should give back in return. As more of Gen Z moves into the workforce, those differences may offer an early look at how work itself is changing.
What motivates Gen Z?
One of the biggest misunderstandings about Gen Z is that we simply care less about work. I don’t think that’s the case. What seems to be changing is how we define a successful career.
For previous generations, success was often tied to longevity, promotions and moving up within an organization. Gen Z still cares about career growth, but that does not always mean a new title. It can mean learning a new skill, taking on an interesting project, building expertise or working with someone who actually teaches you and mentors you along the way.
Feedback matters so much. I want to know what I am doing well, where I can improve and why a decision was made. I don’t need constant reassurance. I want the knowledge to keep getting better.
Work-life balance matters too, but I think that phrase sometimes gets interpreted as wanting to work less. I care about doing good work. I just don’t believe exhaustion should be treated as proof of commitment. Gen Z seems less willing to accept the idea that the person answering emails late at night or sacrificing the most time outside of work must also be the most dedicated employee.
Financial security is also a major part of the equation. Many people my age entered adulthood during a period when the cost of everyday life changed quickly. Overall consumer prices are about 30% higher than they were at the start of 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Housing has climbed sharply too, with U.S. home prices more than 33% higher in mid-2026 than they were five years earlier.
For me, that creates a constant balancing act. I want work that feels meaningful and gives me room to grow, but those things are harder to prioritize when financial stability is also on the line. It means evaluating a job not just by whether I like the work, but by whether the pay, growth and flexibility make it possible to build a life around it.
How Gen Z approaches the workplace
A lot of what gets described as “Gen Z behavior” makes more sense when you look at the environment we grew up in.
Take our tendency to ask why. Gen Z grew up with instant access to information. If we did not know something, we searched for it. If one source did not make sense, we found another. If there was a more efficient way to do something, we would find it. That makes the answer “because this is how we have always done it” particularly unsatisfying to hear.
Marketing is an industry that changes quickly. Platforms, search behavior, social media and AI are constantly evolving, and best practices that worked a few years ago may not make sense anymore.
That does not mean every process needs to be challenged. Experience matters, and there are plenty of things more experienced colleagues understand that I only know because they’ve taught me. But I do think Gen Z is more comfortable asking whether there might be another way, and that can be valuable in workplaces where change happens quickly. Sometimes it is what pushes a team to rethink what could be done better.
That comfort with questioning things may also show up in how Gen Z interacts with leadership. We seem less likely to treat seniority as a reason not to speak up. Adobe’s Future Workforce Study found that 74% of Gen Z employees felt comfortable giving upward feedback to managers or supervisors. That can sometimes come across as bold, especially in workplaces where hierarchy has traditionally shaped who gets to question a decision or offer an opinion. But for many of us, talking directly with senior leaders or sharing an idea does not necessarily feel like challenging authority. It just feels like participating in the conversation.
Gen Z is entering the workforce with different challenges
Gen Z does not just have different preferences. We are dealing with challenges previous generations did not face in quite the same way, and one of the biggest right now is technology.
I work in marketing, so AI is already part of my professional life. It can summarize research, create drafts, generate ideas and complete tasks that might once have been given to a junior employee.
That creates an interesting challenge. A lot of expertise is built by doing basic work first. You write the rough draft, pull the research, make mistakes, get feedback and eventually develop judgment.
But what happens when technology starts taking over some of the work that once created that experience?
Gen Z may be among the first generations to seriously ask: How do you become experienced when some of the work that traditionally created experience can now be automated?
If AI can produce the first draft, the bigger question is how a junior employee learns to recognize whether that draft is actually good. Judgment still has to come from somewhere. That may mean managers need to be more intentional about showing younger employees how decisions are made, explaining what separates strong work from weak work and creating opportunities to practice the thinking behind the task instead of only reviewing the final output.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. AI can make younger employees more capable and productive much earlier in their careers. But it could also change the path from junior employee to experienced professional.
The older end of Gen Z faced another unusual challenge. Many of us graduated from college or started our first professional jobs around the pandemic. Instead of learning workplace norms by sitting next to experienced coworkers, overhearing conversations and watching meetings unfold, some of us learned them through a laptop screen.
So much of professional life is unwritten: how to handle disagreement, present an idea, know when to speak up, read a room or build relationships. Those things are much harder to learn when your first experience with professional life is remote.
Different expectations, similar priorities
When you look at what different generations actually want from work, the differences are not always as dramatic as the stereotypes suggest.
Gen Z values work-life balance. So do Millennials and Gen X. Baby Boomers value flexibility and positive workplace environments too. Across generations, people want to be paid fairly, respected, given stability and be able to feel good about the work they do.
Maybe the bigger difference is not what Gen Z wants, but how comfortable we are saying it out loud.
Previous generations may have wanted more flexibility, stronger boundaries, better feedback or clearer growth opportunities too, but worked in environments where asking for those things carried more risk.
Gen Z works differently. But that’s not because we care less about work.
For managers, the opportunity is to understand the difference. Give younger employees context, create room for questions and make development part of the work rather than something that happens once a year. At the same time, younger employees have plenty to learn from the experience, judgment and perspective of the generations around us.
The goal should be to build workplaces where each generation has something to contribute.
— Cameron McClellan