What Gen Z need from work
Gen Z have been shaped by recessions, the pandemic, geopolitical instability, not to mention financial insecurity and world changing technology.
That’s the finding of the Edelman Gen Z Lab as told to me by the leader of the project Jackie Cooper. Most powerfully she explains that Gen Z’s have a ‘visceral need for safety’ – that’s financial, social, cultural and even physical.
They respond to fear by asking questions and wanting to be heard, which older generations often misread as entitlement or disrespect for hierarchy.
Politically, Gen Z is fragmented. Younger Gen Zs, especially boys/young men, are leaning more conservative and drawn to strong-man archetypes; older Gen Zs, shaped by Obama / BLM, are more idealistic about progressive politics. Algorithms and “TikTok-isation” amplify those splits.
I was blown away to see Jackie Cooper from Edelman talk about the research that the company has done to understand the new generation of workers entering the workplace – I think you’ll love this discussion.
Transcript
Jackie Cooper: I’m Jackie Cooper and I serve as Edelman’s Global Chief Brand Officer and a senior advisor.
Bruce Daisley: And you run something I, I saw in your resume called the Gen Z lab. I wonder if you could just, that’s the context we’re talking today. So I wonder if you could just explain to me what the Gen Z lab is?
Jackie Cooper: Yeah. It’s really interesting that we establish the Gen Z lab to really help our clients understand how to engage with this generation. And it was prompted by, me being on a workshop panel for Adweek, where I was asked to moderate an internal workshop around the future of marketing, and it happened to be with six CMOs and I didn’t really know which aspect of that rather wide subject we should look at.
And so we rang them up before the workshop and said, what’s keeping you awake at night? What would you really like to have in this hour? And I really didn’t imagine that every single one said, actually, can we address Gen Z? And that came out really because as a senior marketeer, you’ve probably grown up.
In a workplace where you are used to leading audiences, leading creative work, leading marketing direction, and your audience follows and engages, and what they were all feeling with Gen Z was, this was not an audience that was doing any of those things. And this was an audience that was not only asking more questions, but had the ability to share their opinions and of course at the extreme, bring them down and cancel them.
And so they were paralyzed by indecision and they were saying they’d rather do nothing than do something that Backlashed. And so outta that workshop came the idea that I said to them look, if I could establish insights, data guidance, that would help you make those decisions with knowledge, would you be interested in that?
And they all agreed.
Bruce Daisley: So give us the top line then. So I’ve read through the latest Gen Z report that you’ve done, and I wanna delve into some of the ways that maybe the group is a bit more bifurcated than we might imagine and the way it’s split. But I wonder if you could just give us the sort of the top line perspective of the state of Gen Z, how they see the world.
Jackie Cooper: Yeah, it’s such an interesting conversation to have because it’s a generation that’s changed generational behavior because of what they’ve experienced. So they’ve gone they’ve seen their parents go through two recessions they’ve gone through a pandemic. We have geopolitical unrest, financial unrest, technology opportunities, but also technology fears.
And the one thing that came across from the very first outreach of survey global survey that we delivered was this visceral need for safety. And we were really quite surprised by some of the feedback that we got. And the fear goes across financially, socially everything that’s going on culturally and.
The way that generation and the way this generation is dealing with fear is by asking questions and wanting to understand and wanting to be heard. And this doesn’t always go very this doesn’t go down very well. Quite often with older generations who see this in the workplace quite often as entitlement.
Or kind of disrespect for hierarchy. And a lot of the time when we’ve been talking about this behavior, we’ve been trying to contextualize it within that initial finding of fear that if you are frightened, the thing you want to do is find out. And if you find out, you are less fearful. And so that visceral need for safety has been a sort of common thread for subsequent, surveys for us to find out.
What’s going on? And politically, obviously it’s such a challenging time. So in the, in, in that latest survey, we want to continue to understand because they really are the most influential generation that we have. But what we also know now that the younger Gen Z is. Are leaning much more to the right and we really do feel that it’s quite fragmented among Gen Z.
It’s not one cohort, so we really do need to understand. A little bit more of the tapestry of how they’re behaving and how they’re showing up and what’s going on.
Bruce Daisley: I saw that in your report. I guess it for the easiest way for us to understand Gen Zs, it’s anyone born since the millennium and so you know, we’re gonna have people who are old of the century, 25 years old, but we’re also gonna have people who are as young as 12, I’m guessing sort of 10, 12, and.
I saw in the report it said that younger Gen Zs, maybe because they’ve grown up in the post COVID era, really, that’s the time that they come of age are leaning. Is that in the US in particular, or is that in, is that everywhere across the board?
Jackie Cooper: It’s stronger in the US but it’s, we see it everywhere probably because this sort of, oh.
We don’t really understand the source of it. What we are seeing is the reasons that they’re giving us now that they’re there and there is this sort of, we all, we see this being much more heavily emphasized towards. Boys and men than we do to girls. So there’s something also about a gender divide amongst Gen Z where the boys and men are wanting to hold on to more conservative values.
And there is a challenge that we see through to. Around masculinity and how they behave and how they get seen and how they show up. And you look at some of the noise around the people at Andrew Tate and it’s quite shocking in terms of how many of those Gen Zs were following that kind of movement.
So I think it, you could ask a thousand questions and really get a thousand answers. And of course when you do a survey, you just try and take. The slides through, through those responses, but what we do see is this sort of. Need for them to be heard. And sometimes people will express within Gen Z opinions that are quite idealistic or quite theoretical, but they’re expressing those opinions very firmly anyway because they feel they absolutely need to be heard, and maybe this world doesn’t hear them.
And doesn’t factor them in, doesn’t factor them in to the workplace, doesn’t factor them into government, doesn’t factor them into the future of work giving the advent of ai. And so it’s a very challenging place for them. Obviously, that’s a generalization. But we do see that in, in large numbers in the us, in the uk and across the world.
Bruce Daisley: One of the things that I got from this stuff that you’d done was that actually there was almost cause and effect in, in almost everything that you could see. So the older gen Zs who’d grown through the Black Lives matter, or they’d grown through the Obama presidency. They had a degree more, idealism about what they believed that politics could do and politics could change. The ones who’d grown up through the COVID era and were very much shaped and defined by algorithm and algorithmically driven content. Were a touch more focused on safety and security and the, you could see the appeal of a confident, strong man leader, that sort of archetype of that.
I just wonder then, projecting forwards, one of the things that came across in your report is political chaos was one of the things that defined the last few years, certainly in the uk. And that political chaos seems to be extending forwards into the future. Would you imagine then that this state of the younger Gen Zs is gonna continue?
Jackie Cooper: I think if you look at the world. I think that we can see that absolutely. There’s no reason for anyone to feel reassured. We, we see that, the whole political. Situation really does help them decide how they’re going to behave. Gen Z is basically shaped by experiences.
They’re shaped by algorithms. And while Gen Z does span multiple ideologies, we’ve also seen the act as a group. With kind of quite a lot of clarity, whether it’s pushing industries together demanding new brand actions. And so I do think it’s. Absolutely a mirror to what’s going on in the world.
That’s what we’ve really found, that what happens in Gen Z is then trickling through into wider behaviors. And Gen Z are, absolutely concerned right now about the world that they live in. From this month, worse than last month. And you, I know you outreach particularly to the US and the uk and in both of these countries, we do not see things improving.
We see things becoming more fractured. And outta fracture comes forth. These generations are saying, okay, but I want to be counted. I want to be seen. I want to be heard. And there are various ways that they can do that. And it’s really. For them, understanding that they have a voice now to decide what their future might look like and they don’t have.
Trust in the traditional institutions. They don’t have trust in government. They don’t have trust really in, in the system. And so quite often we’re asked about activism and we say look, it’s not really activism. It’s more about Gen Z, just wanting action. If you are expressing an opinion and you want action, that doesn’t automatically make you an activist.
Having said that, gen Z’s. Also probably one of the most activist orientated generations we’ve seen since the sixties. But we also see that going through, you just have to look at the king’s marches in the US and that people are taken to the streets. That’s not just Gen Z, but that notion of having a voice standing up for what you believe, not sitting down and letting the authorities tell you what’s what.
It’s spreading beyond the Gen Z generation. But we find from a lot of the work that we do, that it’s the Gen Zs who are triggering families to get out. And it’s the Gen Zs who are triggering the workplace to address issues and be more transparent about what they stand for. So we would, we often say that this is the most influential generation.
And we have a longevity lab, which also targets 55 to 72, and that’s the most economically powerful generation, but the influence is coming from Gen Z.
Bruce Daisley: I wonder if we could talk about the impact at work. One of the things that Edelman’s Trust report actually often talks about is that our organization, our company is the smallest big thing that we think that we can have in effect.
Impact over. We become, I touch idealized when it comes to our organization ’cause we think we can see the boss and surely somehow we can perceive that there’s gonna be something done. That’s right because it’s done by someone who’s close to us. And when Gen Z come to work, what is there?
What is the effect of that at work? How do they, you’ve talked about the need for safety. How do they perceive feedback inside the organization? You’ve talked about them not necessarily having faith in institutions. Do they have faith in companies?
Jackie Cooper: They do have faith in companies, which is quite interesting.
They have a lot of faith in their own CEO, which is super interesting. But that will go up or down depending on accessibility and transparency within their group and the leadership group. And so the hierarchy doesn’t automatically dictate to them that they shouldn’t have an opinion. Or that they shouldn’t ask questions.
And so a lot of the experience we’ve had in the workplace that’s helped optimize communication within that workplace has been when Gen Z’s able to have a voice, feel that they’re being heard. And set up the right kind of system so that right the way to the top, they feel that there’s not only input from them, but understanding on the direction, at the leadership level, at the executive LE level.
And we see that a lot of the, gen Zs really want to make an impact in work, and that’s a good thing. But they also expect their company to make an impact in the world. And so we see numbers go up if a company can. Show a Gen Z cohort, that they take their role as a company in a wider sense of their place in the world, seriously.
And if they are communicative and open about what they’re doing to make the world a better place. Now that doesn’t mean that they all have to go and save the planet. But there is an element of that. There is an element of, look, you, you are out here, you’ve got a superpower as a business to use your marketing acumen, to use your brand, to use the ability to either financially or in, influence to help the world be a better place.
And Gen Zs will ask of their workplace, what are you doing? And the more that the company can come back and say what they’re doing, the more favorable they feel. The other thing that’s really important is it’s okay to say no to Gen Zs. And I think a lot of people go, oh my goodness. Just keep them over there and we’re doing what we’re doing.
But conversation and transparency is everything for them, because that helps them feel safe. They understand what’s going on. And a bit like parenting, if you say look, we understand why you want this, but we can’t do that right now because whatever. However, it’s on the docket for later because whatever.
Our Gen Zs say that’s fine ’cause at least we know we’re being heard. At least we know that they’re actually trusting us to have an opinion and that we’re allowed to hear what’s going on. They’re pledging their time to a company and they therefore want that to be respected. And what’s, it’s not blind time for Gen Z.
They really want to understand where they’re spending their time. And they’ve seen their parents go through quite brutal. Lack of work life balance, the pandemic, and they don’t want that kind of imbalance. That’s not laziness, that’s quality of life. And quite often that, that gets misinterpreted and maybe they actually have quite a lot to teach us.
Bruce Daisley: Is there any scope when we look at the deal that work represents to Gen Z workers, let’s say a 22-year-old, the deal that work represents is less optimistic. Maybe than the deal that was presented to their parents that a lot of parents might have owned a house, had a mortgage by the time they were 30, and be mortgage free by the time they’re 55.
Actually, most of those things don’t seem attainable without the bank of mom and dad now. And so with the lack of wage growth in addition. Are they more pessimistic or have they turned their focus elsewhere to the way that they think about the upside of work? How do they perceive the trade off of work?
Jackie Cooper: Both. So they’re more pessimistic, or you could say more realistic. This is a first generation that won’t do better than their parents financially. And you are right. They won’t achieve anything without the bank of mom and dad. And if the bank of mom and dad’s not that rich, they’ve got a problem. So that’s a reality check for them.
And not, these things aren’t always black and white and they see therefore that they want to live a life that isn’t just about being strapped into a financial strait jacket and trying to aspire to a house that they’re never going to afford. But it really also depends on the socioeconomic situation of where they’re coming from, because there was also.
The reality or the optimism of just living a life and being realistic works for a certain amount of people for another amount of this generation. It’s very depressing because they’re gonna aspire to what it’s really interesting, and I’m sure you are more knowledgeable than me about this move away from going, going away from going to university from.
Let’s just go through that academic process and a job will be ours. When we come out. The jobs that we want are the ones that are craft jobs, the ones that are service jobs, the ones that we all need. And we hear just anecdotally when we are doing these surveys from Gen Z is saying I just want to go out there and earn money and have a job where I know people are always going to need my services.
And what are those jobs as well with the advent of ai. Because the threat for their jobs and their workplace is real. And so I think that it’s such a time of unknown for what that future workplace holds. The notion of being a plumber and earning money. It’s better than going to university if you are not actually sure where your economic safety’s gonna come from.
’cause we’re always gonna need plumbers. Hopefully.
Bruce Daisley: Yeah. That safety thing is a recurrent theme, isn’t it? Safety projecting forward. I wanna talk about technology because one of the surprising things in the report is that young people feel like they’ve got a conflicted relationship with their phone.
They feel like they are cautious about AI and what AI represents in the future. No. I can definitely understand that. People in an older cohort might naturally shrink into that conservatism of thinking that everything new is dangerous. But typically it’s young people who are quite optimistic and idealistic about those things, and it’s just interesting to see, firstly, to see that they’ve got the conflicted relationship with their phone.
That’s something that I. Normally associate that phone guilt is something that’s acquired later in life. I’d love to talk about technology and this strange relationship they have with technology.
Jackie Cooper: No, I love this because it’s a bit counterintuitive, as you say. And gen Z often use this razor I fell into the TikTok hole.
And it’s this experience of you go on the phone and obviously Gen Z. Grown up with everything being on that device and all these different platforms being available, but then they fall down the TikTok hole. And what they mean by that is you just get lost into it. And before you know where you are, hours have burned, you’ve watched all sorts of rubbish, your head’s buzzing, you’re probably doing it at night, you’re not going to sleep, and you’ve fallen down that hole.
And there is and that kind of works across. All of this relationship with everything that’s happening on social, you add to that the mental health challenges and the pressure, the speed the lack of depth, the lack of thought, the adrenaline rush. This is helping this generation and all of us actually feel really quite rattled by spending a huge amount of time.
On these devices in these spaces. What we see from Gen Z, and you may have seen this in some of the sort of themes when you go online, is this absolute thirst for nostalgia and this incredible trend for going back to what was very tangible and very hands-on. We see knitting, crochet, cottage core, old fashioned.
Baking decor. Decor is even changing how Gen Z are decorating. They want to go back to the safety again and the nostalgia of when things were simpler. And so that doesn’t mean being lost in the technological high octane world of being online. They’ll bake and they will put on a vinyl record they won’t put on Spotify.
They will want to really understand that when you are around the table, quite often it’s the Gen Zers who are telling their parents, mom, dad put the phone away. And they don’t want the phones to be there. They want conversation. They want it to be in real time online dating. There’s now this.
Channel that’s going through for in real life meeting. I actually want to meet you in real life. I’m going to put the phone in the basket in the middle of the table and we’re gonna actually see how we get on in real life. And this is a very essential thing. If you talk to psychologists and even if you talk to people who are.
In the technology companies, we’ve all read that quite often. It’s the people in the technology companies who are more disciplined about limiting how much their kids have that online time. We know it’s not good for your mental health, it’s not good for your creativity. And so Gen Z are looking at their quality of life and they’re looking at how they feel and they’re making some super smart decisions.
To try and get back actually to a place where things were not all about that social space and that digital hit, because it’s a. It’s not a good long-term experience for them. And the more you are in this space as this space is changing. Our head of tech always says Today is the slowest the technology will ever be, which is scary, is just going to get faster and faster.
So the only way that we’re going to. Mentally for our wellbeing deal with it is to be disciplined about when we’re in and when we’re not. And I love that Gen Z are leading on this and they’re telling the older generations, you are on that too much. Look at me, have a conversation with me. Talk to me.
Let’s just put that down.
Bruce Daisley: Do you think. I in aggregate the expectations of Gen Z are almost inevitably gonna be disappointed. I say that largely because you’ve talked about how when GS Gen Zs joined the workforce, they have got expectations about having voice, about having a, say. Previous generations might have had that expectation, but it was hazed out of them pretty quickly.
That’s not gonna happen. You’re gonna have three years on this slow scheme. Are the expectations unreasonable? And is the TikTok ification of some jobs? That where people project their jobs and say, I do this. Is that creating unreasonable expectations about what the workforce is gonna be like for some Gen Z workers?
Jackie Cooper: I think to answer your first question, we see in the numbers that over 60% of older colleagues say they’ve been influenced by Gen Z. That’s a really high. Number across where they how they work across their choices for mentoring for what they do in terms of social impact engagement.
So I actually think Gen Zs. Influence across the generations, and we have a lot of data across all of the surveys, whether it’s the media and content you look at, or whether it’s how you turn up in the workplace and the choices you make in the workplace. We see around the 60% mark older generations saying, yep, I’ve been influenced by Gen Z.
So I find that very reassuring because you’ve got the wisdom of the old and they’re not going to just take it all as writ, they can take the influence. And be better and recognize Gen Z, but they’re still going to make their own individual decisions. And I think that the workplace will be better for it, especially against the, in, the absolutely the assault of AI and how that’s going to change all of our workplaces.
The notion of keeping in touch with the human aspect and that human aspect, being more questioning and saying, please make my world better, is such a great antidote to the technology helping with, so much of the graft. So I’m optimistic. Generically optimistic that this dynamic between Gen Z pushing and asking the older generation being influenced and hearing and that sort of pace in the middle where we see.
Look, I want you to connect more with me as a leader. I want you to show me what you are doing more of impact in the world. I want you to mentor me, but I also want to mentor you so you understand what Gen Z’s doing, this notion of mentor mentee between gen generations. Gen Z saying, I want a work life balance.
And us saying you know what? Maybe you’ve got a point. Maybe we have over egged it on the. Drive to achieve and the drive to have work being everything and recovery at weekends, rather than it being much more balanced. And Gen Z also wants to use the workplace to upskill. But they also want their life to be used for upskilling.
And that does make you a better all around person when you come to work. So I think on balance, it’s optimistic. I think we have a responsibility. To have them in the room, literally a metaphorically. I think if we don’t do that, it won’t be optimistic.
Bruce Daisley: It seems to me like there’s one thing that comes out of what a lot of what you’re saying is that being comfortable with contradictions is a really important part.
I saw you talking actually about young people often have got contradictions at the heart of their own feelings. They’re like, they think one thing, but they also think another, and these things aren’t fully formed, and it seems like organizations. If they start with good intention, thinking we’re gonna try our best on this, but there’s gonna be some moments where maybe we don’t get it fully right, but it’s the attempt that is putting us in the right direction that’s not a bad place to be.
That’s the way I’m reading it.
Jackie Cooper: Yeah, in the workplace. We’ve been schooled to believe that we have a strategy and we have a way, and then we all go into that way and that, and that’s a good thing. That’s, we all know where we’re going. And that’s, and that is a good thing.
But within that, you’ve got a tapestry now of multi-generational people who can make that good thing better. And actually being comfortable in the gray and hearing that rather than the black and white could make the strategy better. We’ve heard that. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Why is that? And that’s because it’s made up of the people who are in the workplace, who are human beings in a human workplace, with their own feelings, with their own opinions, and with their life influences affecting how you come to work. And during COVID, obviously it was such an extraordinary time.
While it was. Massively challenging and frightening. We were in a place where we were all experiencing the same world thing to try and manage how we were all managing in the workplace thing, and it was such a weird. Experience to, for example, have a call with someone that you just met, but you were talking to them from your home.
So you were immediately were in each other’s homes. And the immediacy and intimacy of that helped those conversations be a bit more intimate and maybe a little more speedy to get to what you really wanted to get to, of knowing that person and getting to be constructive. So I think. We expect a system to run the company, but actually a system should support where a company wants to go, and that system has to change.
Now to be optimal, it has to be more lateral. It has to, of course, have a hierarchy, but a hierarchy that’s respectful of all the levels. And you and I met on a panel, at a company where leaders were asking us about Gen Z and about the workplace. And what I found so interesting about the workshops.
Most of the questions I was asked as we were doing that sort of round robin in the workshops is how do I just hear from Gen Z and what do I do with what I hear from it? I’ve never really asked them anything and it’s so you kept, but asking is all they want. They’re not saying you have to change everything because their naivety and their lack of experience is known by them as much as it’s known by us, but they do want to ask the questions to get the reassurance and also to love where they work for them.
Having faith and having excitement about where they work is. Is a two-way thing. And I’ve got a Gen Z here, for example, who was supposed to be coming to a meeting and kind of didn’t want to come to the meeting because someone didn’t come back to him in a certain way. And I just literally wrote to him and said we didn’t come back to you because of this, and this, but I suggest you still come to the meeting and tell me what you think this and this.
It’s, the discomfort has to be comfortable. The discomfort has to be welcomed.
Bruce Daisley: I’m so interested in that discomfort. I wonder if I’m just interested in whether we probably need to graduate Gen Zs into the workplace slightly more explicitly than maybe as previous generations that, we have to, I hear all the time from people saying Gen Zs are a little bit uncomfortable with feedback.
Yes. And. Or to your safety point, they go to HR if they get too direct feedback. And that suggests to me and it’s younger millennials have heard that for as well. That suggests to me that maybe we just need to do a bit of acclimatization of them into work and adapt them. But it’s not to say they can’t be adapted, but probably just bring them up to speed a little bit.
Jackie Cooper: Yeah. I think adapting is the word, isn’t it? Because. Everyone wants to advance, and if they don’t, they shouldn’t be in the workplace. It’s not like you should just say all Gen Zs are fabulous and they should be mollycoddled and they should be listened to, and they just have to be reassured all the time.
That’s absolutely not what I’m saying. The insight of the sort of journey that they’ve come through the pandemic, through all kinds of political, social, economic challenges means that they are really. Traumatized is not too big a word in many ways because they’ve had to fight or see their parents fight.
We had 15 year olds in the US in our survey telling us that they were saving up for medical insurance so that they wouldn’t see their parents go through what their parents went through, what they saw their parents go through. So this need for safety is such a theme and. I think adaptability for all of us is necessary.
We’ve had to adapt post COVID. We’ve had to adapt to understand hybrid working. We’ve had to adapt to understanding that suddenly a commute from somebody is expensive and they’re coming to us and saying, but I can’t afford to commute. And you. Commuted before you, before COVID, and they say yes, but before COVID, I lived in a one bedroom studio in New York and I realized that was untenable.
So I’ve moved out and now it’s costing me a lot of money to come to work. My whole situation has changed, and we don’t criticize for that. We recognize that’s something that has changed fundamentally in our world. Gen Zs have been through all of this, and they continue to go through all of this. We have our media telling us that we could be on the threshold of a world war.
You think about the before World War II and how people behaved in that sort of need to live their life. ’cause they didn’t know what tomorrow was going to bring. There are elements of that for this generation. That’s exactly what they’re going through now. So we adapted from COVID. And this generation changed because of COVID.
Why wouldn’t we therefore recognize that there’s further adaption adaptation needed for this generation, the workplace. And we can learn from them, but they also need to learn from us and the work that we’ve done on the Longevity Lab and. I’ve mentioned on that panel that we did together, chip Conley who’s a fantastic author and talks about the sort of older generation’s, ability to really understand what they can bring to the workplace.
E exactly. It’s some parallels. We see lots of bookend parallels between Gen Z and the 55 plus, because. 55 plus now isn’t what 55 plus was 10 years ago. The older generation is asking different questions. No one’s saying, you know what? Farm me out at 60 People are saying Keep me in the workplace. I’m not done.
I actually know what I’m doing. And Chip Cony talks about the wisdom that’s necessary in the workplace. And he told us that. The startups that he’s been looking at succeed, his entrepreneur and supported lots of different businesses. They succeed mostly if they have someone of over 60 on their board. But obviously most of the startups are made up of the Gen Zs.
So that dynamic between the Gen Zs who have all the sort of vim and vigor and the passion, but also they just don’t have the wisdom. They need the wisdom from the older generation. And the older generations need to understand the questions from the Gen Zs. So I’m so lucky with our Gen Z lab, we have 400 Gen Zs around the world who we can immediately turn on for focus groups, workshops, reviews of creative work workplace advisory sessions where we give vox pops and they in turn have their own posse of people in each of the markets.
I learn from them every single day. Recently, last week was in Chicago and attended our global leadership accelerator session where we had hundreds of. Employees from around the world come in who are the next bright stars of the business. You learn more from being in the room with those people than anyone.
’cause they have enough information to be super smart, but they’re asking enough questions of us to make us smarter. And I don’t think being unsettled is a good thing. I think being unsettled is a great thing ’cause it makes you better.
Bruce Daisley: We’re out of time. I wonder if there was one bit of advice or what you’ve specifically learned that you would say has helped you empathize with Gen Zs?
Or is there anything that you would suggest to someone else if they’re struggling with Gen Zs inside their organization? There’s one point that you would you would focus on?
Jackie Cooper: My biggest learning is pull them together and just talk with them. Not at them. Don’t present to them. Talk with them and let them understand that what they say is interesting.
You might not agree with it. You might not do anything with it, but just hear them. Once they feel that they’ve been heard, they will a hundred percent lean in and you’re gonna learn something a hundred percent. You’re gonna learn something because their ability to forensically research stuff is off the scale, and therefore their ability to feed back to you and have knowledge is on another level to the previous generation.
So that two-way communication is only gonna help.
Bruce Daisley: I love that. I love that. Jackie, thank you so much. I appreciate your time.
Jackie Cooper: Thank you so much.
