Tell us your experiences of working with gen Z

Young people today live in a digital world that would seem incomprehensible even 20 years ago. For generation Z (that’s people born between 1995 and 2010) most communication happens on screens and smartphones. Walk into any office and you will probably find it eerily quiet, with people wearing headphones, tapping away on their computers or phones, seemingly oblivious to the world around them. 

Rewind a decade or more and you would find a very different picture. We PR professionals communicated with audiences through phone, fax, email, post and face to face. If you were working in a busy press office the phones would be ringing non-stop amid a buzz of conversation. Now if a landline rings – a rare happening – panic sets in. It’s hard to explain to today’s gen Z how picking up the phone or sending out printed newsletters was the way that PRs operated.

Does face to face communication matter?

Whilst digitalisation and AI have speeded up communications and made life easier, have we lost the ability to communicate face to face, talk on the phone and network?  And does it matter? Maybe those born into a world devoid of the internet where much communication was face to face have retained those “soft skills” that employers say they desperately need. But gen Z live in a different universe. Has their reliance on screens resulted in the inability to talk to people face to face, or even chat over the phone? 

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, thinks they have. He argues that the generation growing up with the smart phone (which appeared in 2008), have become anxious and needy. Haidt says that the shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood caused a "great rewiring" of development, resulting in a massive spike in adolescent anxiety, depression, attention fragmentation, addiction and mental health conditions. He says that from about 2010 onwards gen Z switched from in-person socializing to screen-based interactions, losing critical real-world developmental experiences. Haidt has his critics who argue that lumping together a whole generation as social misfits fails to consider the differences in environment and upbringing. But his research is intriguing.

CIPR-funded research project

To find out whether this has had an impact on public relations – which is all about developing relationships – Richard Bailey and I (both CIPR members) are working on project, funded through the CIPR research fund. 

Titled From Screens to Speech: Investigating Gen Z Anxieties With Direct Interpersonal Communication Within the PR Profession, we are seeking to discover whether gen Zs working in the PR profession, or studying the subject at university, are struggling with interpersonal communications. Or maybe PR attracts naturally confident people who are comfortable with interpersonal communications, therefore trashing the “snowflakes” stereotype.

So far, the findings are mixed. Some organisations say that some younger staff are struggling with cold calling and face to face meetings, whilst others value the new skills and perspectives that they bring. One recruitment consultant observed that whilst young people may come across as confident in online interviews, when in the job they often flounder with skills like networking. To be fair, people of all ages (myself included) have found these difficult initially, but maybe gen Z struggle more than most.

We need your help

Some more older people working in the profession say that younger people need more support and often come with expectations of a healthy work-life balance that previous generations would never have dared to ask for. One factor has been the impact of the Covid pandemic which has led to an increase in working from home and digital communication, born of necessity at the time. This has affected all ages. But have gen Z been affected more than most, particularly if they spent much of their university education online and missed out on the enriching social experience of university life?

We need to find out more to get a better picture of what’s happening. Those gen Zs that we have spoken to all recoil at the notion that they are “snowflakes”. But we need to get a view from employers, from PR agencies to commercial and public sector organisations. Do you have gen Z staff in your organisation?  Do they need more support? Are there mental health issues that are different from older employees? Some employers put together innovative training and engagement programmes. If you have, we want to hear from you. We also need to know what the CIPR should do to help managers support these new entrants into the profession. 

This generation will be tomorrow’s leaders. We need to understand what they can bring to the profession.

We’d love to hear more. So please get in touch if you have a view on this.

How to get involved

Contact Anne Nicholls by emailing ancommunications@hotmail.co.uk or you can complete the survey.

Anne Nicholls is a freelance PR practitioner specialising in education. She is chair of the CIPR’s Education & Skills sector group.

Further reading

Forget screens, gen Z wants to network in person. Will senior PRs help them?

Can we bridge the generation gap in PR to unlock workplace potential?

How can I become a more supportive leader?