There’s a line about Gen Z that gets repeated so often it’s started to sound like fact: no loyalty, no patience, gone within a year. Stacy Gershberg, an HR consultant who consults to a range of organisations and management teams, has heard it plenty of times from the business owners she advises. She just doesn’t buy it.
“I think we have to question ourselves sometimes about the narrative we’re being fed,” she says. “It’s not always completely true.” When she checked those facts against Australian Bureau of Statistics data, the numbers barely moved: job mobility for young workers is only marginally higher than it was 20 years ago, and average tenure across every generation currently sits at about six years.
And the data goes further.
Demographer Simon Kuestenmacher, writing in The New Daily, found that a Gen Z worker born in 2001 is only about half as likely to change jobs this year as their own Gen X boss was at the same age in 1996. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures put job mobility for workers aged 15 to 24 at around 12 per cent today, against 23 per cent back in 1996. Part of the reason is structural: retrenchments have fallen from around 7 per cent during the early-90s recession to under 2 per cent now, meaning fewer people are being pushed out of a job in the first place. By that measure, today’s under-25s might not just be as loyal as previous generations; it might be that young people today are the most loyal generation ever.
Gershberg works inside businesses mostly run by Gen X and Gen Y owners. Her advice to them isn’t to wait for younger staff to fall in line. “If medium-sized businesses want to grow, and they’re going to need the Gen Zs to do that, you’ve got to understand them as a generation,” she says. That means resisting the urge, as she puts it, to “turn the clock back” and instead accept that the workplace has changed for everyone, not just for the newest people in it. Her sharpest comment, though, is aimed the other way. Asked where she actually sees performance problems inside the businesses she consults to, her answer skips past the generation everyone likes to blame. “By far it is not the younger people,” she says. “It is the Gen Ys and the Gen Xs.”
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