Gen Z Isn't Bad at Workplace Communication, Employers Are

A survey of 250 Gen Z professionals across industries found that clear structural expectations rank alongside fairness and empathetic engagement as the generation's recurring workplace demands — evidence, according to Boston University's Jeff LeBlanc, that the friction isn't a skills gap but a norms gap.

LeBlanc, a Learning Facilitator for Boston University's Online MBA who studies workplace culture and communication, argues that what managers often read as rudeness or cluelessness in young employees is frequently a mismatch in unspoken expectations.

Consider a case he documents directly. A Gen Z employee in her 20s, working at a small café and restaurant owned by an older Gen X proprietor, realized she would be late and texted him. He was frustrated. To him, lateness warranted a phone call; a text felt too casual and impersonal.

She read the same exchange entirely differently.

"He's super busy, so I felt a call was going to take up too of time," she told LeBlanc. "So I texted. I thought it was more considerate."

Neither party had explained the expectation to the other. LeBlanc's prescription is blunt: if being late requires a phone call, managers need to say so. A two-minute conversation about expectations, he writes, can prevent both people from walking away convinced the other was disrespectful.

The demographics driving the gap

The oldest members of Gen Z are now approaching 30, while the youngest are still in college and high school, according to LeBlanc. Many of the older cohort passed through college, internships and first jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic — a period when communication moved online and masks covered half of everyone's face.

That timing matters for skills that are rarely taught explicitly. People traditionally learned to read a room by watching faces around a conference table, noticing a manager's tone shift, or catching a quiet explanation from a colleague after a meeting. Someone who was 18 or 19 in 2020 lost the room at exactly the moment those skills develop. Classes went online. Internships went remote. Masks, when people returned in person, made facial communication harder.

LeBlanc's conclusion is measured: Gen Z employees don't necessarily communicate better or worse than previous generations. They learned to communicate in a very different environment.

When honesty reads as oversharing

The mismatch extends to disclosure. One Gen Z worker LeBlanc spoke with had recently started at a large New England company in a blue-collar industry. Struggling with severe anxiety, he told his baby boomer manager. The manager was sympathetic but unsettled.

"It made me feel uncomfortable, if I'm being honest," the manager told LeBlanc. "I didn't want to downplay his anxiety, but I'm not sure I needed to know."

The manager wasn't dismissing anxiety as unreal, LeBlanc notes. He questioned how much of it belonged in the professional relationship. Many older workers learned that professionalism means firm boundaries between personal and professional life. Gen Z came of age when mental health conversations are considerably more public. What feels like honesty to one person can feel like oversharing to a boss.

LeBlanc draws a line: managers don't have to become therapists, and employees don't have to disclose everything. But both need to recognize that their comfort level around disclosure isn't universal.

The 'Friday' problem

Then there is the deadline mismatch. A manager tells a young employee, "I need this by Friday." The employee delivers at 4:30 p.m. Friday. The manager is annoyed — he intended to review it that morning, revise it, and forward it to someone else. The employee met the stated deadline and is equally confused.

This is where LeBlanc's survey data lands. Clarity about what success actually looks like emerged as a consistent theme among the 250 Gen Z professionals he surveyed. His position: a desire for clarity shouldn't be confused with a need for hand-holding. An employee can want autonomy and still want to know exactly what success looks like. "Friday" and "Friday by 10 a.m. because I need three hours to review this" communicate very different expectations.

The AI wrinkle

Artificial intelligence, LeBlanc argues, raises the stakes. Polished emails, automated meeting summaries and faster information generation are now standard. But more communication does not guarantee more understanding.

The larger lesson he draws applies to every generation in the workforce: people mistake the workplace norms they learned for common sense. They aren't common sense. They were taught — by the workplaces, technologies and historical moments in which each generation began its career.

Gen Z, LeBlanc writes, is learning its norms in a very different world. Companies that spell out expectations explicitly, rather than assuming shared defaults, are the ones least likely to lose Friday afternoons to a misunderstanding.