Older generations should lay off Gen Z when it comes to their job hopping

BRIAN was the last straw. Brian was a key reason why I ended up Singapore. Brian was a dead ringer for Quasimodo and rang every alarm bell.

We worked at a London stockbrokers. I was given a temp job, straight out of university, that was as dull as it was easy. Brian had performed a similar role for decades. He was supposed to be an inspirational figure. He terrified me.

When the manager suggested I had the potential to follow Brian, to sit at the same desk in a Marks and Spencer’s tie, year after year, until I was just as hunched over my computer as Quasimodo Brian, I had never felt so inspired. To quit.

Within three months, I was staying at a friend’s HDB flat in Toa Payoh and looking for a job that’d eventually pay half of my stockbrokers’ salary. For Generation X in the 1990s, such a move was considered audacious, exotic even. For Generation Z today, it’s dismissed as job-hopping and comes with sneering commentaries about “quiet quitting” and “lazy girl jobs”.

With the festive season in full swing, it’s beginning to look a lot like the time to criticise those who consider a job switch ahead of the New Year and my generation’s condescension always tickles me. We’ve got so many reasons to be smug right now, eh? The ice sheets are melting, Gaza is boiling over and far-right populism is determined to elect old men with bad hair to do terrible things to their people. But let’s point fingers at young people for having the gall to put jobs with purpose ahead of soulless capitalism.

Workforce culture evolving amid uncertain climate

According to the Forward SG report, released in October, young Singaporeans are suggesting the Singapore Dream might be something more than racking up decades of debt to buy a $200,000 car and spend weekends in musty country club lounges, railing against the ineptitude of others. Priorities are shifting, hopefully.

In an uncertain, post-pandemic climate, Singapore’s workforce culture continues to evolve. In a 2022 survey, about two in five workers said that they would not take a job if it did not offer flexible work hours or work-from-home options. Elsewhere, a survey by mental health advocacy organisation Silver Ribbon (Singapore), showed respondents putting a sense of fulfilment and work-life balance ahead of salary when picking a job.

Further afield, a Workspace Technology survey revealed that half of US-based Gen Z workers would quit if denied a “hybrid work option” and just 49 per cent of Gen Z believed that work was central to their identity, according to Deloitte’s Gen Z and Millennial Survey.

As a consequence, the Forward Singapore report has outlined plans to reward talents in different areas, rather than focus on the salaried class, which seems reasonable enough. But I’m not supposed to say that, am I? Being a Gen Xer, I must ridicule the younger and supposedly lazier generations, throwing out the latest insulting hashtags. They’re “quiet quitters” with their “bare minimum Mondays” and “lazy girl jobs.” Where’s the work ethic? Where are the devils wearing Prada? Where is Gordon Gekko and that Wall Street hunger? Where have all the ladder climbers gone?

Well, firstly, my grandparents’ generation said exactly the same about my lot. At least their accusations were valid. They stopped Hitler’s march on Europe and saved democracy. In the 1990s, I stopped listening to Kylie Minogue and saved guitar music. It wasn’t the same.

And as for being youthful workaholics, I once locked myself in a supermarket freezer, because the prospect of pneumonia was a more attractive proposition than unloading Christmas turkeys on the shop floor. Gen Z might have “bare minimum Mondays”. I had “bare minimum months”.

Maybe, just maybe, the Gen Zs are taking an existential moment to ponder the polycrisis, the omnipresent threat of a new pandemic and climate scientists’ fears that Singapore could face a 5m-high wall of sea water later this century. Maybe younger workers are content to job hop for a bit and sell homemade cookies in the meantime.

Because my salaried generation did so well, didn’t we? Had I followed the Gen X mantra and clung to the rice bowl at my full-time media gigs over the last 25 years, I would’ve lost three of them anyway. Two of the Singaporean newspapers closed down, in print form at least, and a third, in Australia, continues to take spins on the retrenchment merry-go-round. My sub-editing layout skills are now about as relevant as those of a VCR repairer.

Virtues to encourage, rather than dismiss

If anything, Gen Z deserves praise for demanding more than just a fixed salary, no questions asked. Diversity policies matter and rightly so. Statistically, Gen Z is the most diverse generation the world has ever seen - in the United States, 48 per cent of Gen Z is non-white – and they expect to see those changes reflected, in terms of gender, sexuality and identity.

In workplaces across three countries, mostly filled with Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, I’ve heard the Seventies sitcom banter with the usual isms and a dashes of homophobia. Oh, the hilarity of those days. I miss them like I miss my last prostate exam.

Rather than castigate young workers for being impatient and demanding, perhaps older generations might consider open-mindedness, flexibility and passion as virtues to encourage, rather than dismiss. And, really, is the idealistic pursuit of happiness so bad for a Singaporean society that has long struggled to shake off the stereotypes of being dour, repressed and cash-obsessed?

We can all be Brian. Walking away from a dead-end job in the hope of finding something more rewarding is the tricky bit, requiring a positive, inventive attitude that Singapore will need in the years ahead.

In the 1990s, Brian and I inputted the mundane data of settled stock trades. Today, AI could probably handle most of the mathematical grunt work. We’d be unemployed. Salary security feels like an analogue concept in our uncertain digital reality so younger workers might as well go their own way, if the opportunity presents itself.

No one wants to endlessly repeat the life of Brian.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 28 books.

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