The Kids are Not All Right
Landing a remote job after college felt like hitting the jackpot. Granted, it was during a time when most corporate jobs shifted to work from home. I might not have had much say in the decision, but I was more than happy with the outcome.
Over the first few months I was sold on the promise of remote work: your job goes wherever you go. It was the first summer after college graduation, filled with celebrations and weekend trips with friends. I knew they would soon be difficult to see once they also started working or headed off to graduate school.
As fall rolled around, the loneliness of post-grad life began to creep in, and that was only heightened by my remote-work arrangement. Feeling closed off from the world, I wondered what it would be like to work from an office where my colleagues would be only a desk away. I was grateful that I didn’t have to commute every day (even on a hybrid schedule now, I couldn’t imagine it), but I realized I wanted the option. I knew there was something I was missing out on, but I didn’t quite know what that was as a pandemic graduate.
This is a common sentiment held among many Gen Zers, says Jennifer Moss, who is a workplace strategist and author of “The Burnout Epidemic.” We are a generation with major FOMO. Although remote work is all that many of us know, we hear positive stories from co-workers that give us the tiniest glimpse into office life.
“Even the birthday cake celebrations in the lunchroom that everyone hated, people are missing that,” Moss says. “Gen Zs might not even know what that's like. They don't necessarily know what they're missing, but they're feeling it regardless.”
The loneliness working-age Gen Zers are experiencing has become a fear among students whose entry into the workforce might still be years away. According to an Education Week survey cited by McKinsey, 60% of high schoolers in the U.S. and U.K. are “already fretting about feeling lonely, anxious, or stressed about the prospect of working primarily from home.”
I spoke to Moss to understand how soon-to-be graduates should approach the job market and to learn how to spot and address work-from-home loneliness. Below are excerpts from our conversation (some quotes were edited for length and clarity):
It’s easy to romanticize post-grad life when you have no idea what to expect. What’s your advice on setting healthy expectations?
What I'm finding, especially with young people moving into new careers, is that their aspirational experience doesn't necessarily match up with the real-life experience of work. In those first few years, I think we need to have managed expectations. It's kind of like the first year of university. You do some things that aren't as much fun until you become more specialized by your fourth year, and you're doing exactly what you love to do. That's very much like a career. Those first few years are exploratory. Often, you're doing things to learn. When looking at the job, look at it as gaining as much learning as you possibly can and letting yourself off the hook on, 'This is the job. I have to do this forever.' Because then we get into that quarter-century crisis, which is pretty debilitating.
How do you recommend soon-to-be graduates approach the job market? With awareness of remote-work loneliness, what types of roles should they be targeting?
What's happened is that we look at flexibility as remote work. If we swing the pendulum more in the middle, 'the Goldilocks zone,' it is time spent in the office and time working remotely. Hybrid is really a Goldilocks zone if it's done right. Young professionals need to be connecting with other people in their network to develop psychological fitness, social emotional flexibility. They need to be learning how to network, learning how to manage up in a way that's not virtual all the time. Hybrid is what we were begging for before the pandemic, even just Fridays to work remote. Now it's like, 'I've spent the last two years with this experience. I don't want to go back.' What happens when we are habituated or normalized to something is we forget the benefits of being in person.
What type of hybrid arrangement should younger professionals seek out? What does a successful model look like?
We don't want to be looking, necessarily, for a fully-flex hybrid [arrangement] where you go in when you want to because then you could be going into a ghost town. Hybrid is two or three very specific days in the office where you're not doing the things that you could be doing at home. You're not all coming in to sit in your office and work on Zoom. The office should be utilized as a way to be collaborative, connect, be together, team build. Then your days off are doing that administrative stuff that you can't do when you're together. We should be suggesting that young professionals find out what the hybrid strategy looks like. How do you interact when you're in the office? What does that look like? Then, how do they run their remote experience? Is it cross-divisional or are you only meeting with your one team? How often do you get to have one-on-one [meetings] with your boss?
What factors contribute to work-from-home loneliness that many Gen Zers experience?
A lot of young professionals meet their best friends at work. They're likely to meet someone that they might have a relationship with later on. During college, you had this friend group that was very proximal. When you look at the foundation of the happiest, healthiest friendships, it is about proximity to them. Now if you have this disparate experience of work, then you've gone from a lot of proximal relationships to disparate relationships. That gap between how you felt very recently to how you're feeling now can feel jarring, emotionally and socially. We also went through several years of social isolation and distancing, so we can't ignore the fact that the pandemic played a role, too, in that sense of community.
The way that we actually look at friendships has changed. You used to go into an office and you could be friends with lots of people. So you went into work without the expectation of the friendship being work related. Now, because the only time we actually meet with people is in a very specific setting that's driven toward objectives and goals, our desire for those friendships have changed from being amiable and funny to, are they hard working? Do they have a work ethic? That means that we're not picking friendships based on the things that actually give us a lot of joy and boost our mood, and all those things that create bonds like oxytocin. You get that through laughter, through sharing stories. The way that we're meeting has changed. I keep saying that work is like school with no gym, art or recess. There's just none of the things that give us pleasure, and so it becomes all about work and that makes us feel further isolated.
What are steps remote workers can take early on to prevent loneliness?
For teams that are working remotely but have any kind of connection locally to each other or to the office, make the time to hang out. Find a time to meet in person if they can. We need to think of this as networking with our co-workers, instead of saying, 'I'm going to join some other community locally to support me professionally.' If that's not a possibility, I think what managers need to do is create once-a-quarter meetups. Large corporations obviously can afford that, but I keep saying what companies are saving in their spaces should be put toward travel. If we do more focused on building productive relationships and getting to know each other, then all the other metrics always tend to be met or exceeded.
How does loneliness lead to burnout, and how should it be addressed?
There are six root causes of burnout. Lack of community, loneliness is a root cause. If we have loneliness, there's a strong predictor for burnout. If we're looking at preventing burnout, we need to go upstream and look at how we prevent loneliness. That means understanding that not only does loneliness cause burnout, but creating positive relationships increases retention and makes people more likely to feel psychologically safe. It's not like we're preventing loneliness to prevent burnout. It's not one for the other. If we're making productive relationships and friendships a priority, we're going to see a great business case for it.
When someone is feeling that level of loneliness, we have to be checking in. Have we stopped engaging with things that give us joy at night? Have we stopped doing our hobbies? How often are we feeling by the end of the day that we are depleted and we don't even want to call friends anymore? We want to be checking in on how we're sleeping and eating. Are we feeling distracted at work and disengaged? Are we feeling cynical? That usually is a byproduct of feeling burned out, but loneliness contributes to that. If we're feeling these feelings two to three times a week, we are at risk of not just experiencing symptoms of burnout but hitting the wall. Acknowledge and label when we are feeling these feelings, making sure that we're reaching out to people in our lives that give us that effortless state of belonging.