Gen Z communicates differently in the workplace, but older colleagues can still decode them

An academic study of workplace communication finds that Gen Z employees, shaped by pandemic-era remote schooling and masked internships, developed different norms for texting, disclosure, and reading a room than older colleagues.

Anecdotes include a café worker texting instead of calling about tardiness, and an anxious new hire disclosing mental health struggles to an uneasy baby boomer manager.

The researcher's core finding: neither generation communicates better or worse, they just learned under very different circumstances, and managers should state expectations explicitly rather than assume shared understanding.

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