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https://www.businessinsider.com/work-loyalty-gen-z-millennials-gen-x-boomers-employee-engagement-2024-2>
'In January, I published a story on how loyalty died in the American workplace.
The response to the story was huge: I received more emails and LinkedIn
messages about it than I had for any other piece I've written in my 14 years as
a journalist. And what struck me most were the readers who wanted to tell me
that I got something wrong.
In the story, I wrote that people seem to divide into two groups when it comes
to the decline of workplace loyalty. "On one side," I asserted, "are the bosses
and tenured employees, the boomers and Gen Xers. Kids these days, they gripe.
Do they have no loyalty? On the other side are the younger rank-and-file
employees, the millennials and Gen Zers, who feel equally aggrieved. Why should
I be loyal to my company when my company isn't loyal to me?"
To my surprise, a lot of older readers took issue with getting lumped into the
pro-loyalty camp. "Loyal GenX – Are You Kidding?" read the subject line of one
email from a Gen Xer. Someone else wrote, more gently, "While I feel you're
spot on with most of your facts you've got gen x all wrong." They added: "My
generation leads in workplace dissatisfaction and realized 2 decades ago that
there was no more corporate loyalty."
We're used to hearing 20-somethings complain about the state of corporate
America today. But I didn't expect to receive such an outpouring of dismay and
disillusionment from seasoned workplace veterans. I'd written the story for
young people, as a defense of their decision to rebel against the notion that
we owe our employers a debt of gratitude. Instead, I seem to have
unintentionally tapped into the quiet frustration of more experienced
employees. After all, it's the boomers and Gen Xers who actually remember a
time when their companies treated them better. For them, the broken
"psychological contract" I described in my story isn't some historical
artifact. It's their lived experience. "You summarized everything I experienced
in the last 38 years of my career," one reader wrote.
Readers told me they have watched employers renege on the social contract in a
variety of ways. One boomer, a retired banking executive, acknowledged that he
himself was lucky to have spent more than 30 years with a single company that
treated him well. But starting in the 1980s, he watched as other businesses
caved to the whims of Wall Street, cutting employee benefits to squeeze out
every last penny for shareholders. Today, he wrote, "Corporate greed is
paramount at the expense of everything else."'
Via Frederick Wilson II.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
