The Times Magazine 23happy to be the person that speaks the truth.”
McLaughlin grew up in San Diego,
where her father was a welder, her mother
a hairdresser, and her stepfather worked at a
tyre shop. A keen lacrosse player, she spent
time during college working at a private
girls’ school in Buckinghamshire. (“There’s
a difference between being nice and being
respectful,” she says of British communication.
“Respectful is being authentic and being
direct.”) After graduation she fell into working
in “human capital”, got her MBA, then became
a consultant for some years, before spending
a decade running the Centre for Effective
Organisations at the University of Southern
California. She founded her own firm in 2008.
While she specialises in entertainment and
media industries, McLaughlin works across
sectors from aerospace to finance.
Hollywood – and the entertainment
industry as a whole – has been particularly
slow to adapt to changes in workplace culture,
she believes, in part because, “If somebody
wasn’t enjoying their experience, there are five
other people who wanted that job. So were
they held accountable in the same way? Did
organisations feel that pain of endlessly losing
talent? Probably not.”
In Britain, a study of 9,000 individuals
in the British film and TV industry,
commissioned by the Film and TV Charity
and published in 2020, found that 84 per cent
of workers had experienced or witnessed
bullying or harassment.
In the two years since that report
was published, the stakes have changed
dramatically. Rather than dealing mainly with
the fallout from #MeToo and Black Lives
Matter, the biggest pressures on workplace
relations, says McLaughlin, are the “great
resignation”: the post-pandemic re-evaluation
of life, and the demands of Gen Z employees.
“I have never seen so many people make
life choices that I never saw coming,” says
McLaughlin of the upheavals caused by the
coronavirus. “I work in financial services and
I’m like, ‘You’re going to go start a llama
farm? I don’t understand.’ ‘You’re going to
open a florist’s? OK.’ And these are people
that had big, coveted jobs.” People, she says,
who have asked, “ ‘Do I want to spend my time
in this way?’ People leave organisations now
because of their bosses, not because of pay
and compensation.”
It’s not that previous generations didn’t
entertain the notion of becoming llama
farmers. But, she says, “Our parents would
never have left their jobs. And you and
I would leave, but with a job to go to. This
generation’s like, ‘I would rather have no job
and couch surf than work here.’ That’s new.”
Dr Elizabeth Michelle is a London-based
psychologist who holds workshops for CEOs
to try to understand this new demographic.
“Everyone complains about Gen Z, but not
many do anything about it,” says Michelle.
She also offers corporate workshops on
anxiety, mental health and communication,
“But all anyone wants to hear about is Gen Z.”
While this has been the case for probably
four years, she says, the pandemic created
the perfect storm. Complaints about Gen Z- “things like them being addicted to social
media, not having resilient mental health or
not being able to have confrontational
conversations” – were exacerbated by Covid,
says Michelle, who thinks they should be cut
a little slack. Not only, she says, were Gen Z’s
early years in the workplace dramatically
disrupted, but they were also years “in which
you didn’t have to get dressed, you didn’t have
to leave the house on time, you didn’t need to
have face-to-face conversations and you were
on your screen all the time”.
Michelle believes there is a power struggle
in the workplace right now, but it’s not
necessarily between ageing, out-of-touch
“boomers” and Gen Z. “I’m getting a lot more
calls from millennial managers who are
frustrated by the annoying Gen Zs,” she says.
Now reaching their forties, the formerly
maligned millennials are themselves
“managing these grads that are coming out
of university, who feel like another species”.
Last year, in a New York Times feature titled
“The 37-year-olds are afraid of the 23-year-
olds who work for them”, managers told of
junior employees expecting time off for
anxiety or period pains, questioning why they
should work an eight-hour day if they finished
their tasks by lunchtime, and delegating
menial tasks to the company founder.
I tell McLaughlin about a friend of mine
who, in her twenties, worked herself into
the ground for difficult bosses and never
complained. Now, in her forties, she’s the
boss, running her own business of around
20 staff. Her workplace has, she says, become
a “wokeplace”, with twentysomething staff
reluctant to return to the office, and
recruitment consultants telling her that she
must offer fully flexible working to attract new
employees. Has the pendulum swung too far?
The pendulum, McLaughlin believes,
is certainly “swinging to the middle” and- shrewdly – she sees both sides.
Among Gen Z, “There can be a lack of
understanding in terms of what it means to
be an employee,” she says. “I think that’s a
learning curve for all generations that enter
the workforce, but I don’t think the learning
curve has been communicated as clearly to
this generation.”
Bosses, meanwhile, “are afraid to get it
wrong. You try something, it doesn’t go well,
and it can be everywhere really quickly, on
social media or sites like Glassdoor.”
Anyone over the age of 25 might resent it
but, ultimately, says McLaughlin, a change in
working culture is non-negotiable. “Leaders
are held accountable in a very different way
and if they aren’t doing those things right,
they lose talent, they are less competitive
and they lose business.”
It’s simple economics. Instead of trying
to fight change or fearing it, “You have to
leverage that innovation, that hunger, that
different perspective,” she says. “Because,
ultimately, it is the perspective of most of
your potential consumers.” n
‘Young people think: I’d rather have no job than work here’