From Tetris to Minecraft, the Gen-Z Changing Work Mindset

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Tom
Welcome back to the team's Insider podcast. In this episode, I talk to Richard Trestain at Jabra and we get into their recent research about hybrid work and modern work, and they had some really interesting stats around what GenZ expectations are in the workplace. You know, what do they want? What's their expectations? And

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Tom
really, how are those expectations formed?

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Tom
Thanks to Richard for taking the time to join the show. Many thanks to Jabra, who are a big supporter of Empowering Cloud. Really appreciate their support of what we're doing on with the show. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Pod. I've been looking forward to this one. Rich and I have had this conversation a few times actually. He's presented this

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Tom
information at our London news group, and I'm going to talk about kind of what's going on with hybrid work, but not just opinion and actually looking at some research that Jabra commissioned.

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Tom
But first of all, Richard, you want to introduce yourself?

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Richard
Course. Yeah. Hi, Tom. Great to be here.

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Richard
I'm Richard Trestain I'm product marketing manager at Jabra representing EMEA. So it's my job to tell everyone of all of our stories and get everyone excited about our products and our research as well in this case.

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Tom
Awesome. So we've been planning this podcast for a while. So you did present this information before at the London News Group. I think when it was just pre-release as well.

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Tom
But maybe you could talk us through, I mean A What is this research, you know, a little bit about how you do it? Because it's, you know, it's not just a finger in the air.

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Tom
There's some real methodology behind it.

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Richard
Absolutely. Yeah. We

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Richard
we've been doing the kind of thought leadership for four years, but it really came to the top when

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Richard
this little pandemic thing happened that we're all so familiar with. And we've wanted to give people this sort of clarity and guidance on how return to the office might be working and then the the emergence of proper hybrid work.

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Richard
So we've had surveys every single year since then around about four and a half thousand people, 14 or 15 countries, and we've kind of asked the same questions each year. But there's always a theme to then the subsequent questions that we ask in the survey. This this year's theme was Gen Z or Gen Z. I keep being reminded to say Gen Z,

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Richard
and previous to that we've also done

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Richard
study with London School of Economics as well.

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Richard
So yeah, happy to talk about any of those

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Tom
Well, let's see the hybrid works. I'm really interested. I'm just off the back of Enterprise Connect and I sat in different sessions with different analysts and some of them were saying the average is now 3.5 days a week and some of them were saying nobody's going back at all.

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Tom
So what what did you find around that and what are your thoughts on that?

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Richard
Yeah, I think it's a it's clear to to me, even from our study, that it's kind of plateauing. Now we're seeing around 6% people fully remote. That did surprise me. And that's across all these different countries. And of course, there's big differences per country. Nordics, for instance, have

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Richard
even more remote work than other countries, and 43% fully in office, which really speaks volumes to the return to office, the benefits of being in an office.

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Richard
People are saying actually, that it is easier to work with people in person

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Richard
who knew. I think I feel like we kind of feel like that's pretty undeniable.

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Tom
Like it's funny, like like obviously there are personal benefits to being flexible, but I find it hard for anybody to argue that if that your immediate peers and you're working on a project, that ability to be in person, yeah, undoubtedly adds value. You can obviously do it without. There's a very successful company's 100% remote but yeah, there is value.

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Tom
Even all small company Empowering Cloud. One of the first things we did was get a small office space so we could get together and that there's a value in that.

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Richard
Yeah.

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Richard
Working together in person on a project, I, I personally don't see how that can be done fully online, fully remote. But it really the other key points are really that

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Richard
technology is available in the office. There will inevitably be people who are working remotely and need to come in to that meeting remotely. So you then have to have the meeting room equipment to make that work.

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Richard
But yeah,

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Richard
43% fully in office I think is

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Richard
perhaps going to be more or less as high as it gets. That's my feeling anyway. It's it's on record now, so that's my prediction. And then 51% hybrid, that's

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Richard
at least one time per week in the office.

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Richard
Yeah. So that's the that's the figures we're seeing right now.

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Tom
I think it's interesting. No, Yeah. We've, we've always had some capability for someone to remote into the meeting, but I feel like with the customers I work with, the dynamics have changed to where it was. Most people are in person and the remote person is dialing in and kind of trying to catch up with the meeting to Now very often actually it could be the very senior person or the meeting leader.

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Tom
This remote, like the geographic geography of the people joining is not relative to their role in the meeting at all. By sometimes I'm take the inverse where actually it's the senior people that have a well set up home office that tend to stay remote and the potentially junior people who don't have the same capabilities face that like to come into the office.

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Tom
So that changes how we meet because we need to have a really even experience to get the most out of the meeting.

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Richard
I think we all got our set ups at home pretty good during the pandemic and after

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Richard
the the kinds of meetings we were having at the very, very beginning of the pandemic. I remember just you just looking at those sea of faces around you thinking, what are you doing now? I don't have that anymore. Generally, people look good, have got their home set up pretty good.

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Richard
So their ability to be seen and included in a meeting with other people in the meeting room, I think is is is doing really well. Now the key is to make sure that meeting room looks good for the remote participants as well. And you can see individual people in the room.

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Tom
Yeah, no, I think that that's exactly and it's ironic, isn't it, that the challenges flipped around to where pre-pandemic the meeting room was the best experience and now very often you say, like

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Tom
we were just talking before the call, you're really dialed in on your

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Tom
p20. They're like, The video is good, the audio is good.

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Tom
Whereas in the room, if you haven't gets out the room appropriately, you're sometimes missing out a lot really.

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Richard
And there's certain generations and certain types of people, the way people work, what they really need that engagement so much.

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Richard
They need to be able to see everyone in the room to be able to relate to them. And we we've spent years talking about equity, but we really do need to dial up that equity.

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Tom
So what about the research in terms of kind of this year in Gen-Z Emmanuel's? I feel like very often like that's a challenge in the sense of they're the people that need to understand the workplace, the work, the culture.

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Tom
So what did the LSE research find around Gen-Z.

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Richard
Well, we did we did these two separate pieces. So the Gen Z research came off the back of our regular

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Richard
annual research. And so we made sure that we had a big cohort of Gen Z respondents and then we compared their answers to everyone else in the knowledge worker area. So Gen Z, Gen Z got to get it right.

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Richard
And they are absolutely all about flexibility. If you look at the overall population of knowledge workers, flexibility is the other top three things like salary and other benefits fallen down the list a little bit. But Gen Z are over indexing even more and like 89% of Gen Z, Gen Z are

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Richard
in jobs which allow them full flexibility. So they demand it for sure.

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Richard
Yeah. But then we also seeing this kind of mentality of what work is really

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Richard
coming through clearly in the research. And one of the analogies that we use in some of our presentations is the idea of Tetris versus Minecraft. So we've got

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Richard
Tetris being the work style that

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Richard
the other generations are used to. You have a job to do, you flip a block around, you, put it in place, you do what you need to do Minecraft, do what you like.

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Richard
You can decide one day to walk off into the distance and see if you can get to the horizon. Never can I.

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Tom
Love this analogy. That's a really good way to think about actually is like, Yo, yo, yo. It makes a lot of sense. All your Tetris, your pre constraint to you've been given this task, you have to fit it into the wider machine. And I can see that anecdotally in the the Gen Z attitude you to do well what, what are you, what are we trying to achieve.

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Tom
I can go away work out how to achieve that.

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Richard
Yeah. I going to say that the analogy is not mine, it comes from someone else. But see, but it really works when you're trying to describe the differences.

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Richard
If you are used to

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Richard
this idea that you live in a sandbox world where you can do whatever you like, you're inspired by social media. Of course the algorithms are feeding you what you want to see as well.

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Richard
So you see every day, day in, day out, inspiration about these people who have made lives and jobs exactly how they want them to be. You've got like the Mr. Beasts and you've got the

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Richard
Kylie Jenner's who have done what they want, made massive amounts of money. And, you know, you could argue very happy.

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Richard
But then there's also the much larger group of influencers and people you see on social media where they have a fantastic way of like work life balance,

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Richard
working extremely hard, maybe

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Richard
doing up houses for a living, living in different continents.

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Richard
They're the kinds of people and work styles that Gen Z are exposed to is absolutely infinite compared to what I would say. You and I are assuming that we're in more or less the same generation.

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Tom
I think really about saying bracket. Yeah, good, good. Right. Disclose it on the podcast.

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Richard
No, no we won't. But how are you. You know we sit in a perhaps we sat with a careers adviser who said, well here's a long list of different careers

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Richard
doctor, lawyer, engineer, architect, all these things. Gen Z don't see that they just see this huge wide open world. And I think that is fantastic. It really is fantastic.

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Richard
But it does lead to kind of misconceptions about what work is going to be when they get there. And we see from our data that they love this flexibility, but they are also already burning out something like 52% of Gen Z saying they are burnt out and these are people have been in the in their workplace for five years and perhaps where that comes from is that they come in, they're super excited to be in the workplace, they are very, very

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Richard
motivated to succeed and get places quick and they realize that it's not quite what they expected.

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Richard
So there's a lot of work for companies to be doing.

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Tom
Yeah, you'll see on social media, I mean, it's undoubted again, that's had a huge influence on attitudes and perceptions. And we all know that social media skews towards the aspirational good news story. And it can be, you know, that's not the reality for most people percentage wise, like you're going to a more a more normal job

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Tom
and have a more normal routine.

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Tom
So maybe it does set up some false aspirations or expectations there of I'm going to go from

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Tom
from intern to CEO in five years and run the company versus the reality of having to, you know, work your way up a little bit.

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Richard
And actually their

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Richard
their method of progressing in their career is to change jobs. Now, well over half are expecting to change jobs immediately

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Richard
and 75% regard changing jobs as being the way to progress. The company's got to do a lot to keep

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Richard
Gen Z.

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Tom
Yeah it is is genuinely challenging. And I think also the back to that careers advisor the perception in our joint was you're picking a career and you're going to go down that career route, whereas I think it's very obvious now to Gen Z they're not picking a, a career or even an industry. They're they're doing a thing for a while and the world will change and they'll do another thing.

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Tom
So it's not just company hopping, it might be industry hoping it's a, you know,

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Tom
a whole bunch of different things.

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Richard
So yeah, actually one of the things that that relates to is that they're very happy with their managers, but actually they don't regard their managers experience or their knowledge of the industry, their own as being in any way important.

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Richard
It's completely different to the other generations where we would follow a manager who knew lots about the company, knew lots about the subject matter.

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Richard
They actually choose managers who are supportive, who are good motivators, good leaders, and are really engaging with them and the list is online, but way down the list is anything to do with experience or knowledge of the industry, which for me is a little bit crazy and I can't quite get my head around it. But you can kind of understand where they're coming from.

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Richard
They'd rather be motivated and led into battle by a great leader than necessarily someone who's got good experience.

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Tom
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? I think I feel like in general there's an underappreciated of management as a skill like you see a lot of in

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Tom
management. I think it's got harder in hybrid because again, you had that personal touch in a lot of management cases and now you're trying to manage people that are geographically dispersed. You have to find new ways to build that that relationship and kind of you get the get the motivation going.

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Richard
Absolutely.

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Tom
So how so, Richard,

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Tom
how does that pull back to like that? That sounds very accurate to me. How does that pull back to our hybrid working styles? Our meeting rooms are how do we bridge this gap between this Gen Z and

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Tom
helping create that culture where they they feel engaged?

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Richard
Yeah,

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Richard
they feel just as engaged in person as digitally. So that's a good start.

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Richard
They're digital natives. They are more than happy to be on a on a video call, but actually they do also crave the personal connection. So the way to keep them in in the company is to give them as much

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Richard
engagement as possible, give them opportunities to to meet people.

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Richard
Speaking to a customer the other day who having a problem with

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Richard
people leaving a contact center role and what they did essentially was given more time of face to face engagement with with colleagues and managers, and they found they managed to massively increase the time that

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Richard
people stayed in the job. And if that is came through very strongly in the research.

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Richard
So having meetings in person, but then having

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Richard
remote meetings which are truly equitable and mean that the person feels fully included in that meeting and fully heard is key. And that, of course, then comes down to technology. In a lot of ways it's quite interesting because they said that of all the reasons their meetings were frustrating, all of those reasons were technical.

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Richard
None of them were behavioral, wasn't about

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Richard
employees talking over each other or poor agendas. It was all about audio quality, video, quality, internet connection. So they just expect things to work. And we need to decide.

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Tom
So I imagine their expectation is high because they're coming from they've been Internet native, they've been digital tools native like they've all probably video calls are a default. Like like kids. Expectations are high, so you give them a, you know, a crappy old laptop and a good luck. They're going to go, wait a minute, my my Apple AirPods experience in consumer land is great.

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Tom
You have to match that bar in the enterprise.

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Richard
Yeah.

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Richard
Yeah. And they are the first to complain about poor equipment for sure. But then the distribution of that equipment is still very low. So it's I can't remember the exact figure, but it's something like 8% use a headset

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Richard
and 18%, I think use a webcam. So I think introducing them to those kinds of products is is absolutely vital.

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Richard
And they'll realize that, actually this does really increase my engagement and my my enjoyment of the meetings. And then that extends to the meeting room itself where that camera, video bar, whatever it is in the room, needs to project those people who were in the room to the remote. Participant Super well. And then we look at things like dynamic composition where it zooms in on the the most recent speakers make sure that those people are seen and heard in the meeting.

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Tom
And this is an area where, you know, Chipper have been innovating. You were one of the very early ones to embed intelligent speaker now now with the people recognition and I think am I right in saying multi stream is coming on the horizon as well?

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Richard
Yeah, that's coming very soon. We announced that quite some time ago. But yeah, the idea that a Panacast 50 can

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Richard
create separate streams of the different speakers in the room and deliver that to the platform. In the case of Teams, then Teams can do people recognition, voice recognition and attribute those people in the room to the transcript,

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Richard
increasing Copilot's efficiency.

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Tom
On a full 15 minutes without saying Copilot.

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Richard
So I feel like yeah, yeah, no, sorry.

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Tom
I actually say at this point.

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Richard
The C word. Yeah.

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Tom
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean like that. That's a kind of

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Tom
a reality going guys that Gen Z And what if I don't know what the next gen is called? Do we go back to or do we come back?

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Richard
Gen A Gen Alpha But I think people are starting to call it Gen AI so that works.

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Tom
Yeah, well I would say that that feels like a

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Tom
a reality that will come to me where obviously they would expect the ability to just ask questions, mind data

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Tom
like that, that is going to come through for sure.

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Richard
Know it is.

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Richard
And you know, we, we're developing those features deliberately so that it will make AI work better. So we're the only intelligent speaker in front of a camera with a speaker that has that capability of perfect transcripts and things.

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Tom
And we just again, off the back of Enterprise Connect, Microsoft announced MDEP that, which is the Microsoft Devices ecosystem platform. Nice, nice catchy name. That's Microsoft's flavor of Android Jabra going to be the first kind of baking that into the the Android bar as well is that right?

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Richard
Yeah yeah. So we we got up on stage and we did that announcement with Microsoft. So we are going to be the first and it's looking really exciting. We don't have a lot of details right now. It's very early stages, but just the idea that there is a Microsoft operating system on Android that has the familiarity of security that people are used to with Microsoft I think is really powerful.

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Richard
And yeah, that's really nice that we're going to be the first.

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Tom
Yeah, yeah. I've got my

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Tom
6:00 virtual back and only got my VBS in the background, so I'm looking forward to getting that on the on the MDEP and feeling the experience when the time is right. We'll both dive in a bit more detail in the pod and

00:19:09:07 - 00:19:11:02
Tom
talk about the specifics, but exciting.

00:19:11:08 - 00:19:13:17
Richard
Yeah, absolutely.

00:19:13:19 - 00:19:19:03
Tom
Awesome. Well, thanks for taking us through the research, Richard. It's really nice to talk. Know, not just

00:19:19:03 - 00:19:29:02
Tom
I always like talking to you because it gets to the wider conversation about what the kits delivering for the for the organization. I think that research does have some significant value to the conversation.

00:19:29:04 - 00:19:35:18
Richard
Thank you very much. Yeah, it's it's a pleasure to show this. The Gen Z study especially gets a great reaction, so

00:19:35:18 - 00:19:40:07
Richard
I'd recommend people can look at the report is a quite a quite a long report 28 pages but.

00:19:40:07 - 00:19:43:10
Tom
It doesn't say how to how do people get hold of it. What's the best thing to do. Yeah.

00:19:43:10 - 00:19:46:18
Richard
Just search Jabra Gen Z and it comes up there.

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Richard
There's a huge amount of data there incredibly powerful for organizations who are trying to navigate through this. So yeah, really useful.

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Tom
Awesome. Well, we'll link it in the show notes as well. So you want to take a look at do you take a look? Great. Thanks Richard. we’ll talk again soon.

00:20:01:06 - 00:20:06:12
Richard
Thank you very much to all.