In Defence of Gen Z

Write off an entire generation at your peril. Clarico's response to the ongoing media debate about Gen Z and their iced coffees.

Gen Z are bearing the brunt of media commentary and scrutiny this week. A viral video of a recruiter advising Gen Z candidates to leave their emotional support iced coffees at home for interviews has spurred media outlets to proffer a whole host of (predominantly negative) opinions on the entire generation’s professional potential.

As a millennial, I could easily hop on the bandwagon and berate Gen Z for even causing this debate but I feel an innate pull to jump to their defence instead.

Their formative years were stripped away

Think about what the first few years of a career normally involve. You sit beside someone more experienced and watch how they handle a difficult client. You overhear a phone call and learn how to deliver bad news. You get pulled into a meeting to take notes and quietly learn how decisions actually get made. You make small mistakes and get corrected over a coffee (hot or iced). Most of what we call professional judgement has traditionally been picked up this way.

A huge number of Gen Zs entered their early careers during the covid-19 pandemic. Some sat a Leaving Cert that became calculated grades. Others finished their degrees online. They were onboarded over Zoom, met colleagues as squares on a screen and were expected to absorb workplace norms that nobody was in the room to model. Internships were cancelled. Graduate programmes went online. The unwritten rules of office life went untaught, because for a long time in their formative professional years, there was no office.

Fundamental early career experiences were stripped away, and what replaced them was built in a scramble around them. In a dystopian turn of events, many of them spent their first professional years working from their childhood bedrooms. They started from a real disadvantage, and it’s only right and decent that we offer them the grace now to recover and adapt from that time.

What they built instead

The same generation that missed out on learning by osmosis learned to do things the rest of us were scrambling to figure out. They built working relationships entirely online. They taught themselves new tools because there was no one down the corridor to ask. They arrived digitally fluent and became genuinely digitally native at work, at a time when plenty of senior colleagues were still asking if everyone could see their screen.

What they bring now is creativity, digital fluency and a challenge to the status quo. They ask questions. Why is it done this way? Why do we need to be in five days a week? Why does this meeting exist? Being asked can be uncomfortable, particularly when the honest answer is “because we’ve always done it like that”. Yet a challenge to the status quo is exactly what most organisations claim to want when they put “innovation” in their values statement.

Candour is a skill and we’re legislating for it

Gen Z are often criticised for being too open, whether about their feelings, their boundaries or what they expect from an employer. That honesty doesn’t feel like something we should be critiquing in a world where we have to legally mandate pay transparency to expose the gaps between what people are paid for the same work.

Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive, employers will have to share the salary or salary range for a role in the job ad or before interview and candidates can no longer be asked about their pay history. That kind of openness feels like something Gen Z would do naturally.

We are having to mandate openness about money because, for decades, employers weren’t offering it voluntarily. Rather than criticising Gen Z’s candour and honesty, we should be embracing it. A generation that simply says the quiet part out loud is ahead of the law, not behind the times.

We haven’t exactly been perfect to date

Much of the criticism of Gen Z rests on an unspoken assumption: that the way the rest of us have been working is the standard worth defending. The evidence doesn’t back that up.

Microsoft Ireland’s 2026 Work Trend Index, found burnout among Irish workers has risen to 44%, up from 39% last year, with over a third struggling to maintain a work-life balance. In health and social care, almost half of workers say they often or always feel burnt out, 68% report illness linked to work stress, and three in four regularly think about leaving.

Setting boundaries in a workforce with these burnout figures looks less like laziness and more like self-preservation.

They’re your customers as well as your colleagues

There’s a commercial point here too. Gen Z is a growing share of the workforce and a valuable market with real buying power and insight. They know what their peers want, how they talk, where they spend and what makes them switch off a brand. Any business trying to sell to them while dismissing them as a punchline in the workplace is leaving that insight on the table. The young person who questions your processes is a truly valuable asset, offering a perspective and understanding of a key demographic that isn’t going anywhere and whose power and prevalence in the workforce is only going to increase with time as boomers and Gen X move towards retirement.

Write off an entire generation at your peril

There are quips about every generation but recent media commentary feels like a true Gen Z pile on.

Gen Z’s professional coming of age was unique. It has given them a unique perspective. My advice to employers is to see the value in this perspective. Embrace their challenges, insight, experience and candor. Let’s take Gen Z seriously, whether they’re your cup of tea (read iced coffee) or not…

If you manage early-career talent and want to close that gap, Clarico’s Corporate Workshopshelp managers and teams bridge generational differences in how people work, and our Employee Coaching supports early-career staff in building the confidence and professional judgement the pandemic years didn’t give them. Find out more at claricocoaching.com.