Jessica* is in just her second job out of university but she describes her boss as “very toxic”, saying he dumps his workload on her most days and has previously told her off for complaining to HR.
The 25-year-old works 10-hour days and said her boss has also previously implied she isn’t very smart.
Add to that no one really monitors him, she said, meaning he gets away with behaving badly and doing very little work.
“A lot of the time he has to do reports and instead of him doing them he will get me to do them and there is no one I can tell to say he is offloading his work to me. A lot of time I am doing his work and he’s not doing anything and that’s just how it is,” she told news.com.au.
“If I ever speak to HR, rather than trying to resolve it, they will tell him directly to work it out.”
It’s resulted in her being forced to just “shut up”, despite noticing that 80 per cent of the day her boss is offline and unreachable with no one holding him accountable.
“I would say overall I enjoy my role but I don’t enjoy having to do his job as well,” she added.
“I am potentially looking at doing interviews at other places just because of my boss but I like my co-workers and the company – just not this one guy. He just makes me feel very miserable at work.”
Jessica is one of a growing number of Gen Z employees having to deal with toxic workplaces as a dramatic drop in trusting business leaders grows.
Vice president of research and advisory at Gartner, Aaron McEwan, said there has been a huge erosion of trust in business leaders and the public now view them on the same level as politicians or institutions like the church.
He said Gen Z are increasingly sharing their workplace ‘icks’ or ‘cringe’ publicly, especially when it comes to the behaviour of their managers.
Common toxic boss complaints include micro aggressive feedback, blatant double standards and making colleagues feel isolated, he added.
It’s playing out with the likes of trending topics on TikTok such as #quittok and #worktok, which is about employees sharing their experiences of their workplace with anything from exposing a toxic boss through to highlighting bad work practices.
“There’s been all of these incidences over recent years where people were filming an internal town hall meeting and publishing the results of that. One example was of a CEO that was congratulating a worker for selling their dog so they could come back to office to the work. Other examples include wide-scale lay-offs being announced,” he told news.com.au.
“At micro level managers are having to deal with complexity and changing expectations of employees and with the onset of social media that allows a much higher level of scrutiny of day to day behavior.
“But managers are unprepared for transparency and scrutiny of behavior. It used to be that people would go home and whinge to their partners about sexual harassment and now managers are filmed and canceled the next day.”
Mr McEwan said the pandemic “drastically shifted employees expectations of work” but this has also resulted in residents being frayed and record levels of fatigue leading to higher levels of workplace conflict.
At its most extreme this means bullying, harassment and workplace misconduct either perpetrated by managers or badly mishandled by bosses.
But he warned there is an even bigger reckoning coming for workplaces as the cost of living crunch bites.
“The most powerful one is when you couple all this with cost of living pressures, particularly the housing crisis,” he said.
“It used to be the understanding that if you worked hard and did a good job, it would be rewarded with development and promotions and it would increase your earning potential.
“But we’ve had 30 years of flat wage growth but an increasing cost of living so it almost feels like if you work hard there is no real reward at the end of it so what is all this about?”
Poppy* said she was on track to “burnout” after dealing with a manager she describes as “incompetent” but is also incredibly unhappy as there is no promotion coming her way, despite picking up her boss’ slack.
The 27-year-old is employed as a consultant and said one of the biggest workplace ‘icks’ is her boss eating while on client calls, which she think is “super unprofessional” – but that’s only when she shows up.
“I don’t think she’s very capable. I don’t think she does her job properly. She won’t attend meetings and if she does attend meetings with clients or internally, she doesn’t know what is going on as she is not on ground day to day and not involved in the work,” she told news.com.au.
“So that loads falls on to myself and another person in the team and we are both a lot more junior.”
She said another issue is it’s well known within the company that if you pick up the admin work of one boss that you are more likely to get promoted, which is a huge ick.
Meanwhile, recent leadership change at the top has changed the culture dramatically.
“The reason why I have stayed so long … is partly going through turmoil. This is the third time going through redundancy,” she said.
“It always felt like I was one of the lucky ones to not be let go and felt intimidating as the market is super tough to get a job. It felt safer to stay but now I’m looking to move from the company to another consultancy or making another career change.”
Gartner research recently revealed that less than half of employees agree they can trust their managers, and just 53 per cent believe their organization has the interests of employees at heart.
This issue is playing out too as the gap between CEO’s and employee wages continues to grow, Mr McEwan noted, making younger generations in particular question whether it is worth working for a particular company.
”We often see scandals with overpaid CEOs or just look at the banking inquiry a couple of years ago with widescale fraud and dodgy practices,” he noted.
“Then there’s the restaurant industry which has been accused of wage theft, big supermarkets accused of wage theft, and ripping people off during the cost of living crisis and price gauging. Then these CEOs of companies are being interviewed and failing the pub sniff test of ethics, so there is a whole bunch of factors that are eroding trust.”
He said organizations can forget public relations management and instead must embrace “radical transparency”.
“There really is no where to hide so what used to be swept under the carpet or hidden behind close doors its not the reality of the workplace anymore,” he said.
“No amount of PR spin can get you out of that and these things have a massive impact on companies.
“The example of the CEO congratulating the employee who sold their dog so they could come back to office, went viral within 24 hours and tanked the share price of that company. There is a much higher degree of scrutiny and expectations of ethical and responsible behaviour from leaders.”
*names changed for privacy reasons
