A new generation of work
It’s practically a tradition — leaders begin observations of their junior team members with, “When I was that age…” — stating, with some frustration, how different their
youngest team members are from their own or previous generations. The latest “problem child”? Gen Z.
Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Zers are different from previous generations. Unafraid to speak up or break long-established taboos, a Gen Z team member might leave the office at 17.00 (five o’clock) sharp because they have football practice, even if there is more work to do. They might also question the company’s stance on a controversial social issue.
More broadly, headlines such as “Generation Disconnected: Data on Gen Z in the Workplace” [1] and “Gen Z: The Workers Who Want It All” [2] portray these young employees as entitled and uncommitted to their jobs. A problem to be, if not solved, at least managed.
But there’s another way to look at it. Every generation is different, their mindsets, habits, and perspectives shaped by a unique set of events. Instead of seeing these differences as a problem, organizations need to leverage each new generation’s unique perspective as a strategic advantage. In the case of Gen Z, it starts with understanding who these employees are and what they value, and then tapping into their native genius.
The “dialoguers”
Opinions come naturally to Gen Z employees, and most are not shy about expressing them. In fact, Gen Zers expect to have a voice. Keeping informed of what’s happening in the company and beyond is important to them. Also, more diverse than prior generations in the workforce, Gen Zers tend to reject labels, whether related to gender, sexuality, race, or culture. They are comfortable representing more than one identity.
- What to do: Create spaces for conversations about lived experiences. This can look like reverse mentoring, empathy workshops, panel discussions featuring Gen Z team members, and shadow boarding.
Prioritize mental health
In 2022, a McKinsey survey [3] of American 18-to-24-year-olds found 55 percent had received a diagnosis or treatment for a mental illness, and research from Deloitte [4] showed 46 percent of Gen Z employees said they were stressed all of most of the time. It may not be surprising, then, that a survey of UK Gen Z employees revealed 62 percent had taken a “mental health sick day.” [5] The same survey found only 24 percent of those who took a mental health day were honest about it, fearing retribution.
- What to do: Show your Gen Z employees that you care about their mental health. Make available company-sponsored counselling services and educational resources. Also, train managers to be empathic and build trust with their team members so that Gen Z employees feel they can ask for help.
Provide opportunities for growth
Many Gen Zers entered the workforce during the Great Resignation triggered by COVID-19. Today, Gen Z still has high rates of turnover, with 58 percent considering changing jobs in the year ahead. [6] While this is alarming for employers, research also shows 30 percent of Gen Z workers are looking for opportunities to advance within their current company. [7] Also, 76 percent of Gen Zers cited the desire to learn, practice new skills, or gain new expertise as motivation for seeking another job. [8]
- What to do: Invest in your people. Create learning and development opportunities for your youngest employees and give them a clear path for advancement. Think of all that Gen Z ambition as fuel to propel your company to the next level. Don’t blame young employees for wanting to leave; give them a reason to stay.
Leverage purpose as a motivator
Progressive and socially active, Gen Z workers expect their employers to be good corporate citizens. Research by New (Network of Executive Women) [9] showed that 77 percent of Gen Z respondents say the values of the organization they work for must match their values. As a diverse group themselves, Gen Zers prioritize diversity and inclusion. They are also deeply concerned about climate change.
- What to do: Put diversity, inclusion, and equity at the core of your company’s culture, not on the periphery as an initiative or one-time workshop. Similarly, embed sustainability throughout your organization’s processes. Finally, provide forums for employees of all generations to talk about their values and how the organization can align with them.
Gen Z has been called “the generation that wants it all”, for them financial security is important but not enough. As they ask for more from the employers, organizations are expected to change or be left behind. This new generation is changing how we work and how we think about work.
Navigating generational differences between employees will always be a challenge for organizations. But your organization’s success depends on it – attracting, retaining, and nurturing top talent requires addressing these challenges, not just within the Gen Z population, but among employees of all generations. Doing so requires a mindset shift from “us versus them” to “we all bring something to the table.” This will enable your organization to adapt to every new generation and ultimately win the talent war, ensuring your organization’s longevity.
References
[1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/404693/generation-disconnected-data-gen-workplace.aspx
[2] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220613-gen-z-the-workers-who-want-it-all
[3] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/sustainable-inclusive-growth/future-of-america/how-does-gen-z-see-its-place-in-the-working-world-with-trepidation
[4] https://www.deloitte.com/content/dam/assets-shared/legacy/docs/about/2022/deloitte-2022-genz-millennial-survey.pdf
[5] https://www.milkround.com/recruiter-advice/mental-health-sick-days-report-by-milkround
[6] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/great-expectations-making-hybrid-work-work
[7] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gen-z-boldest-generation-its-job-hunt-priorities-off-charts-anders/?trackingId=pwWrCQQ1SiG9Yds3hH8gUg%3D%3D
[8] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gen-z-boldest-generation-its-job-hunt-priorities-off-charts-anders/?trackingId=pwWrCQQ1SiG9Yds3hH8gUg%3D%3D
[9] https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/consumer-business/welcome-to-gen-z.pdf
Related content
Related content
Organizations have long wanted to scale coaching, but have been limited by cost and capacity. With AI, that's beginning to change as new platforms make coaching more accessible, flexible, and available on demand, extending support beyond a select group of leaders to entire populations.
For talent leaders, this shift creates both opportunity and complexity. With greater reach comes a new set of trade-offs: how to balance access with depth, flexibility with accountability, and efficiency with meaningful development.
The limits of unlimited (coaching).
Unlimited coaching sounds like the obvious answer. Remove the barriers, give everyone access, let people engage on their own terms. What's not to like?
In practice, quite a bit.
When coaching has no defined structure or cadence, engagement tends to become episodic - people show up when something feels urgent and step back when it doesn't. The coaching relationship never quite deepens. Conversations cover ground but don't build on it. And the development that was supposed to happen keeps getting pushed to the next session, and the next.
Three patterns emerge:
- Sporadic engagement over sustained development. Without a rhythm to anchor the work, coaching becomes reactive. Clients bring whatever is most pressing that week rather than working toward something larger. Progress happens in bursts, if at all.
- Insights that don't compound. Great coaching reveals patterns over time - things a client can't see in one session but can't unsee after several. Without continuity, and without a consistent coaching relationship to hold the thread, each conversation starts close to zero.
- Outcomes that are hard to measure. No milestones. No defined endpoint. No clear way for the organization, or the client, to know whether it's working. Activity fills the gap where impact should be.
The result is a model that's easy to scale and hard to defend. Which is exactly the problem talent leaders are navigating right now.
The relationship is the lever.
Decades of research into what makes coaching work keeps arriving at the same answer: it's the relationship. Not the platform, not the methodology. The relationship.
When a coach and client build trust over time, developing shared language, and returning to the same themes with increasing depth, something shifts. Conversations get more honest. Insights stick. The client starts doing the work between sessions, not just during them. That's when coaching becomes genuinely transformative, and it can't be rushed or replicated in a one-off session.
The ICF and EMCC are clear on this: continuity is what dives outcomes. The coaching engagements that produce lasting change are the ones where each session builds on the last, not the ones that simply offer more access.
Three principles make that possible: Consistency, Continuity, and Completion.
1. Consistency
The foundation everything else is built on.
The temptation when designing a coaching program is to treat flexibility as a feature - let people book when they want, swap coaches freely, engage on their own schedule. But frequent coach changes reset the clock. Every new coach has to earn trust, learn context, and find their footing with the client. That's time spent getting started, not getting somewhere.
A stable coaching relationship works differently:
- The coach starts to see around corners, uncovering patterns the client can't see on their own
- The client stops performing and starts being honest
- The relationship itself becomes a source of accountability, not just the sessions
Consistency doesn't constrain the work. It's what makes the deeper work possible.
2. Continuity
What turns a series of sessions into genuine development.
Without continuity, coaching tends to be additive at best- each session offers something useful, but nothing compounds. With it, the work builds on itself in ways that can't happen in isolated conversations.
What continuity makes possible:
- A limiting belief surfaced in session three becomes a thread that runs through the rest of the engagement
- A behavioral pattern the client couldn't see at the start becomes impossible to ignore by the end
- Space opens up for the harder work - the kind that requires sitting with discomfort across multiple sessions, not resolving it quickly and moving on
That slower, deeper work is where lasting change actually happens. It doesn't come from more sessions. It comes from the right sessions, in the right order, with the same person.
3. Completion
The most underrated principle of the three.
In a world of unlimited access, there's no finish line, and without one, it's surprisingly hard to know what you're working toward, or whether you've gotten there. A defined endpoint changes the entire shape of an engagement.
A clear endpoint creates urgency and focuses every session on what matters most.
- Shifts the question from "what should we talk about this week?" to "what do we need to accomplish before we're done?"
- Gives both coach and client a body of work to look back on, not just a log of conversations
For talent leaders, this is also what makes coaching legible as an investment. Sessions logged is an activity metric. A cohort of leaders who completed a structured engagement and can articulate what changed, that's a result.
Don't just scale it, design it (here’s how)
The opportunity in front of talent leaders right now is significant. The organizations that will get the most from this moment are the ones that treat coaching design as seriously as coaching delivery.
Practical design decisions:
- Define the arc before you launch: set the number of sessions, the cadence, and the goals upfront, not after people have already started booking
- Protect the coaching relationship: Make coach switching the exception, not the default, and design your program to discourage unnecessary re-matches
- Build in milestones: create structured check-ins at the midpoint and end of each engagement so progress is visible to both the coach and the organization
- Separate on-demand support from developmental coaching: Use AI-enabled tools for in-the-moment guidance, and reserve structured engagements for the deeper work
- Measure completion, not just activation: Track how many people finish an engagement, not just how many start one
Questions to pressure-test your design:
- Does every participant know what they're working toward before their first session?
- Can your coaches see enough context about a client's journey to pick up where they left off?
- Would you be able to show, at the end of a cohort, what changed, and for whom?
Access opened the door. Intention is what makes it worth walking through.
Three decisions that changed everything.
Two years ago, we made three deliberate decisions about how BTS would move with Applied AI.
We would become our own Customer Zero.
While others were building strategies, defining governance, and waiting for clarity, we made a different call: we decided not to wait. Not because the stakes were low, but because they were high. And because in a space evolving this quickly, clarity wouldn’t come from planning. It would come from movement.
So instead of starting with a roadmap, we started with three principles:
- No top-down mandate. The people closest to the work figure it out.
- IT must evolve from gatekeeper to enabler - leading AI trials and fast experimentation.
- Don’t wait for certainty.
We set the organization in motion, and once we did, things started to move quickly.
What if we started this company today?
Waiting for certainty is itself a choice, and it’s costing companies more than they realize.
We started where we knew the work best: our simulations. No perfect plan, just teams moving, trying, and iterating.
Simulations are core to who we are at BTS. Companies that simulate don’t just make better decisions; they execute faster and build more engaged cultures.
The team asked a simple question:
"What if we were to start our company today?”
That question started the flywheel.
They asked IT for a few licenses and started building - vibe-coding, writing agents, and testing tools - moving at a pace that would make any VC-backed start-up smile.
The messy middle.
At first, the team was underwhelmed.
The early reports were blunt:
“Not good with math.”
“Poor graph capabilities.”
The team wasn't discouraged. They kept tinkering - jumping between tools, staying on top of new releases, experimenting constantly.
This was a small team, across 24 countries, building off each other’s ideas. Laughing at crazy creations. Breaking things. Iterating in a sandbox alongside real clientwork.
Each cycle produced something:
- A sharper scenario
- A faster build
- A more powerful simulation
The flywheel was turning, and it was generating something real.
When the diamond appeared.
Then something shifted.
The team moved into client trials across five countries. They figured out ISO compliance and built the architecture to handle the complexity, the “spaghetti.”
And what emerged wasn’t incremental:
- What used to take weeks started happening in days.
- Limited creativity started to feel like unlimited innovation.
- Clients became self-serving.
- Agentic simulations were built directly into client systems for real-time updates and preparation.
This was our first AI diamond - a high-impact outcome created by many cycles of experimentation compounding into real value.
It only appeared because we kept the flywheel turning, each cycle increasing the odds that something would break through.
95% adoption in eight weeks.
Then it was time to take the AI diamond global.
BTS is decentralized and highly entrepreneurial. We operate across 24 countries and 38 offices, where local teams have real autonomy.
And historically? That’s meant a low appetite for adopting something built somewhere else and pushed from the center.
So we expected resistance.
Instead, something surprising happened.
In the first eight weeks, we saw 95% adoption across our global footprint.
It felt completely different from our own digital initiatives, ERP implementations, top-down rollouts of the past.
This moved on its own. Why?
We realized it didn’t start with a framework or a model, it started with a feeling.
The feeling of being at the leading edge of one’s craft and profession.
- Joy
- Excitement
- Pride
As we watched this play out across teams it stopped feeling like isolated wins.
There was a pattern to it. A repeatable, organic, innovation motion.
And the flywheel didn’t stop with simulations.
It spread across finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Some cycles led to small improvements, and others revealed new diamonds.
Not becausewe planned for them, but because we built the conditions for people to find them.
The question I'd ask any CEO right now: Is your flywheel turning, or are you still waiting for the perfect plan?
In part 2, I’ll share the key success factors behind the breakthrough, and what we’re now seeing across more than 120 global clients.
La maggior parte delle riunioni di vendita non fallisce.
Semplicemente non porta a una decisione.
Ed è lì che si perde valore.
I clienti di oggi sono più informati, più selettivi e hanno meno tempo.
Non hanno bisogno di altre presentazioni di prodotto.
Hanno bisogno di conversazioni che li aiutino a stabilire le priorità, decidere e andare avanti.
Eppure, il 58% delle riunioni di vendita non riesce a creare valore reale.
Non perché i venditori manchino di capacità, ma perché le conversazioni non sono progettate per far avanzare le decisioni.
“I clienti non agiscono su ogni esigenza che riconoscono.
Agiscono quando qualcosa diventa una priorità.”
In questo breve executive brief scoprirai:
- Perché la maggior parte delle conversazioni informa… ma non porta all’azione
- Cosa spinge davvero i clienti a stabilire priorità e muoversi
- Come creare urgenza senza compromettere la fiducia
- Il passaggio dal presentare soluzioni al facilitare decisioni
- Cosa distingue le conversazioni che si bloccano da quelle che accelerano il progresso
Se i tuoi team stanno affrontando trattative bloccate, decisioni ritardate o un pipeline lento, questo brief ti aiuterà a capire il perché e cosa fare in modo diverso.
Scarica l’executive brief e scopri come progettare conversazioni che portano davvero a decisioni.