When Amazon announced Monday that their staff would be returning to the office five days a week, I gulped.
Days earlier I’d gotten off a call with an old friend, RedBalloon communications director Isaac Lopez, about whether he was seeing the same thing I was in the job market: chaos. I’d initially wanted to write a piece about conservative versus progressive employers. But the topic seemed so minuscule after our chat when compared to the impending generations of workers and their less-than-stellar perspectives of what a job really is.
Amazon’s staff has until Jan. 2, 2025, to figure out their lives, many of which are built around the flexibility of remote work, according to the announcement. Employees were quick to vent their fury at Jeff Bezos’ money pig, calling the move “backwards” and “out of its mind,” Business Insider reported. The pandemic’s enforcement of remote work, coupled with other social trends like employment influencers peddling dangerous rhetoric online, leaves Amazon in somewhat of a perfect storm. (RELATED: Celebrity Storm Chaser Reed Timmer Seems To Shred AccuWeather, Says He’ll Never Work In Media Again)
The move could prove successful, honing loyal teams of dedicated workers, but this is unlikely, Lopez and his colleague Kayla Youngren tell me on a call following Amazon’s announcement. “If serious talent demands a fully remote job, they can get it,” Youngren, an account manager, tells me. Amazon could end up losing expert talent to steadily-growing competitors with better employment packages. Thing get even worse when you look at the talent pool Amazon may be left with (though they may largely have themselves to blame).
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“People lay their phones on their desk pointing upwards at the ceiling, show up without shirts on, you name it,” Youngren adds. But what do you expect? “All interviews are done remotely so there’s a lack of consistency in what people see, whereas 20 years ago you’d get dressed up to sit in a waiting room awkwardly until you saw the man in the big suit in the big office,” she continues. “[Zoom interviews] are how people call grandma and how they’re interviewing for a job. There’s a lot of confusion over what would be standard practice.” (RELATED: The ‘Smartest’ People In America Are Basically All Totalitarian Psychopaths, Study Finds)
Thanks to COVID lockdowns, generations of children are graduating schools and colleges online, leaving us in a “weird period of time with no set social expectations anymore,” says Youngren. Most business owners are not Gen Z or younger millennials, “so their businesses are built on older traditions, like sending a thank you email or note after the interview. Gen Z kids will end the call without even saying goodbye.”
Great candidates come through, but they just don’t have the manners to do well with older generations. So many recruiters I spoke to, along with RedBalloon, “have to do a lot of covering for candidates’ social skills.” The one big difference that seems to set talent apart is whether or not they worked as a teenager.
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— KAY SMYTHE (@KaySmythe) February 15, 2024
A lot of kids who depended on underpaid pocket money gigs, like delivering newspapers, working at coffee shops or bagging groceries, can’t get jobs today because businesses are bound by things like minimum wage employment laws. What we don’t realize we’ve lost is the essential stepping stone between childhood and functional adult life, wherein kids are indirectly taught soft social skills as well as the value of a dollar at the end of a hard day’s work.
“Kids don’t actually have many examples of talking to people on the phone. The main methods of communication are just typing,” says Youngren, adding another factor to our social division. (RELATED: Dear Kay: My Kids Want To Be Professional Social Media Influencers. What Should I Do?)
Couple this with the downgrading of education, and we’re not left in a world where “everyone gets ahead.” We’ve basically cut off the social education of responsibility for entire generations of American kids, and the results are starting to show in the demands they make for jobs they’re not qualified to do.
Recruiters are part of the problem. Most are paid depending on the package they get for their talent, so there’s a built-in incentive to drive up costs while setting unrealistic expectations. RedBallon says they do not work on this model because it doesn’t help businesses grow.
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— KAY SMYTHE (@KaySmythe) September 18, 2024
What does this boil down to? Generation after generation of young Americans with an ever-growing importance of self-satisfaction instead of overall success for ourselves, our families and our country. “It’s like if you were trying out for a pro-ball team and they said, ‘It’s a real toxic environment here. They care more about winning games than feelings,’” Youngren says of many young people’s mindsets toward work.
“A job is not a support group; it’s not a family; it’s a business,” she says, something I believe should be taught from the first day of kindergarten. It’ll be up to companies like Amazon to try to recreate this understanding, as schools and homes are clearly not cutting it anymore. (RELATED: Kids Raised In Cities Are Socially Isolated, And It Really Shows)
If we don’t break the cycle now, my fear is we’ll keep expanding the divide between those who have, and those who have not, the consequences not being truly felt for decades into the future when there aren’t enough of us to run a civil society. The only thing holding together this growing societal chasm is individual ability to contribute to the collective good. Hopefully, together, we can stop the downward spiral of a socially illiterate society.
