The most annoying thing about young people at work

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Vscek editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

You’ve got to be kidding, I thought to myself the other day when I got an away email from a work contact that said this: “Thanks for your email. I’m on vacation until August 15th. Anything urgent, drop me a line.”

It was annoying. I had no idea what WA meant to anyone. Also, when I realized that WA was short for WhatsApp, I realized that even if I wanted to WA the young sender, I couldn’t because she hadn’t included a phone number in her email.

This, I later snorted to a friend, is the problem of young people at work.

They have no idea what office behavior means. Who includes a confusing abbreviation like “WA” in an away email? And why tell the world about WA when you can only be WA-ed by people with your phone number?

Once I stopped ranting, my friend pointed out that the sender had actually been pretty sensible.

She had devised a polite way of saying that she was available for urgent work matters while on leave, but only if you were a client, a co-worker, or someone who knew her well enough to have her phone number, rather than an annoying random cold-caller.

My friend was right. I was wrong. In fact, having been called by a lot of such irritants aVsceker leaving a phone number on OOO messages, I intend to adopt the WA policy myself.

This is an example of one of the most annoying things about young people at work. They oVsceken turn out to be right.

I say this because I believe that generational differences may be greatly exaggerated. I also know how many managers have difficulty managing what they perceive as younger, spoiled, disengaged, and difficult workers.

But I’ve had to surrender to the terrible truth that people younger than me sometimes know better. This goes beyond their admirable, if nervous, preference for roomy cargo pants over skinny jeans and long socks under their shoes instead of the less comfortable—and seemingly dated—invisible socks that fill my drawers.

It’s the youthful approach to “work-life balance,” a phrase I don’t remember uttering before the pandemic, that has really forced me to rethink.

I was reminded of this the other week, when I was telling a journalist I’ve known for decades about a series of deadlines I’d accepted that threatened to ruin the next two weeks.

“Why don’t you just get rid of one of the commitments?” she asked. I looked at her, slightly shocked, as she added that this is what a younger person would do.

She and I spent years working nights and weekends to cover breaking news or meet important deadlines. Everyone did it back then. More recently, we both heard younger colleagues announce that because they worked weekends, they were taking two days off, regardless of the breaking news. The first time it happened, my reaction was much like my reaction to the OOO message: You’re kidding. I still don’t think you should sign up for a career with unavoidably long or unpredictable hours unless you want to.

But I started working before email and smartphones forced you to work 24/7.

And as I watched older people in different industries burn out, get sick from stress, or simply become more tired and unproductive, I became convinced of the need to make working hours sustainable.

The health benefits are clear. Working at least 55 hours a week led to 745,000 deaths from stroke and coronary heart disease in 2016, a 29 percent increase since 2000, United Nations data shows.

And long working hours aren’t necessarily good for business, either.

A Gallup survey in June found that only 6 percent of employees feel engaged at work in Japan, a country where there’s a whole word for death from overwork (karoshi).

That makes them some of the least engaged employees in the world, a ranking they’ve held for years, which is concerning when you consider that employee engagement is tied to productivity and profitability.

Ultimately, older workers’ acceptance of long, unhealthy working hours is what younger workers around the world are challenging. Their disapproval may grate. It may even grate, but it’s certainly pushing work life in the right direction.