Crisis in the corporate sector.
You would have already seen the countless articles with demoralizing headlines, “No one wants to work anymore!”
Specifically, they are talking about Gen Z. It is really difficult to get them motivated. Which has led to the birth of countless articles on topics such as Bare Minimum Mondays, Quiet Quitting, and god knows what other SEO-optimized keywords this attention deficit generation needs in order to catch interest in clicking a page link.
Generation Z who recognize that corporate existence is a mundane existence and feel no extra effort is required other than what is entailed in the job description, are people who are either insanely smart to recognize the unnecessary drudgery of life or insanely stupid to think they can speed-run the ladder to success. In both cases, they are insane, which no one would disagree with.
However, I have always wondered whether it is just this generation that thought like this.
Was it the influence of the “Get Rich Quick” startup culture fraud that made them take this extreme approach to life, or was this phenomenon always lurking in the shadows, waiting to be slapped with a TikTok worthy #hashtag.
From a managerial perspective, the question has always been how to motivate this new breed of employees to perform beyond their duties and squeeze out a few more shekels.
From a personal perspective, the question of going back to work on Monday has always kept me awake on Sunday nights.
Why can’t gen Z be motivated to work, and why does Corporate dread force me to stay awake?
I first faced this problem when working with a bigwig executive of a major supply chain tech product company who had accidentally stumbled upon a McKinsey article glamorizing the buzz word of the year: – Corporate Gamification. With the CEO of the company scheduled for a visit and company attrition at an all-time high, Gamification was supposed to be a disaster mitigation plan to welcome the upcoming calamity of incorporating Gen Z into the workplace. The A-Team was assembled for the Dead on Arrival project, with me chosen as the sacrificial volunteer to lead design and development, managing a young developer recently inflicted with PTSD from being told his life was going to be confined to coding on the company’s outdated tech stack. With no idea what to do and like any volunteer handed an unnecessary project, I procrastinated with video games, specifically “Assassins Creed Black Flag” as long as I could before starting the project requirements documentation. Clueless, I simply copied the global leaderboard notification system of the game as the main feature of the pilot project since the game was fun. After that, weekends were no longer dreary.
The project became fun as we had complete freedom to do whatever we wanted. It was then that I was introduced to the concepts of points, badges, and leaderboards. The presentation was well received because no one had a clue what I was talking about, but everyone was in agreement with the principle that work was being done, and the comparisons with Candy Crush made it sound fancy. If Candy Crush could be incorporated into corporate processes, it would be enough to welcome the touchscreen generation used to participation trophies.
And it clicked. I derived satisfaction not from completing the project but by inserting bits and pieces—easter eggs—into the design and workings of the system that made the project personal. All of a sudden, Mondays were not as dreary as I imagined them to be. This project also helped me make a career switch to working on gamification projects full time.
Which brings us back to the dilemma of Gen Z. Gen Z is like any other generation when they were young. Youths have always wanted to discover and express their soul, a task progressively becoming more difficult in the hyperconnected digital age where you have 5 seconds or less to catch someone’s attention. It’s a dehumanizing experience. With fewer opportunities to express oneself, it does not help them when office spaces are soul-snatching as well.
Their argument is that they get paid so little for work, that it simply is not worth it, leaving them with neither money nor time to express themselves. When personal lives are not fulfilling, how can corporate life be satisfying?
When working on a warehouse operations optimization project in India, I personally got to experience this. After employee surveys, one of the recommendations discovered was to increase the pay rate of packaging employees. This recommendation was immediately shot down by the warehouse manager, who informed me that it had already been implemented with no consequential increase in performance. They found that employees would use the extra money to buy booze after work, and that was it. Instead, management had implemented the pay increase in the form of grocery vouchers for high performers. This change impacted the employees social lives when their wives would ask if they would be getting the voucher this month or not. This made the vouchers extremely desirable.
I had not realized it back then, but this phenomenon is called “Social proof” in the world of Gamification.
Simply put, one technique in Gamification systems is to use social influence to encourage individuals to conform to the desired behaviors. In this case, the grocery vouchers were used to influence families to drive employee behavior, which in turn gave them access to a better lifestyle.
Who knew that a socially fulfilled employee works better, and this is exactly where companies need to do better if they want to avoid employees being disengaged with work!
While it is not the domain of the corporation to improve the social lives of their employees, doing so brings much value in terms of performance improvement and employee retention. The way companies can execute on this is by giving employees space (and projects) to express themselves.
Let’s face it, the personal lives of Gen Z are diluted by their exposure to social media. For Gen Z, no personal life experience is their own; everything they do is a poor imitation of what they see as desirable on Instagram or whatever is the hip platform to be on right now.
This social fulfillment was never a part of the corporate structure. But it has always existed in the form of Easter eggs where employees would use work to sneak in personal mementos to make their own lives fulfilling.
For example, every software application, no matter how marvelous it seems, was frustrating to build at one point in time, and as a measure of respite, coders would sneak in harmless pieces of code that made them connect with the work that they were doing.
To give a few examples, Microsoft Excel is an application that the majority would agree is a well-built application. But did you know it came with plenty of Easter eggs? One of them is “Hall of Tortured Souls” an FPS game built within the application. I doubt there would have been a dedicated project manager who would have allowed such a name.
Given a choice, people would prefer to insert Easter eggs in their lives as well like Google co-founder Sergey Brin who inserted the below HTML code in LaTeX, a popular tool used by academics to format complex documents:
Not every personal contribution to a project needs to be an Easter Egg. Some are conscious decisions that become the fundamental key of the project. Like Steve Jobs, who was influenced by calligraphy and incorporated it into the Apple Macintosh as one of its key features.
Some use these personal project inputs as a means to stay invested in their work. Like Kubo Tite, the author of the famous manga “Bleach”. Kubo Tite became a victim of his own success as his Japanese comic became insanely popular, which brought upon the wrath of the magazine editors to ensure his work remained compliant with industry standards in comic paneling and design. Kubo Tite would stay committed to his project by focusing on the fashion aesthetics of his characters, as seen below, which was novel for a well-known published series at the time.
The concept of Easter eggs may well be the solution to keep Gen Z motivated in the workplace, unless companies want to address the real problems of Gen Z (we can take up the issue of blaming the damn boomers for making a “killing” instead of a “living” via real estate investment, but let me not digress).
For Gen Z, who seeks comfort in the doom and gloom of today, a push for positive change may be uncomfortable. A small initiative such as allowing Gen Z to express themselves in workplaces via “Easter Eggs” may be the trigger of the needed change to drive projects to success and permit a sense of self-fulfillment. Enabling this sense of personal connection to the workplace and project ownership also brings advantages to reduced employee turnover and increased workplace performance.
I have myself incorporated “Easter Eggs’ into my projects, including the one that you are reading right now. The color scheme of this website is an homage to the new season of the anime “Bleach” which was announced after a decade of its last episode airing. The moment I saw the trailer for the new season, I was struck by the odd color palette of the trailer, which resembled something out of a Google Android design template handbook. It seemed like the solid UI color scheme that one would find in a website design.
And why not? I immediately took a screenshot from the trailer (couldn’t find the exact trailer online) and assembled the color palette in a power point. This color palette seen below is the foundation of the design of the blog.
Whenever there is a heavy weight on opening the blog editor, at least the design of the website and fond memories of watching Bleach will be there to ease the burden as I strive to write on a weekly basis.
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