Gen Z Is Entering the Workforce. Are We Setting Them Up to Succeed?

Design Nerds Anonymous

Hosted live at the Mannington Commercial Showroom in Atlanta, this episode features a panel discussion exploring how Gen Z is navigating the modern workforce amid rapid shifts in AI, communication norms, and career trajectories. Panelists Janet Simpson (CEO of TVS), Tony

Key takeaways

• Janet Simpson (CEO of TVS) stresses that modern teams require explicit communication charters to navigate fragmented digital channels and build trust effectively.
• Tony Purvis (SCAD Atlanta) observes that Gen Z students actively seek knowledge but lack instinctive workplace expectations, necessitating structured critiques to build resilience.

Main topics

• Generational workplace norms and environmental context
• Explicit communication and team charters

Notable quotes

"Sometimes we don't realize they don't have it instinctively."

Conclusion

The episode equips educators, employers, and Gen Z with actionable frameworks for aligning expectations,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) I find our students are craving knowledge and information and absorbing it all. So they're not scared of being told what the expectation is, but they don't even know to ask what is the expectation. Sometimes we don't realize they don't have it instinctively. Speaker 8 (0:20) Welcome to Design Nerds Anonymous, the podcast that sparks curiosity at the intersection of business and design. I'm your host, Amanda Schneider. Now, there is no shortage of opinions about Gen Z at work. But you know what there might be a shortage of? Actual conversations with Gen Z and how that's going for them. So for this stop on our Work for What's Next Roadshow, we decided to change that. We recorded live from the Mannington Commercial Showroom in Atlanta and filled the room with people who see this school-to-work transition from very different sides. The Gen Z students entering the workforce, the educators preparing them, and importantly, the business leaders hiring them and leading them. So whether you're part of the design industry or you just found this podcast through my recent conversation with Oprah, I'll tell you, this is really a conversation about how all of us can learn to work better together. So instead of each generation talking about one another, what happens when we actually talk to one another? Well, here we go. Speaker 7 (1:32) Let's listen in. Speaker 8 (1:35) All right. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Mannington Commercial Showroom in Atlanta. And I am so thrilled both about the topic we have today, the panelists, and also this room full of people that we have, because those of you that are listening on the podcast won't be able to see what I'm seeing right now, but there is an incredible room full of students, educators. as well as those of you in the professional practice of design. So we are here today to talk about Gen Z is entering the workforce, but are we setting them up to succeed? To Speaker 7 (2:12) give you a little bit more background on this topic, we know that Speaker 8 (2:15) Gen Z is entering a workplace with changing context to the one that many of us of older generations entered. AI is changing how work gets done. Communication norms are shifting as we're moving into more and more of a hybrid world. Career paths generally are less linear. And the definition of work-ready, I would say, is changing right along with them. So today we're going to explore what does Gen Z need to learn? What does the workplace need to unlearn? And how do students, educators, and employers all prepare for what comes next? So with that, I'm thrilled to introduce our panelists. And I always let them introduce themselves so they can tell you what they want you to know about themselves. But I would love for you to tell us who you are, where you sit in this education to employment journey, and maybe one thing that you're seeing that the rest of us might not see from our vantage point. Speaker 7 (3:07) I'm Janet Simpson, and I'm the president and CEO of TVS, which is a commercial architecture and interior design firm based here in Atlanta. And my background is in interior design, so I am an interior designer. I've practiced for 20 years, and I've been in this role for 10. As a leadership role, just really seeing how we can really adapt the workplace. Speaker 7 (3:32) So one of the things that I'm seeing right now is that TVS was founded in 1968. Thompson, Ventulet, Stainback. And Mr. Ventulet recently passed away at the age of 90. We are celebrating him within the firm. We're getting ready to host a real reception in his honor. We have a lot of artifacts from his career, sketchbooks, his notes. drawings. He's also an artist. But one of the things that really has struck me as we're doing that is the one continuity throughout all generations is the relationships that were made along the way while you were doing the work. There is certainly a lot of built environment work to represent his impact, but it's... Those connections, those relationships, all of those things that were made along the way, that is the thing that keeps giving. And it starts to create a network that you don't even realize. I don't think he even realized. And we're starting to have a moment right now where we're getting to see all of that come together. So I've been reflecting a lot on what's the power of having a platform to make all of those connections. So the work is... always about way more than just the product, the thing that you need to get done at the end of the day. It's a relationship business. Speaker 8 (5:03) And we'll get into maybe some of the struggles of maintaining those relationships as the world evolves so quickly around us. So we'll come back to that for sure. Okay. Awesome. Tony. Speaker 2 (5:13) Hi, I'm Tony Purvis. I am the head of the interior design program at the Savannah College of Art and Design at our Atlanta location. I've been enrolled for five years now, come from industry. Something that I noticed because of the privileged position that I sit in, our Gen Z students are interesting and dynamic and contradictory and complicated and have fantastic qualities that we would love to see move up into the profession, but we have to get them into the profession, into places where they can be heard to bring about that influence that's instinctive to them. Speaker 8 (5:56) I love it. I love it. So we'll talk about maybe some of those barriers in a minute. Okay. Awesome. Amy. Hi, Speaker 6 (6:02) I'm Amy Bridenthal. I am a professor of business management at Agnes Scott. college and we have several Scotties in the audience. I'm very excited. I had a first career on the business side. My first 12 years of work were at Accenture doing management consulting. And then I decided to do a career shift in my 30s because after working across a lot of different companies, I was like, why are people so weird at work? I Speaker 4 (6:25) really... Speaker 6 (6:26) I do not get it. So I went back to grad school. And so now I have the privilege of getting to work with Gen Z students at Agnes Scott with my full-time job. And then I also work with the executive MBA program part-time at Georgia Tech. And so I really love this conversation about talking across generations. And I think the big observation that I would open with is that things aren't as dire as the internet would have you believe. And people aren't as different. as we believe when we have unique interactions with one person who's really different than us, I think at the core of a lot of it is misunderstandings, like faulty assumptions that are just making us not understand each other and then making us take actions that are maybe... counter what you think we would do. So we can talk about some of those. And some of the world of work has always been broken. And a lot of the way of the typical way we do things and that we have done things for a long time, research shows is not the most effective way to get performance and well-being out of our employees. And so I think this is maybe a great tipping point to kind of rewrite work and figure out how to manage and do work in a more productive way for all generations that maybe we could have always. done a little better. You Speaker 8 (7:35) know, obviously our foundations are in the interior design industry, but I think a lot of the things that we're going to be talking about today are applicable really well beyond. And as we look at, as you guys were talking, I kind of wrote down three key words. I wrote down relationships, barriers, and perceptions, or I could have said misperceptions maybe. And it feels like this is probably three really great words to talk about what's happening there. So as we kind of uncover these Problems that we can solve for the world in the next 30 minutes, no problem. What do you think is really happening here? I think the Speaker 7 (8:07) pace at which communication channels are changing, you're adding on complexity with different communication channels, and you're talking about trust and getting things done and building relationships, but it takes a conversation with the beginning of any problem. project, in any team that you're in, you actually have to have a communication channels conversation. Like how are we going to communicate? What are you paying attention to? Because there are so many ways to get in touch, but so few ways to actually connect. And just the clarity of just having, we had to have this conversation with our, my executive leadership team just recently. We'd already had it once before, but we had sat, had to sit down and say, when do you want to receive a text? When do you want to send an email? When are we going to be in person? Because it's just so much noise, right? Speaker 8 (9:02) We used to have face-to-face, maybe face-to-face and email. Now we have 20 more ways to talk, right? Yet all these different ways haven't necessarily made us better. So I think that's interesting, Tony, as you talk about barriers. Like, is that the barrier that's created? Speaker 2 (9:15) Well, so Janet, when I was listening to you speak with, what came to my mind is that similarly with our students at SCAD, This generation, by my observation, appears to me to need a little bit more explicit expectation setting. And that makes sense because the context in which they grew up was very different than the context of those of us, you know, Gen X and older. I find that the students are really eager to learn. but things that might just be second nature to us. Maybe we saw our parents go to work and always dress a certain way. Maybe we saw telephone conversations happening. That just wasn't their experience. And so we're finding it necessary to be a little more explicit than we may have been with millennials or even before that. But at the same time, I find our students are... craving knowledge and information and absorbing it all. So they're not scared of being told what the expectation is, but they don't even know to ask what is the expectation. Sometimes we don't realize they don't have it instinctively. And Speaker 8 (10:23) Janet, I want to come back to you just for a second, because are you seeing that explicit need in some of your folks entering the profession? And is that frustrating to your hiring managers? Speaker 7 (10:34) I'm not going to go as far as to say it's a frustration. I think we're getting to become more aware of creating communication norms and being very explicit about that, when to expect something. And I do know that within our firm teams that we work on, we have team charters. We talk about expected behaviors. Speaker 7 (11:00) And it's not to say that those are hard and fast, but it's just a recognition that I think when you approach a problem and you don't just assume it's the other person's problem, if something's happening and there's a pattern happening, then we try to address it as what's the clarity we can bring to this. And one of the things that repeatedly comes up all the time is people need information. but we're having an increasingly harder time getting the information in a way that they're going to receive it. Speaker 8 (11:33) Amy, what would you add to this? Speaker 6 (11:34) Yeah, Speaker 7 (11:35) so I think, you know, to your original question on kind Speaker 6 (11:37) of why we are in this situation where the different generations seem to have such a difficult time understanding each other, I think both of you really hit on it. It's, you know, who we are and how we are is, you know, the old adage of nature versus nurture, right? And so the environmental impact, like the environments in which we grew up and became our human selves were... very different across these generations, right? I think in your book, you have a quote about, you know, older generations grew up with the parents saying, because I said so, do it. And that was the norm. And that's what you did, right? And that is not the generational norms now, right? It's curiosity and question and like, help me understand why we would do this, right? So I think our norms. just the basic assumptions of how we should be and our norms of behavior that we grew up with are so different. And then we all of a sudden are in the same workplace. And, you know, we were with people with our same generation all through school and all through undergrad. And then all of a sudden you go to work and now you're really working with people across lots of different generations. with really different norms and basic assumptions to things that we don't often think we