Are Gen Z workers really fragile? A TikTok going viral suggests there's a battle of the generations at work, and that older bosses should take it easy on their sensitive, young workers.
Rachel Lynch, who lives on Australia's Sunshine Coast, took to TikTok to share her experience at a sandwich shop where a Gen Z teen was reduced to tears after being yelled at by her older boss.
"My order was taken by a young girl, she was probably like, I don't know, 16, 17, maybe 18," Lynch said in her video. "I could tell she was young. She didn't seem very confident so I was just like, 'You know, take your time, I'm in no rush, you do you.'"
When the waitress fumbled with her order, Lynch said she figured her sandwich would either come out perfect or be completely wrong. Then 15 minutes went by and Lynch still didn't have her order.
"All I ordered was a sandwich. Fifteen minutes pass and I hear her speaking to some other people at the restaurant just saying like, 'Oh what was your order again? I forgot,' and I was like okay she's definitely forgotten my order, that's fine."
But the waitress' boss didn't keep such a cool head, Lynch said.
"She goes inside and she obviously tells her boss that she's already forgotten the order that she's taken outside," Lynch said. "He's yelling, she's panicking obviously, she starts crying."
"Nobody's technically in the wrong, it's just that she's obviously forgotten the order and she's obviously gotten a little bit frazzled and then he's, it's not like he was being aggressive, he was just obviously quite frustrated," she added.
It was the second time Lynch said she witnessed a young worker breaking down at their job.
"This happened to me a couple of months ago at another cafe where the young kid is crying and really panicking, like really, really panicking, like hyperventilating almost because she's f**ked up the orders and then the owner who's definitely old millennial or boomer is quite vocal in their outrage, not... like people need to step in but in a way that it's just loud enough that everybody in the restaurant can hear," Lynch said.
Both incidents left her to question why workers from older generations can't deal with those from Gen Z.
"It's just like this intense relationship between older managers and business owners and their younger staff," Lynch said. "Gen Z is more soft, they're more fragile, they want to work more collaboratively... and you can't just f**king yell at them. That's not -- that doesn't help them."
At the end of the day, Lynch said people really just need to learn how to work with one another better.
"Maybe back in the workforce when a boomer yelled at a boomer, they just pull up their socks and get on with it and be like, 'Well I'll f**king show them, I'll work the hardest I've ever worked,'" she said. "But when a boomer yells at a Gen Z... they're just heartbroken, they're just like, 'This is too much, I can't f**king handle this. Like, it's just a sandwich."