Do you have office icks?

Stylist magazine recently published a list of the 5 things that supposedly drive Gen Z crazy a.k.a. their ‘office icks’:

• Having to call someone for something work-related (anxiety-inducing)
• Being given a Dell laptop (apparently, the company views you solely as a number)
• Making awkward noises to fill the void on video calls (cringey)
• Friday afternoon meetings (‘Two words: absolutely not’)
• Messages longer than one sentence on Slack (‘If I wanted an essay, I’d send an email or call you. Also, I would have become a professor.’)

What struck me about this list wasn’t that it was ‘entitled’, as some people have commented.

It was more how familiar it was.

Because in my experience, plenty of people of all generations find phone calls daunting. (As a teenager, and even into my twenties, I’d rather have chewed off my foot than pick up the phone.)

Using the phone can also be particularly challenging for neurodivergent people.

We all find those please-God-make-it-stop Zoom silences hard to fill.

And who loves a Friday afternoon meeting? No-one.

As for messages, well, they need to be to be just that: messages, not manifestos.

(Although I have to admit the status symbol of laptops was new to me…)

I don’t think the generations are so different after all. We have more in common than we think.

We all like pithy, thoughtful communication that makes things easy on the recipient. We can all feel awkward at times. And if we think a bit more about our audience, and less about ourselves, then we’re on to a winner.

So tell me, which ones on the list resonate with you?