Best Practice

Preparing students for workplace expectations: Two exercises

Careers guidance Work experience
In a four-part series, Dr David Oxley and Dr Helmut Schuster consider the future of careers and careers advice and students’ transition to the workplace. In part 3, they offer two exercises to help students prepare for workplace culture and expectations
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In a recent survey, 3 out of 4 managers said that they find working with Gen Z one of their greatest challenges. The primary accusation was that “they” are unprepared for the corporate workplace (see Anwar, 2023; Schlott, 2023).

Specifically, that it was hard to get them to focus at work, that they had poor communication skills, were addicted to social media, and blurred the lines of business etiquette.

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise … They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Dismissing the next generation is far from a new thing, as this quote attributed to Socrates testifies.

Indeed, 50 years ago, baby-boomers were being labelled as self-centred hippies, whose anti-establishment, anarchic views, would destroy the world (Samuel, 2022).

Who better then to know the truth of the unique strengths of the emerging generation than readers of this publication – their teachers.

 

Explore this SecEd series: Careers advice and entering the workplace

    • Part 1: The future of jobs: What will work look like in 2034? Published April 30, 2024
    • Part 2: Helping students to consider early career goals: Three exercises. Published May 7, 2024
    • Part 3: Preparing students for workplace expectations: Two exercises (this article)
    • Part 4: Finding your first job after school: Three exercises. Published May 21, 2024

 

Mind the gap

While we’d like to dismiss the commentary about Gen Z in the workplace as superficial stereotyping and misperception, we could probably do a better job of bridging the gap.

This next generation grew up in a context where parents blurred the lines between disciplinarians, best friends, coaches, and business partners. Their outlook, as they join the workforce, is that it will be filled with that same parental role models they are familiar with.

The result is sometimes a clash between a conservative business world still anchored in Christian work ethic morals and an emerging workforce that is unwilling to make lifestyle compromises for work, even during work hours.

Our observation is that we haven’t spent enough time educating students on the realities of business – particularly workplace dynamics.

Consequently, it can hardly be a surprise that in some cases there is a disconnect. Like many things in life, we can approach careers with unreasonable expectations, with a sense that the world should offer us something special – or we can engage with a healthier attitude, where we are more pragmatic and work to make the best of the opportunities that come our way.

We believe most people eventually come to embrace the second perspective when they realise the broader context. We have designed the following two exercises specifically for this purpose.

 

1, Business and employee dynamics

We all love to play cryptic board games and business simulations. Being successful in business often boils down to two things – succeeding in managing people and money decisions. This game is intended to flush out how difficult it is to manage the disparate narrow personal vested interests and succeed.

You will need teams of five to seven students:

  • One student is the entrepreneur.
  • Two students are “employee self-maximisers” (ESM).
  • Two to four people are in the employee control group (ECG).

The three separate groups should get a confidential briefing. You can do this verbally or write these on cards and have them select at random.

  • The entrepreneur is told they have £45,000 (for five employees – adjust the number up or down by £6,000 for different group sizes) to invest, but before they proceed, they must agree a mutually agreeable monthly contract with all their employees at a minimum of £5,000 a month.
  • The ESM group is told they are entering a job offer negotiation and that they have heard some friends got offers of £7,000 a month (the discussion should be limited only to the value of their monthly offer).
  • The ECG group are told that they are in the final running for a job at an exciting technology start-up that may solve one of our world’s biggest problems.

The game should be run for a minimum of three monthly cycles (this could be an ice-breaker 60-minute session including debrief).

After each salary/budgeting round, the entrepreneur spins a dice and applies the number as a multiplier to whatever capital is left after paying employees. Any team that goes negative is declared bankrupt. There are no loans, no fuzzy math – pure monthly cash accounting.

The entrepreneur is responsible for tracking the running total (profits and losses) and hands in their journal entries at the end.

 

Exercise 1: Desired outcomes

The debrief from the game is simply taking participants through the superficial results (which team made the most profit), to the creativity of the entrepreneurs in structuring employee pay (we specifically leave this open for people to be creative), to how employees felt about their pay.

Ultimately, however, we are trying to draw out three main themes:

  1. Profitable business requires business owners and employees to be cognisant of the economic realities.
  2. Generally the best outcomes are achieved when things are transparent and people compromise.
  3. That squabbles between small groups completely derail the entire company.

 

2, Record, analyse, leverage

All organisations have different routines and preferences for how they communicate. Some of this is generational but the ceremonies of communication styles give a glimpse into how the company really works.

We want to promote students’ observation and deduction skills in extrapolating how different organisations speak different languages. The question becomes whether students are then prepared to learn and apply that language to further their career aspirations.

This exercise can be anonymised to protect identities but by design we want to ask students to focus on the constructive description rather than judgement of desirability.

Ask students to select an organisation they have access to. This could be their school, even a particular semester course, a club they are members of (sports or extra-curricular activity), their family, or somewhere they do part-time work. Ask them over a period (a week is probably minimum) to track the following:

  • How many communications do they receive in total.
  • What form did they take – email, text, social media, verbal (in person/via video-conference).

Then ask them to think about how the communication felt:

  • Formal or informal.
  • Addressed to the collective or personal.
  • A dictate about rules and procedures (boss down).
  • More organic/informal/open/social.
  • Instructive and focused on telling.
  • Inviting ideas and contributions.

Based on the above, we then ask them to make the following determination. They must choose one of these descriptions for their subject organisation:

  • Traditional – instructive and more analogue.
  • Corporate – very organised, formulaic, and professional.
  • Contemporary – more modern, more open, more diverse forms of communication.
  • Next Gen – dynamic, experimental, unfiltered, progressive.

 

Exercise 2: Desired outcomes

The debrief of this exercise is to discuss why students made the determinations they did but then to dwell on what they feel the final labels infer about the organisation and working there.

What types of people would enjoy working there. How would you be highly effective if you choose to work there. How big an adjustment would it require for you?

 

Compromise and adaptation

It is certainly helpful for your career if you are smart, driven, determined. But, if you don’t understand how the organisation, business, or profession you have chosen actually works – how decisions get made – how they are communicated – well, you may find yourself marginalised and a bit disillusioned. Not all organisations deserve our compromise, but if you really believe in the outcomes and vision for a business, it is worth asking yourself if you might get more done by bending with the prevailing cultural winds.

  • Dr David Oxley and Dr Helmut Schuster are co-authors of A Career Carol: A tale of professional nightmares and how to navigate them, (Austin Macauley Publishers). Visit www.drsschusterandoxley.com/books

 

Further information & resources