Managing Gen Z Expectations at Work

In the third episode of the season, host Nicole Patrick sits down with Angela Cheng-Cimini, SVP, Talent and CHRO at Harvard Business Publishing, to work through a question that has moved from theoretical to urgent for people leaders everywhere: how do you build a culture that Gen Z will actually stay for? With Generation Z already making up 24% of the global workforce, the answer shapes hiring, retention, and the day to day experience of work.

Cheng-Cimini brings more than 25 years of HR experience across consumer product goods, professional services, tech, and nonprofits, with earlier stops at large organizations like PepsiCo, Hasbro, and Nestle Waters. At Harvard Business Publishing, a mission driven nonprofit connected to Harvard Business School, she has a close view of how the newest generation evaluates employers, what motivates them to join, and what quietly pushes them out the door.

Her throughline across the conversation is refreshingly counterintuitive. Much of what Gen Z wants, she argues, is not unique to Gen Z at all. What has changed is that this generation is far more willing to ask for it out loud, and far quicker to leave when the answer is unsatisfying.

Why Gen Z interviews the employer before accepting a job

Cheng-Cimini says the shift starts before an offer is ever made. Candidates now arrive at second and third interviews asking what their career will look like in two or three years, and how the organization will help them get to the role they aspire to hold. The question is no longer only about the job on the table today.

That forces employers to articulate, concretely, how they invest in talent. At Harvard Business Publishing she describes a robust career model the team calls choose your own adventure, where skills can be applied on a different team or even in a different country. Organizations that cannot speak to that forward path, she suggests, will lose people who can.

Mental health and purpose are the new table stakes

Two forces sit alongside development, Cheng-Cimini argues. The first is mental health. This generation is entering the workforce during a period of real tumult, from the pandemic to war to hate crimes affecting marginalized communities, and they want to know what an employer is doing so they can bring their whole selves to work. Companies that ignore that, she says, miss out on what people can genuinely bring.

The second is purpose, or what she calls good with a capital G. Gen Z wants meaning, and many will accept less pay to work somewhere that has real impact rather than simply making widgets. She points to her own nonprofit, mission driven employer as an example of what motivates candidates in conversation, and as a signal of where loyalty now comes from. The final piece is transparency: the corner office can no longer hand down decisions without explanation, because this generation demands answers and expects to help iterate the thinking.

What modern learning and development looks like for Gen Z

On learning and development, Cheng-Cimini's guidance is to meet people where they are. Gen Z is digitally savvy but early in their careers and still building networks, so not everything can be remote or virtual. Isolation, she notes, hurt this cohort harder than older generations who already had support systems in place.

Practically, that means delivering training in many formats, much of it asynchronous and, in her word, snackable. A two hour lecture will not hold attention; a thirty minute session, a Slack message, an email, or a short video they can watch and even speed up will. The team is converting existing training content into smaller videos and apps so learning feels personalized rather than generic.

Are Gen Z's workplace needs actually universal?

Asked about her biggest learnings managing Gen Z in a hybrid setup, Cheng-Cimini pushes back on the premise. Scanning an organization that spans people fresh out of school to people near retirement, she concludes the needs are universal. People want agency over how, when, and how much they work, and they are not signing on for eighty hour weeks even when investment banks wave large sums at freshly minted MBAs.

They also want stability. Having seen what instability does to emotional health, this generation is less risk taking and wants to sign on somewhere that will be there for a while. And they want democratic access to information, because nobody wants the FOMO of sensing something is happening in the office while they work three hundred miles away. Meetings get recorded, decisions get posted, and information lives somewhere findable. Done well, Cheng-Cimini notes, this serves every audience an organization employs, which is why a strong employee feedback loop matters across generations, not just for the youngest.

How managers become amplifiers instead of HR custodians

On decentralizing culture from HR to managers, Cheng-Cimini feels the point deeply as an HR leader herself. Mid-level managers absorb the brunt of top down execution while acting as the buffer for the frontline teams they lead, and they are too often asked to deliver on culture without being supported themselves.

Her fix is to take care of managers first. Once they feel heard and are equipped to juggle competing demands, they become multipliers and amplifiers of culture. She reaches for the airplane analogy: put your own mask on before helping others. Because Gen Z is more vocal, it will ask managers for more feedback, more access, and clearer reasons why, so managers need to be resourced to answer.

Does technology keep Gen Z engaged, or does frequency?

When the conversation turns to tech, Cheng-Cimini resists the easy answer. Technology is not the only solution, she says. The primary way managers keep Gen Z engaged is frequency of communication, then choosing the right method, whether that is Slack, an asynchronous email, or a live call.

She makes herself accessible by design: an open calendar, a Slack that is always on, a phone people can text. That accessibility doubles as a check on FOMO and a small, regular act of care for mental health. On video especially, she watches for cues, a quieter participant, a wrinkled eyebrow, and follows up. Gen Z craves instant feedback the way their social lives run on likes and reshares, and hearing it a month later in a performance review lands too late.

Why continuous listening is how you keep Gen Z

The common thread across every answer is listening: to career aspirations at the interview stage, to mental health signals on a video call, to managers who feel overloaded, and to a generation that expects to be heard rather than managed at. That is precisely the discipline an employee listening platform is built to support, turning frequent, low friction check-ins into signals leaders can act on.

For people leaders, the practical takeaway is that engaging Gen Z is less about buying new technology and more about closing the gap between what employees feel and what leaders hear. Continuous pulse surveys and steady two way communication let organizations catch disengagement early, support managers before they burn out, and prove to a vocal generation that their voice actually changes something. As Cheng-Cimini frames it, the organizations that do this well end up appealing to every audience they employ, not just the youngest one.