Generation Z’s impact on the workplace reaches far beyond the stereotype of digital natives glued to their screens.
Generation Z’s impact on the workplace reaches far beyond the stereotype of digital natives glued to their screens.
For years, Gen Z has been accused of being soft, distracted, or allergic to hard work. But talk to the people managing them, and a different story emerges. Across industries young workers are cutting through red tape, automating busywork, and quietly making their older colleagues look inefficient. This is true regardless of the industry: take healthcare, insurance, or even electricians.
Ryan McEachron runs an insurance agency in California. He’s watched Gen Z employees streamline processes he assumed were fixed. “One of our newer insurance agents questioned why we were requiring clients to fill out redundant paperwork across three different forms,” he said. After she rebuilt the forms herself, turnaround for quotes dropped from two days to the same day, and the company’s closing rate jumped by 31 percent.
“They’re direct about inefficiencies that older employees just accepted as ‘how things are done,’” McEachron added. In government work, he saw the same pattern: junior staff asking why approvals needed five signatures instead of three—and saving weeks of processing time as a result.
At Palmetto Surety in Florida, a Gen Z employee pointed out that the team’s weekly updates were “theatre”, everyone just repeated what was already in Slack. Haiko de Poel, the company’s fractional CMO, listened. “We killed the meetings,” he said. “Project delivery actually accelerated because people had three extra hours monthly to do real work instead of prep slides nobody remembered.”
De Poel calls their focus “ruthless efficiency.” One designer rewired the company’s website navigation over a weekend, cutting bounce rates by 40 percent. Another employee blocks her calendar into 90‑minute focus chunks and refuses to check email outside those windows. “Her campaign output was double her predecessor’s,” he said.
At Kita Dental in Sydney, Dr. Kent Boon realized his Gen Z assistants were far better at helping patients understand complex treatments. One drew diagrams on her iPad to show how full-arch implants worked, a task Boon had struggled to explain verbally for years. Acceptance rates for the procedure jumped.
Boon says his younger staff also improved how the clinic handled complaints. “When a patient’s upset about costs or treatment outcomes, my Gen Z front desk associate handles it more directly and empathetically than anyone else,” he said. “No script, just honesty. Patients respond to that.”
In the trades, digital transformation can feel like a crawl. Not for Gen Z. Daniel Vasilevski, who runs an electrical business in Australia, said a 22‑year‑old apprentice learned a new job‑dispatching system in under two weeks, something that took senior workers six. Now that apprentice completes 18 percent more admin work a week.
“They were raised in an environment full of technology,” Vasilevski said. “It’s not just social media. It’s real-world operational tech.” He credits younger workers with cutting invoicing errors by nearly 10 percent, improving client satisfaction in a job where precision matters.
Josh Qian, COO of home design company LINQ Kitchen, says Gen Z employees aren’t afraid to call out companies that preach culture but don’t practice it. “They’re committed to finding a job that aligns with their values and aspirations,” he said. They see work as something that should offer enjoyment and growth—not just stability.
Qian sees this as healthy. “They’re using the labor market to shift the power to the employee instead of the other way,” he said. “As an ambitious Millennial, I can benefit from that too.”
Older generations might call that demanding. But the evidence suggests Gen Z just expects modern workplaces to function the way technology already does: intuitive, efficient, and worth the effort.
When your youngest employee starts questioning why something takes five approvals (or quietly builds the thing your team didn’t know it needed) it might not be disruption. It might simply be progress.
