Meet the new boss: Nadya Okamoto, 26-year-old co-founder of New York startup company August. JUTHARAT PINYODOONYACHET FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Anne Marie Chaker
March 10, 2024 9:00 pm ET
At a New York startup company called August, employees enjoy “mindfulness Fridays”—a more-relaxed workday for deep focus without meetings. The company, which makes menstrual-care products, also has manager-driven quarterly “heart checks” to see how direct reports are feeling about how hard they are working and how much they are paid.
It’s a work style introduced by Gen Z co-founders Nadya Okamoto, 26, and Nick Jain, 24, who graduated from Harvard and Princeton, respectively, during the pandemic.
“We talk a lot more than most places about how to prevent burnout,” says Okamoto, who says she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder two years ago, and speaks openly about it. “One of the things I’ve learned the most is to slow down.” The self-described fast-paced entrepreneur, who published a book while a sophomore in college and started a global nonprofit distributing menstrual products while in high school, says that “while I may be fast moving, I appreciate a team around me to slow down.”
Generation Z—generally defined as college grads and 20-somethings born sometime between 1997 and 2012—entered the workplace when there wasn’t even one to go to. Those years, marked by a global health crisis and social unrest, helped shape their views about life as well as work. Many of them were home as their parents’ workplaces closed, so they got a ground-floor view of what jobs really looked like, and they didn’t like what they saw: a work-life balance that left little time for life, management that seemed to not care about the mental health of their employees, and an organizational structure that didn’t give workers much of a voice.
Now, they have an opportunity to shape the workplace as they begin to enter the ranks of management themselves. While Gen Z’s members now account for only 16.8% of the total workforce, according to data analyzed by ADP Research Institute, they are ascending rapidly: Employers promoted Gen Z workers into management 1.2 times faster in 2023 than in 2019.
Prepare for unrest.
Erin Burk, an August vice president, and August co-founder Nick Jain. Burk says some of the startup’s eight employees include therapy appointments on their shared work calendars. PHOTO: JUTHARAT PINYODOONYACHET FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A challenge to work with
Research shows that Gen Z workers can be challenging to work alongside. A survey of 1,344 managers by ResumeBuilder.com found that 74% believe Gen Z is more difficult to work with than other generations, due in part to lacking skills as well as motivation. In another ResumeBuilder survey that interviewed hiring managers who assessed a Gen Z candidate, 58% said Gen Zers didn’t dress appropriately, 57% said they struggled with eye contact and 47% said they asked for unreasonable compensation.But those “weaknesses” might be in the eye of the beholder. What older workers see as workplace liabilities, others see as signs of potential leadership strengths. “It’s not that they don’t want to work,” says executive coach Scott De Long, 64, who consults workplace leaders on how to manage increasingly younger teams. “They don’t want to work for people who treat them the way that we were treated when we grew up.” That sometimes translates into a desire to cut through hierarchy, dress codes and the chain of command.
As a generation struck by a crisis that upended norms and made burnout a kitchen-table term, they are known for normalizing mental-health care. Gen Z has openly made mental health a touchpoint in their lives: 37% of Gen Zers report having received therapy from a mental-health professional compared with 22% of baby boomers, 26% of Gen Xers (who followed boomers) and 35% of millennials (who preceded Gen Z). And male and female Gen Zers are equally likely to report having received treatment.
Nick Jain, Nadya Okamoto and Erin Burk at August’s office. Casual clothing, and even casual cursing, are part of the culture. PHOTO: JUTHARAT PINYODOONYACHET FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Sneakers and cursing
Erin Burk, vice president of business development at August who describes herself as a 30s millennial, says some of the startup’s eight employees include therapy appointments on their shared work calendar. That’s in large part due to the tone set by the 20-something co-founders, she says, and it feels different from her more button-down past workplaces. Work and personal lives move fluidly from one to the other: It isn’t unusual for August employees to dash in and out of the office in sneakers and workout clothes and curse freely and openly.“The idea of your authentic self and your professional self as two separate things is three or four generations off,” she says.
When she joined the company two years ago, she recalls being struck by the liberal use of the heart emoji in reaction to Slack messages. “I do remember thinking, ‘That’s very emotional, is that appropriate for work?’ ” she says. “And then, I was just like, ‘You know what, you can still bust your ass all day and be emotionally available. What’s the harm in that?’ ”
That feeling is a hallmark of Gen Z, which exhibits high emotional intelligence and is unafraid of introspection, researchers say. According to a report published last year by Deloitte, Gen Z workers consider “empathy” the second most important trait in a boss; their managers, on the other hand, rank it a distant fifth. (The No. 1 value for Gen Z: patience.)
In search of emotional wisdom
Taylor Fulton-Girgis, a 25-year old marketing manager for Othership, a chain of bathhouses based out of Toronto, says managing a team of eight people, including videographers and graphic designers, prompted her to attend an “emotional wisdom retreat” recently to learn more about her strengths and weaknesses as a manager. A facilitator asked her to respond to questions such as: “How am I showing up?” and “Am I taking responsibility for my decisions and actions?”She has learned that managing different individuals means understanding their unique work styles and ways of communicating—and to try to meet them where they are, she says, rather than making them follow her own standard.
Taylor Fulton-Girgis of Othership says executives have to learn individuals’ work styles. PHOTO: OTHERSHIP
“You have to make time for individuals and learn different personalities,” Fulton-Girgis says. “Some people might prefer Zoom over phone, someone might want a hands-off approach and someone else might prefer hands-on.”
That kind of introspection caused 29-year-old Connor Trombley, a senior vice president at speaker training and development company ImpactEleven, to rethink his management style when several team members weren’t making deadlines on a six-week timeline for postproduction videos, which became frustrating.
In discussing the situation with his own boss, Trombley realized that the friction wasn’t rooted in their lack of ability. “I realized that the expectations you set for yourself cannot be the same expectations that you set for your team,” he says.
He retooled the production cycle to give the employees a little more time, while also providing the clients a raw edit earlier in the process, so they had an idea for what the finished video might look like without feeling like it was taking too long.
By listening to and working with his employees, he says, “in the end, it ended up being a better client experience.”
He has also learned to give his employees the space they need to do the best work they can. “I now try to think about the human I’m talking to,” he says.
Connor Trombley and Sharon Fenton of ImpactEleven. He learned to adjust his management style. PHOTO: PAUL MOBLEY
One of his direct reports is Sharon Fenton, a 33-year-old creative-services manager, who says when she started the job eight months ago, she came in every day, but has more recently asked to come in twice a week, which she appreciates since she has a 2-year-old son who she likes to spend time with during the day. Trombley agreed, and used the opportunity to discuss communication style, whether she wanted to have weekly check-ins and how much detail coming out of meetings she felt she needed to have.
She says she told him she appreciates details. “I told him the more feedback I get, the better job I’ll do,” she says. “I’ve just never had a manager like that.”
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