Over the past year or so, Silicon Valley has been doing everything it can to get workers back to the office. Now that the industry has people back at their desks, it’s trying to figure out how to make them happy. With the influx of people living in offices, including the growing number of Gen Z representatives, the Valley is trying new things, such as empty offices.
According to the New York Times, the “barefoot” movement has begun, with businesses encouraging employees to leave their kicks at the door. Ben Lang, an employee at AI wearable coding company Cursor, launched a website called Noshoes.fun that tracks options for would-be employees who like to let their toes get some fresh air. The list includes digital workplace maker Notion, payments company Gusto, mobile game developer Supercell, and a number of AI-centric startups such as Replicate and Rime Labs.
Now, whether not wearing one among others really adds a lot of comfort to your workday is probably a matter of personal preference. But the idea behind it, according to the Times, is to allow displaced workers to return to work with the same comforts they had while working from home. Apparently, in part, it’s because the workers in these offices are embarrassing young people, and these companies are trying to figure out what Gen Z really wants.
In some areas, they are slow to regenerate and become more degraded. According to the Wall Street Journal, some startups have started filling the snack bar with Zyn and other nicotine pouches. Palantir—a surveillance technology company owned by Trump—alongside Trump, the war-fighting crime boss Alex Karp—has apparently been at the forefront of this push, perhaps because the blow from the wallets is the only thing that allows its employees to calm down after issuing a new update to improve the efficiency of killer drones.
At this point, the general confusion of American business is about how to accommodate a younger group that often seems to expect more from its employer than the generations before it. Executives have labeled Gen Z things like “clueless,” “authoritative,” and “lazy”—though frankly, all generations seem to go through these slurs as they enter the workforce.
But the cultural divide seems to be as great as ever. According to a CBS News report, some companies are even sending their Gen Z employees to etiquette classes to learn how to behave in mixed environments like the office.
Interpreted as friendly as possible, this practice is an attempt to help Gen Z catch up on some of the lessons they may have missed out on by having a chunk of their social time stolen by the global pandemic. In a nutshell, companies are trying to push a generation of people who expect more work-life balance, better boundaries between their time and effort, and demand more respect from their managers to keep up with an industry that pushes work above all else. Given that, it’s hard to imagine that letting people stand at the water cooler in socks and slippers will win them over.
