From Hygiene To Manners: Does Gen Z Need Etiquette Coaches At Workplace?

A few months ago, a company in San Francisco made headlines for hiring workplace etiquette coaches to train Gen Z employees on basics like hygiene, email sign-offs, punctuality, and office behaviour. At a cursory glance, it sounds awkward and absurd. Do professionals need to be taught how to behave? However, the reality is something one cannot ignore.

Gen-Z work culture

Gen Z entered the workforce through a very different door. Many began their careers during the pandemic, learning professionalism through screens, Slack messages, and informal digital spaces. For them, casual communication, flexible schedules, and hierarchies felt normal.

Traditional offices, however, still operate under unwritten rules, such as how you dress, how you email seniors, when you speak, and even how you physically present yourself in a shared space. But due to this meeting of two different worlds, the current need to train Gen Z has become unopposed.

So many of my friends are now not hiring gen z NOT because they aren’t smart or good at their jobs (they are) but because they’re rude, difficult to work with, and don’t know how to behave with other colleagues. Honestly hard to defend a lot of the stuff lol.

— Harnidh Kaur (@harnidhish) December 3, 2024

Is This Really a Gen Z Problem?

Putting the blame entirely on Gen Z is an easy shortcut. Every new generation has been labelled “unprofessional” when it first steps into the workplace.

What’s different today is that the nature of work has evolved, while many office cultures have stayed stuck in the past. Gen Z looks for clear communication, flexibility, and meaningful work, not unspoken rules backed by silent judgment.

Professionalism and its connotations

The real question isn’t whether Gen Z needs etiquette lessons, but whether workplaces need to redefine professionalism. Respect, accountability, and basic courtesy matter and no generation is exempt from that. 

But professionalism doesn’t have to mean rigid traditions that no longer serve the work. If offices want loyalty and productivity, they need dialogue, not just correction.

Views expressed are the author's own.