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I've been hearing from so many people about our episode on Gen Z in the workplace.

I'm calling in response to the Gen Z episode that I just listened to this morning. I wanted to respond to the episode about the Gen Z workers. Yeah, this was in response to the conversation you had with Gen Z-er.

The responses are really different depending on whether you were currently in the workplace, like say this listener.

But I find that right before a given deadline, I have seen a lot of absenteeism happen from Gen Xers. I don't really want to put my name out there, But it's one of the things that I really wish you would have asked.

But those who have been out of the game for a minute, they actually like what they're seeing.

I'm bored with Gen Z. I think what they're trying to do is change things for the Just because my generation had to go through all of this and just put our head down to work, doesn't mean that that's right. I applaud them for bucking the system and trying to change things.

Can I get your reaction to the Gen Z one? You know what?

I think that that's a product of its time. The piece that stood out to me was, Sometimes I just need a mental health day. I was listening to your piece saying, Oh, my gosh, you cannot imagine telling my boss, Hey, I need a mental health day.

But there are lots of things that at one time seemed unimaginable in the workplace.

Telling people to cover tattoos, that was something that was absolutely solid voice, late '90s, early 2000s. Then all of a sudden, tattoos became a whole lot more mainstream. That's a shift that we've seen for sure.

So consider this episode, A Coda. What does it mean to be professional in the post-pandemic, post-work-from-home, post-casual Friday workplace? Why are some of you stealing each other's food from the company fridge? Why have some of How to just stopped saying hello when you see each other? We hear from a business etiquette pro who's getting plenty of calls from companies saying, Help. I'm Audi Cornish, and this is the assignment. Okay, so just start by introducing yourself, who you are, what you do.

Sure. My name is Kate Sabrisky. I run a company called Business Training Works. For the last 23 years, we've been helping people with soft skills training. So that can mean anything from business etiquette, customer service to management leadership.

Walk me through how it works with you. I've got a company. Everyone was home. Now, they're half Home, Coming in, and I call you up, and I'm like, I'm not loving how people are coming to work or not coming to work. People are starting to complain. What's your conversation with me like? What do you ask about?

What are you seeing that you don't want to see? What are you not seeing that you do want to see? And so that's typically where we start. And then we try to figure out, is it a training issue or is it a management issue?

So you've just done four questions. So Let's see how you answer. You answer them for me. What are the things people ask when they say, what is it that, something that we don't want to see that we're seeing? What are the kinds of things they bring up?

People not answering their phones and being responsive during the day when they're working from home. That's something that may be viewed as unprofessional. People cooking dinner while they're supposed to be in a meeting, and it's three o'clock in the afternoon. People not being on camera, and I'd like to have them on camera. If it's people who are working from home. If it's in the office, what you might be seeing that you didn't want to see, loud people in big open office environments, very basic things, stinky food. Person comes in with really smelly food and eats it sitting right next to me. Person having very loud conversation next to me that I don't want to hear. And it's not a one-off, it's an ongoing thing. So some real fundamentals would be things that we're seeing that we don't want to see, things that I'd like to see that I'm not seeing. Sometimes it can be something as simple as I come in here and people don't even say good morning to me. I'm not even acknowledged. I mean, a real fundamental, which makes sense that that's potentially absent, because if you've been working at home for three years, who are you saying good morning to other than your family and yourself?

So some of that stuff that would have been very normal five years ago and just part of it were out of practice.

Plus, there It was the whole distancing idea for many parts of the country. And so you came back to work, and there might be one person wearing a mask, but not everyone. But do you want a handshake? Do you do that weird elbow thing? There was a weird period where we couldn't figure out how we should even greet each other.

Yeah, and touching. Yeah, absolutely. There may be some holdover from that still about how much handshaking and touching do I really want to do. We did go through some of Thank you for bringing that up. I put that on a pause in my mind, but we definitely encountered some of that. Then do we wear masks? That would be pieces of that, too. We're here in a group. Do we make everybody do this? Do we make it optional? What's It's a polite thing to do. Every office had a different answer.

You also mentioned whether or not it's something that actually needs training, which strikes me as a little strange. What are the kinds of calls you get? What are they What are you trying to elicit when you ask that question?

Is this a management problem or is this truly a training issue? If it's a training issue, usually it's a skill that's missing or a piece of knowledge that's missing. If it's a management issue, I know I'm not supposed to be stealing my coworkers food out of the refrigerator, but I did it anyway. Is bringing somebody in from the outside to tell you, Don't do this, is that really the right approach, or do we need to say to people, This is not okay. This is unacceptable.

But does that mean you have to be like, You're just a bad manager. This is really a conversation you just need to have. It'll take 10 minutes, or are you like, Fine, pay me to do whatever? How do you think about it?

Both. We will tell them, I can save you some money. It sounds like this is a management thing. We can come in and help you learn how to have those conversations. Sometimes we will say, This is a management thing, not a training thing. The person pauses and says, Mm When do you think you could get down here? Because I want somebody from the outside having this conversation because I'm just not comfortable. I said, Fine. You can pay us and we will come and do it. The one nice thing on a serious note about having us come do it is we go away. You can bring us in, we'll do it, we leave, and then you can reinforce the message that we gave. For sometimes, for whatever reason, people don't want to be having that message.

You'll get So the pandemic created just this huge moment of upheaval in work culture across the board, white-collar work culture, also blue-collar work culture, right? All of a sudden, who's an essential worker? Who's not, who's coming in, all the little battles that were happening there. What did you see during that time that were considered the big challenges as everybody went through this big shift at once?

Yeah. Anytime there's a shift, I think people are learning a new environment. So when people went home, we were getting a lot of requests. How do I run a virtual meeting? What do I put on the camera? What do I not put on the camera? Do I even need to use a camera? What do I wear when I'm in front of my colleagues? Do I need to wear anything in particular? Is it okay for me to show up in my sweatsuit, in my tracksuit? We were getting a lot of that type of work and people just learning the mechanics of how do I work from home and how do I interact with my colleagues. So that's a big piece of our work right now is, okay, let's bring everybody together. Let's talk about what we think professional means and what does it mean to us here. Because if you go into any office and you randomly a whole 20 people and you say, I want you to define for me what does professionalism mean? You will get 20 different answers in terms of what's appropriate and what isn't. And so a big part of what we try to do is to have that conversation to get people on the same page and to work through some examples so everybody understands the expectations of the organization.

I understand that in the early days of your work, one of the biggest conversations was just around, do you wear pantyhose or not?

It was pantyhose. It's a very funny thing because we would go in and we would tell people, a professional dress in a business, not business casual, but just a business dress. For women, that is going to mean pantyhose. Then almost like a switch flipped, and they went away. Not that you can't wear them anymore, but very few people wear them or they're worn at not the same rate as they were worn 25 years ago.

But it gets to the point of social more is changing, and then it can happen rapidly.

Oh, it absolutely can happen rapidly. You get a new trend that comes in, and all of a sudden, people are doing something very different. Than what they were doing previously. I can give you a few more examples, telling people to cover tattoos, that was something that was absolutely solid voice, the late '90s, early 2000s. And then all of a sudden, tattoos became a whole lot more mainstream. So that's a shift that we've seen for sure.

When you talk about this evolution, do you think about, is it societal changes that drive it, or what are the other factors that can change things?

Technology. Technology is a huge driver. If we think about, let's dial it back a little bit farther back than 25 years ago. But if you think about jobs when you had a job and all you had is a typewriter and a telephone and you didn't have a computer. If you didn't have a computer, then you weren't sending an email. Maybe you would send a fax that you typed out and sent it. But if you think about even the way that you address the person on the other end, it would be dear Mr. Smith or dear Ms. Smith or dear Mrs. Smith, because weren't writing the person nine times during the day. It was a much more thoughtful piece of writing, or at least a slower piece of writing, and you'd pop it in an envelope and off it would go. Well, all of a sudden, when we're writing each other several times in a day- Several times in an hour. In an hour? Sure. But it would start to feel really weird if you were getting, Dear John, dear John, dear John. So we go to, Hi, John. And then it's possible. I always suggest trying to put the person's name somewhere in your message.

But it would be strange if you kept getting, Dear John, dear John, and you just heard from the person four minutes earlier. So that's a shift and something that is different than what we were doing pre-computer.

So So it's interesting, when the pandemic comes along, it's a number of these factors you mentioned all at once, which is big technology change, meaning all of a sudden everyone's like, this video conference better work, right? It wasn't before video conferencing to me, it was like, I know someone somewhere does it, but never in my business. All of a sudden, everybody's doing it. And then the other thing you have is this big shift in etiquette because we are all like, we're going to be home, but how long? So what's cool to do? What's not cool to do? What calls were you getting from companies during the pandemic?

I think establishing what's the norm. And people with little kids at home, this is a really good example. I think everybody was very tolerant early on. You had little kids at home. They had no daycare to go to. You're still trying to work. So if a little kid showed up in the middle of your meeting, not the end of the world. Three years later, if your dogs are going crazy and it's just this constant state of chaos, I think there's less tolerance for that these days. We were getting calls with, Okay, how do we survive? Initially, and now the calls look like, Okay, what's the norm? And again, what's professional? Let's get you in here to have a conversation to make sure that we can all agree. And the thing that we try really hard not to do is, I'm not the auditor of taste. I'm not going to come in and tell you, you must do this and you must do that. That's not really the way that we're wired. It's really, let's get everybody on the same page and let's talk about what does our brand of professionalism mean.

With workplaces becoming more diverse and diversity issues, issues coming to the forefront, we've talked about that a lot on our show. How do these etiquette teachings play into that? Because it occurs me that there are some things about what I traditionally understood as etiquette that also felt like a cultural policing, right? Or this is how it's done. But if you prod a little more, it's like, Well, this is how you do it. That doesn't mean it's the most important thing in the world. I feel like a new generation started to pick that apart a little more. So how do you think about those traditional ideas and how they dovetail with the cultural moment we're in, where we're more aware of cultural differences?

If we were going to give you the quote, unquote fork course. What are we going to be following? We're going to be following essentially what's going to amount to a European model, where there are lots of places all over the world where people have managed to eat just fine with no fork whatsoever. I would really challenge anybody who's an expert with a knife and a fork to go to one of those cultures and pull it off with their hands with the same amount of agility that the people in people in those places can do. Our approach typically is, this is a way. Tell me about other ways that you know of to accomplish X, Y, Z, or how many people grew up someplace else, or when you grew up, was this like this for you? Or did you grow up with a different set of rules, norms? If we don't want to get that specific it could say, or was it different when you grew up?

Does that bring you into territory that's uncomfortable or that you're like, this wasn't what I signed up for?

I suppose it could. But for me, I was... Well, that's interesting to know. Thank you for educating me that it is different. Because again, I don't think that my role is to come in and tell you this is the way to do this thing. There are lots of ways to accomplish something. It's really about just making sure that whatever we're doing is respectful of other people's backgrounds, because I think that that's a key piece of this. Because how can you go in and talk about etiquette, professionalism and manners, and then make people feel bad? I think you blew it. If that's what you managed to accomplish was to say, Oh, your experience was truly less than. I think just being open to other ways of doing things is truly important, and you get some nice conversations.

I'm talking to Kate Sabrisky. She's a business etiquette consultant. Back in a moment.

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Tia is on a mission. Why? Because 54% of black Americans don't have enough savings to retire. So in collaboration with big name artists like Wyclef Jean, TIAA released Paper Right, new music inspiring a new financial future. With 100% of streaming sales going to a non nonprofit that teaches students how to invest. Stream paper right now and help close the gap. It's The Assignment. I'm Adi Cornish, and I'm talking with business etiquette consultant, Kate risky. Over time, what have you learned about your own personality that makes you effective at this?

I'd like to think that if you want to be good at this, you need to be curious and to understand that you may not have every answer under the sun, and that if you approach it as, What am I going to learn today when I go to this organization and tell me a little bit about your story so I can understand you as a person and a little bit about what you're about. So I think that that helps. And again, to not go in there and to put your way of doing things onto somebody who may have had a very different life experience. We'll give you the quote a book answer if you ask us what the book answer is. But we really want to help people be as successful as they possibly can be and find their own brand or way of doing it that's going to help them get ahead.

It must be interesting because you also have a son, right? Is he in his early 20s?

I have two. So one is 17. One is 20, one is 17. Yes.

So, yeah, they're going to enter a workforce that It's nothing like the one you did.

Looks completely different. I think that there is this generational component that does come out. I think Gen Z gets such a bad rap and said, You know what? They'll complain about them wearing a pink stocking and an orange stocking. Think back. Some of this is just life-based stuff because you're young and that's just where you are in your life. Let's try to be a little bit more tolerant. I know you've heard these these themes before, but complaining about, Oh, these people don't work. They're lazy. They're this, they're that. Or they say about people who've been around for a while, Oh, they're not interested in change. I really encourage people to do some less of that and to really welcome Gen Z. If they don't know something, they don't know something. I'll give you a quick example of something that my son didn't know how to do as well as I would have thought that he would have, and it was making a phone call. I said, Well, you need to call and you need to get your transcript from X, Y, Z. And he goes, What do I say? What do I say on the phone?

I said, What do you mean, what do you say? I'm not understanding what you're asking me. He says, I don't know what to say when I make the phone call. And I said, Well, Why don't you know what to say? He goes, Because I don't make that many phone calls, mom, that are professional phone calls. I mostly text my friends. He's even texting. He's not sending an email. So rather than jumping down his throat and saying, Who raised you? That That was me. It's, Oh, wow. Okay. You don't know how to do this thing. Let's talk about what that's going to look like, and let's practice it before you get on the telephone. I think that that's a really good personal example of something that somebody might not know how to do at work. And your immediate impulse is to say, What is wrong with you? Why don't you know this? And instead, why don't you think about, well, gosh, why doesn't he know this? Oh, that's right. Because his whole way of operating is so different. I mean, anybody my age, by the time you were 12 years old, you could practically run an operating system.

You knew the phone, left, right, sideways.

Yeah, you're doing your call waiting. You were switching back and forth. You were on the phone for a billion hours. You were cold calling your crushes, houses, and going through their parents to get to them.

You had skills.

Skills. Soft skills.

So by the time you show up at work, you've got this totally wrapped. And then you get this generation that comes 30 whatever years later, and they don't know how to do this thing that you look at as such a fundamental. But why would they know how to do that? And they're like, well, you know what? Let's time travel. I bet there are things that I know how to do now that you have no idea if I were to go back to when you were my age. So that's one of the joyful parts of some of this, of people just sharing those experiences. If you do this work, sometimes it can even become, I don't want to call it quite a team building exercise, but it can be an eye opener when people say, What was expected when you came up with work? Sometimes I'll just put people in order of, When did you enter the workforce? Feel free to lie if you want to lie. You don't want to reveal your age. But tell us what normal used to look like. You're doing a lot of facilitation to pull those things out of the people who are in the room, because, again, the goal is to walk out of there with a shared understanding of how do we, as a group, want to operate.

That's most of the time the goal.

Kate Zabrisky is the owner of Business Training Works, a company that specializes in business etiquette and management leadership training. That's it for this episode of The Assignment. Of course, we always want to know what's on your mind, what you thought of the show, what other assignments you might want us to take on. Please give us a call. We love hearing from you. As you heard in this episode, we might use your voicemail on the show. The number is 202-854-8802. Call, text, leave us a voicemail memo, however you feel comfortable. And yes, I listen to them. The Assignment is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Lauryn Galloretta. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez, and our engineer is Michael Hammond. Dan Dizula is our Technical Director. Steve Ligtai is the Executive Producer of CNN Audio. We also got support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasari, Robert Mather's, John Dianora, Lenny Steinhart, James Andress, Nicole Pessereau and Lisa Namarau. Special thanks, as always, to Katie Hinman. I'm Audi Cornish. Thank you for listening.

When you work, you work next level. When you play, you play next level. When it's time to sleep, Sleep Number smart beds are designed to embrace your uniqueness, providing you with high-quality sleep every night. Sleep Next Level. Jd Power ranks Sleep Number number one in customer satisfaction with mattresses purchased in-store. And now, during Sleep Number's President's Day sale, saved 50% on the Sleep Number limited edition smart bed plus special financing for a limited time. For JD Power 2023 award information, visit JDPower. Com/awards, only at sleepnumberstores or sleepnumber. Com. See store for details.