In early 2000, we were pitching with an FMCG major setting up its shared services centre in Bengaluru. The designated site head asked us about the best practice to be adopted while hiring to prevent activism or employees’ strike. There was silence in the room. None of us had an answer. I think the unionism context is even more complex today, with Gen Z in the workplace! In the wake of the recent Jantar Mantar demonstrations led by Gen Z, it is imperative for enterprises to identify a set of behaviours that can be deemed as a protest.The unrest withinThe 1953 Marlon Brando starrer The Wild One was synonymous with youthful rebellion. Two famous lines in the movie were: “What are you rebelling against?” and “Whaddya got?”Most organisations have the biggest churn at the entry level. Would you call Gen Z quitting companies as a quiet way of showing a ‘thumbs down’ to unfair company leaders or the enterprise itself? In fact, I remember my own act of rebellion with one of my employers when I was 22. Once, when one of our colleagues sobbingly told us that she was fired, three of us who shared the same manager confronted him, asking why he was letting her go. He said the separation conversation was a private one between the manager and the reportee, and we had no business to intrude. A week later, our HR warned us that any such lateral conversation with our colleagues could be deemed a breach of policy. I never attempted any such activism after that.But then, times have changed, and so have the forums for employee dissatisfaction. Glassdoor, Ambition Box, Google reviews, Blind, and Reddit have become the new platforms for employees to voice their dissent against errant managers or employers.Let’s get loudIt’s not just digital. Gen Z or not, employees are raising their dissent in different ways, of late. In 2018, The New York Times reported that 20,000 of Google’s global employees and contractors walked out for 30 minutes to protest against the massive exit packages given to executives accused of sexual misconduct. In 2024, Reuters reported that Google had terminated 28 employees after they participated in protests against the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government. But how do you react when colleagues gang up in your face? One of HCL’s internal event videos that went viral recently showed employees chanting “We want a hike” as soon as their CEO appeared on stage. It may have been in jest, but the point was well made in public.Imagine in your next town hall, a large set of your employees sloganeering to have one of your managers removed for firing their most popular colleague or demanding work from home? Do you think things can come to that with Gen Z employees?Fast-forwardI turned to LinkedIn to see which sectors have the largest Gen Z cohort. No surprises there... it’s the tech sector, which has hired one million freshers in the last five years. Today, Gen Z constitutes one-fifth of the Indian tech sector workforce. In other major sectors the share is in single digits. Meanwhile, data shows that the Gen Z segment has an attrition of about 24 per cent within the IT sector, where the average attrition is only about 12 per cent? However, this churn may be attributed to the nature of the industry, rather than Gen Z, especially when global capability centres are adding one lakh-plus new jobs each year.Gen Z hackHow about the entrepreneurial side of Gen Z? Should we take some learnings from the unicorns founded by Gen Z? In the last two years, of the 338 new unicorns in the world, 33 were founded by Gen Z, including Zepto in India. When Gen Z leads, will it be able to empathise better with the needs of people from the same generation?Meanwhile, what percentage of your organisation is Gen Z, and are your policies or practices aligned with them? If the energy, popularity, and effectiveness demonstrated on the streets over the last few weeks are an indicator, then it may be prudent to have Gen Z participate in crucial organisational decision-making to prevent effort recession or episodes like the great resignation. I think enterprises and HR clearly know what Gen Z want. The struggle is to meaningfully frame them in policies and practices, and align them with the organisation’s context.(Kamal Karanth is the co-founder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing company)Published on August 3, 2026