When a customer at a fast-food counter asks for help, and the teenage employee responds with a blank, unblinking stare, it’s easy to write it off as a bad day. When it happens enough to earn its own Wikipedia page, it’s a workforce trend.
The “Gen Z stare” — a deadpan, unresponsive gaze that young workers deliver in place of verbal acknowledgment — went viral in mid-2025, sparking heated debate on TikTok, LinkedIn, and in HR departments nationwide. Months later, a companion trend arrived: the “Gen Z pout,” a vacant selfie expression that the New York Times described as looking “like a koi fish on Ativan” — a pose defined by deliberate detachment and the studied performance of not performing.
Together, they tell a story about the generation now flooding entry-level roles at America’s largest companies — and what they’ve prioritized.
A collision of professional cultures
To understand why the stare registers as such a disruption, it helps to examine the professional norms it collides with. Baby Boomers — who currently occupy a significant share of managerial and executive roles — built their careers inside a workplace culture defined by formality, hierarchy, and personal relationships cultivated face-to-face. According to research compiled by ClarityHR, this generation’s professional etiquette is “deeply rooted in formality, respect for authority, and personal relationships developed over time,” with a strong premium placed on punctuality, structured hours, and in-person interaction. For a Boomer manager, a blank stare in place of a greeting isn’t just awkward — it reads as a fundamental breach of professional contract.
Generation X, now filling many mid-level management roles, brought a more relaxed, autonomous sensibility to the office — but still prized clear, efficient communication and professional etiquette as baseline expectations. Millennials, the generation immediately preceding Gen Z, pushed for flexibility and authenticity in workplace culture, and yet still largely internalized the performance of enthusiasm: they wanted meaningful work, but they showed up for it. As research from the UC Berkeley Executive Education program notes, each generation’s communication norms were “shaped by technological advancements and cultural shifts experienced during their formative years.” That means today’s managers and Gen Z workers are, in many cases, operating from entirely different instinctive playbooks.
Gen Z, by contrast, entered the workforce carrying the specific psychological imprint of a pandemic that interrupted their final years of high school and early college: the precise window when professional socialization typically forms.
What the data shows
Gen Z now makes up nearly 30% of the U.S. workforce, a share that will only grow as Boomers continue retiring. That makes their workplace behaviors less a cultural curiosity and more a structural challenge — one that’s already showing up in corporate earnings calls, HR budgets, and management training curricula.
A 2024 survey by Intelligent.com found that six in 10 companies had avoided hiring a Gen Z candidate due to professionalism concerns. Among the most cited issues: poor communication skills, lack of eye contact, and an inability to engage in basic workplace small talk — behaviors that map almost exactly onto what the Gen Z stare describes in practice.
What that survey obscures, however, is the cost of avoidance. Gallup data shows that disengaged employees (a category in which Gen Z is disproportionately represented) cost companies the equivalent of 18% of their annual salary. And according to Gallup research, Gen Z experienced the steepest drop in workplace engagement of any generation in 2024, falling by 5 percentage points in a single year. The financial math is unforgiving: a generation that makes up nearly a third of your workforce and is actively disengaging doesn’t just drag on individual teams. It compounds across the organization.
The write-off trap
There’s a specific kind of institutional damage that happens when hiring managers and leaders respond to the stare with dismissal rather than diagnosis. When companies screen out or quietly sideline Gen Z candidates and employees en masse over communication style, they’re not solving a problem — they’re deferring a much larger one.
Organizations that fail to engage this generation face a cascade of downstream consequences: inflated hiring expenses, eroded employer branding, and a talent pipeline that fractures before it can develop. With Gen Z projected to constitute 30% of the global workforce by 2030, companies that write them off today are systematically defunding their own future leadership bench. The entry-level workers being dismissed as unprofessional in 2025 are the senior managers and functional leaders of 2035 and 2040. The organizations that invested in bridging the gap will have first claim on them.
There’s also the churn cost. Research from Randstad finds that Gen Z’s average tenure in the first five years of their careers is just 1.1 years — a figure that already represents a dramatic departure from Millennials (1.8 years), Gen X (2.8 years), and Boomers (2.9 years). When leaders respond to early disengagement signals with frustration rather than structured intervention, they accelerate that exit. Deloitte’s 2025 survey found that 59% of Gen Z workers plan to leave their current job within two years if they cannot see alignment on values or growth opportunities. A manager who reads the stare as attitude and moves on has, in many cases, simply started the departure countdown.
On the ground in retail and hospitality
The stare has been most visible — and most costly — in customer-facing industries. Chick-fil-A, which adopted its famous “my pleasure” protocol from The Ritz-Carlton more than two decades ago, has made scripted warmth so central to its brand that the phrase has become a viral cultural touchstone — with TikTok full of skits about employees forgetting to say it. That a two-word customer service phrase can generate millions of views says something about how rare deliberate warmth has become on the service floor.
Walmart has committed nearly $1 billion in skills training through 2026 and has already put more than one million associates through VR simulations of customer service scenarios — an investment that signals how much employers can no longer take baseline service behaviors for granted. Across industries, 40% of HR leaders now cite communication training as their top learning and development priority for 2025, according to Gartner — a number that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
In the office
The stare doesn’t stop at the service counter. A CNBC report from July 2025 featured a CEO warning that the behavior would “backfire” on Gen Z workers — not because managers are unwilling to adapt, but because the stare reads as disengagement during the moments that matter most: performance reviews, client meetings, and cross-functional collaboration.
Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase have both enforced strict return-to-office mandates in part, executives said, to reestablish in-person professional norms that eroded during the pandemic — the same window that researchers at Northeastern University believe disrupted the formative communication development of workers who were in high school or early college during COVID lockdowns.
The image economy
What makes both trends notable isn’t apathy — it’s selective investment. Gen Z workers who blank-stare through a shift briefing often go home and produce sophisticated, high-engagement content for personal brand channels. The pout is the aesthetic expression of that same energy. This generation has spent years mastering self-presentation for digital audiences, often in rebellion against that certain quality of “millennial cringe,” marked by an eager-to-please kind of aspirational ambition, with authenticity and detachment as currency. Now it’s bringing those same values into workplaces still running on a warmth-and-enthusiasm operating system.
Psychology Today argued that desensitization from content-saturated digital upbringings may be the root cause of flattened social affect in professional settings. But the takeaway remains the same: business often requires a different approach.
The CEO calculus
The business case for taking both trends seriously is straightforward. McKinsey’s 2024 workforce report identified communication and interpersonal skills as the top gap in entry-level hiring across industries — outranking technical skills deficits for the first time. Companies that fail to bridge that gap through structured training risk higher turnover, weaker customer satisfaction scores, and slower development of the junior talent they’ll need in senior roles within a decade.
The cost of inaction is not abstract. Disengaged employees perform 20% worse than their engaged counterparts and are six times less creative on a day-to-day basis, according to workforce research compiled by Wiser. Deloitte’s research, meanwhile, shows that 86% of Gen Z workers say a sense of purpose is important to their job satisfaction. The engagement gap is often a leadership gap. Organizations that treat the stare as an HR curiosity rather than a strategic signal are, in effect, choosing to absorb the productivity penalty rather than address its cause.
The pout and the stare aren’t going away. For Fortune 500 CEOs, the question is no longer whether to take them seriously — it’s how quickly they can build the systems to meet this generation where it is, before a competitor does.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
