For generations, learning how to “speak office” happened almost by accident.
You sat beside someone who had been doing the job for 20 years. You watched how they emailed the boss, when they picked up the phone instead of sending a message, how they addressed a client, and when “Hey” was acceptable versus when it could get you into trouble.
You absorbed the unwritten rules.
Gen Z entered the workforce just as those rules were being dismantled.
Remote work, Slack, Teams, social media, texting, and AI have created a workplace where the line between formal and informal communication is increasingly blurry. The result isn't simply that younger employees say “delulu” while their bosses say “move the needle.”
The bigger problem is that employees of different generations no longer necessarily agree on what professional communication looks like in the first place.
And that can have consequences far beyond an awkward email.
Sunny Workplace, a nonprofit employee-engagement platform, recently commissioned a Censuswide survey of 2,004 U.S. workers, split evenly between Gen Z and baby boomers. Eighty percent of Gen Z respondents said generational differences in workplace language were a challenge, compared with 30% of boomers.
The slang gap is real, if somewhat amusing.
Three-quarters of boomers surveyed didn't know what “delulu” meant. Nearly two-thirds didn't know “rizz,” and 61% didn't know “no cap.”
Gen Z wasn't exactly fluent in corporate-speak either. Only 22% said they knew exactly what it meant to “boil the ocean,” while just 25% said they understood “blue-sky thinking.”
But nobody is losing a promotion because they don't know what “rizz” means.
They might lose credibility because their manager interprets a two-word email as dismissive.
That's where the generational communication problem gets serious.
The email that starts a culture war
Betsy Sneller, an assistant professor of sociolinguistics at Michigan State University, told Fortune that younger workers may not have the same conception of email as older workers.
For many older employees, email is relatively formal, permanent and deliberate. Instant messaging is where you send the quick “Can you take a look?” message.
For workers who grew up with texting and social media, that distinction isn't necessarily intuitive.
A missing greeting or period may simply mean, “I'm being efficient.”
An older colleague may read the exact same message as, “Why are you being rude?”
Neither person necessarily believes they are doing anything unusual.
They're operating under different rules.
Linguists call this a difference in register: the way people change their language according to their audience and social setting.
Renée Blake, an associate professor of linguistics and social and cultural analysis at New York University, describes work as having its own register, just as home does.
The problem is that the workplace register is no longer being transmitted as reliably as it once was.
A young employee isn't necessarily sitting next to a veteran colleague long enough to observe all those tiny behavioral cues.
They may be sitting alone in an apartment, staring at a Zoom window.
As Iain Smith, head of behavioral science at Sunny Workplace, put it: instead of learning the shortcuts and social rules from an experienced colleague, young workers are “turning up to Zoom.”
That's a much bigger story than slang.
Professionalism has become subjective
The danger is what happens when a difference in communication style becomes a judgment about someone's character.
A young employee writes a casual email.
Their manager sees a lack of respect.
A manager sends a three-paragraph message full of corporate jargon.
The employee sees unnecessary bureaucracy.
Both sides walk away convinced the other person is the problem.
This is how a communication mismatch becomes a workplace culture problem.
Smith argues that workers who haven't learned the workplace vernacular can be judged on their professionalism based on how they speak.
That's especially significant for Gen Z, which entered professional life during one of the largest disruptions to workplace norms in decades.
But blaming Gen Z misses half the story.
COVID didn't just change young workers.
It changed everybody.
The pandemic scrambled everyone's social radar
Renée Blake experienced the confusion herself.
After becoming sick, she moved one of her college classes online and assumed she could be more informal with students she had only recently met.
They pushed back.
It was too informal, they told her. She didn't know them well enough.
In other words, the generational stereotype had flipped.
The older professor was trying to be casual.
The younger people wanted more distance.
That matters because it exposes the weakness of the usual “Gen Z vs. boomers” narrative.
Communication norms aren't simply handed down from one generation to another anymore. They're being renegotiated in real time.
And AI has now entered that negotiation.
Young workers increasingly use AI to figure out how to write a professional email, phrase a request to their manager, or make a message sound more formal.
That's useful.
It's also revealing.
If an employee needs an AI assistant to tell them how to sound professional, the technology isn't necessarily solving the underlying problem. It may simply be filling a training gap that workplaces used to fill through observation and mentorship.
And sometimes the AI-generated answer creates another problem: perfectly polished corporate prose that sounds like it was written by nobody in particular.
Professional, perhaps.
Human, not so much.
The generation gap is probably being oversold
There is another reason to be skeptical of the “generational workplace war” narrative.
Research doesn't consistently support the idea that generations have fundamentally different work values.
A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found few systematic, meaningful generational differences across a range of workplace outcomes.
Smith, himself a millennial, points out that his generation was once subjected to many of the same predictions now being made about Gen Z.
The generation that was supposedly going to transform the workplace eventually became the generation complaining about the next one.
That's the cycle.
The more useful explanation is less dramatic: technology changes communication faster than institutions change their expectations.
Gen Z didn't invent informal communication.
They simply entered adulthood in an environment where informal communication was already becoming the default.
Older generations didn't invent corporate jargon.
They inherited it, institutionalized it, and eventually forgot how strange it sounds to everyone else.
Now the two systems are colliding.
And Gen Z is about to get its own taste of the problem
The irony is that this won't remain a Gen Z problem for long.
Sunny's survey also tested Gen Z on Gen Alpha slang.
Forty-one percent didn't know what “Ohio” meant in its slang context, while 75% didn't fully understand—or said they wouldn't use—“skibidi.”
So the translators are already becoming the people who need translating.
That's the real lesson here.
Every generation eventually develops its own language. What has changed is the speed at which those languages emerge and the fact that workers from different generations can now spend an entire workday communicating without ever sharing the same physical space.
The answer isn't for Gen Z to learn every corporate cliché or for older workers to start saying “no cap” in meetings.
It's for workplaces to stop treating professional communication as something employees are simply supposed to know.
Tell people what the norms are.
Explain when something belongs in email versus chat.
Show employees what good communication looks like.
Give feedback before a misunderstanding becomes a performance review.
And, perhaps most importantly, stop confusing unfamiliarity with incompetence.
The workplace doesn't have a Gen Z language crisis.
It has a shared-context crisis.
The old system taught people how to speak office by putting them in the office.
The new system took away much of that informal learning and assumed everyone would somehow figure out the rules anyway.
They haven't.
And no amount of “rizz” translation is going to fix that.