The Generation That Won't Answer the Phone: Age Gaps at Work in Australia and the Netherlands

🇦🇺 Australia · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Both countries are living through the same demographic handover — Gen Z overtaking Baby Boomers in the full-time workforce — but they're managing the transition with strikingly different levels of friction. In the Netherlands, Deloitte's research finds 64 percent of working people say collaborating across generations has more upsides than downsides, and the once-common assumption that younger workers must "prove themselves" first turns out, per the same research, to be largely a myth. In Australia, a 2024 workforce survey found 41.5 percent of Gen Z employees are actively job-hunting — the highest of any generation — a restlessness that reads less like a generational personality trait and more like a verdict on what the workplace they inherited actually offers them.

Do's & Don'ts

🇦🇺 Australia

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Australia's generational gap runs noticeably hotter than the Netherlands', and the data points to specific, addressable causes rather than vague "kids these days" friction. Randstad Australia's research on Gen Z and millennial expectations finds younger workers prioritizing authenticity, inclusivity, and purpose in ways that don't map cleanly onto how many existing Australian workplaces are structured or communicated. The result shows up in hard numbers: the highest job-mobility rate of any generational cohort, and a persistent gap between what older leadership assumes matters (salary, security) and what younger employees say actually drives their decisions (culture, leadership quality, development opportunities). This isn't unique to Australia globally, but the intensity — 41.5 percent actively job-seeking — suggests the gap between generational expectations and current workplace design is wider here than in comparable economies.

The Netherlands' generational relationships look, by contrast, notably cooler and more collaborative. Deloitte's Dutch-specific research and academic work on Dutch Gen Z values converge on a similar picture: high shared emphasis on purpose across generations (95 percent of Gen Z, 93 percent of millennials citing it as important to satisfaction), and — critically — a widely held finding that the commonly assumed "prove yourself first" dynamic between older and younger workers doesn't actually hold up under Dutch workplace data. Sixty-four percent of Dutch workers report multigenerational collaboration as more advantage than disadvantage. One nuance worth flagging: Dutch Gen Z research also finds younger workers here place unusually high value on interpersonal contact compared to Gen Z cohorts studied in Germany and China — a data point that cuts against the stereotype of a screen-native generation uninterested in connecting with colleagues.

The Reckoning

The counterintuitive finding is that Australia — a culture that markets itself heavily on egalitarian, laid-back workplace relationships — actually shows sharper generational friction than the more formally hierarchical-seeming Netherlands. The explanation likely runs through Hofstede's low Dutch power-distance score (38): flat, consensus-driven Dutch workplace structures already give younger employees a real voice in decisions, which may be defusing the exact tension — feeling unheard, undervalued, dismissed — that's driving Australian Gen Z attrition. Australia's more individualist, achievement-coded workplace culture (masculinity score 61 per Hofstede, notably higher than the Netherlands' 14) may inadvertently sharpen generational competition rather than easing it.

The job-mobility gap is the practical takeaway for anyone managing across these two countries. An Australian manager assuming Dutch-level generational stability is likely to be caught off guard by turnover; a Dutch manager transplanted into an Australian team should expect measurably more active job-searching among younger staff than they're used to, regardless of how the relationship actually feels day to day.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone describing what it's like as a millennial working with Baby Boomers said the friction was rarely about ability or effort, it was almost always about differing assumptions of what a "normal" career path or company loyalty should look like, assumptions neither side realized the other didn't share.

Quora — A response on how different generations perceive workplace norms argued that most conflict framed as generational is actually about communication style and unstated expectations, and that naming those expectations explicitly resolves more tension than any formal generational-diversity training tends to.

Hacker News — A discussion thread responding to research on generational workplace frustration pushed back on the idea that only younger workers are dissatisfied, with several commenters noting Gen X and Boomer employees report comparable levels of frustration with modern employer demands, just for different underlying reasons.

Quora — A comparison of Gen Z and Millennial workforce attitudes noted that Gen Z's reputation for job-hopping obscures a more specific pattern: they leave fast when a role clearly isn't matching what was promised at hiring, but stay long-term once genuine trust and development investment are established.

Conclusion

If you're managing or joining an Australian team, take the generational friction seriously as a structural signal, not a personality clash — the data suggests specific, fixable gaps around purpose, flexibility, and communication rather than an unbridgeable values divide. If you're managing or joining a Dutch team, you can lean on genuinely lower generational friction as a real asset, but don't assume it's automatic — it's substantially the product of a flatter, more consultative workplace structure that has to be actively maintained. My honest line for a friend over drinks: in the Netherlands, the generations mostly get along because the structure gives everyone a seat at the table already. In Australia, you'll have to build that seat yourself — and if you don't, Gen Z will simply find a company that already has one.