Breakout Business English - Improve your vocabulary and confidence using English at work.
Aug 16, 2026 · 31 min · 13 segments
Send us Fan Mail Managing Gen Z is the challenge that we're discussing today so if you're a manager of a young team and you want some tips on how to…
And that is to make transparency a priority.
Constant exposure to social media, filtered lives, unrealistic expectations.
That's certainly something I started to experience as a millennial growing up.
That environment did something important.
It made them very sensitive to anything fake.
When they enter a workplace that hides salaries and keeps profit and loss under wraps and expects people to act a certain way, they notice.
And more than that, they start from a position of distrust.
One of their co-founders has said that opening up the company's books, the company's accounting, and letting every employee see the financial data, the company's numbers, the customer numbers, and how marketing actually works was one of the most important cultural decisions they ever made.
It informed people and changed how they felt about their role.
That's the power of transparency.
It turns employees into genuine decision makers.
When people can see the full picture, they stop feeling like a small replaceable part of a machine.
We might use the idiom, a cog in a machine.
And they start feeling like contributors who actually matter.
And transparency can be as simple as a manager admitting a mistake or being upfront about difficult feedback instead of trying to sugarcoat it.
So the idea here is that for Gen Z, building trust starts with being honest and being transparent.
Okay, let's look at the phrase under wraps, which you heard a moment ago.
I gave you this sentence.
When they enter a workplace that keeps salaries under wraps, they notice.
When they enter a workplace that keeps salaries under wraps, they notice.
When something is under wraps, it's being kept secret.
Nobody outside a small group knows about it yet.
And that is to make transparency a priority.
Constant exposure to social media, filtered lives, unrealistic expectations.
That's certainly something I started to experience as a millennial growing up.
That environment did something important.
It made them very sensitive to anything fake.
When they enter a workplace that hides salaries and keeps profit and loss under wraps and expects people to act a certain way, they notice.
And more than that, they start from a position of distrust.
One of their co-founders has said that opening up the company's books, the company's accounting, and letting every employee see the financial data, the company's numbers, the customer numbers, and how marketing actually works was one of the most important cultural decisions they ever made.
It informed people and changed how they felt about their role.
That's the power of transparency.
It turns employees into genuine decision makers.
When people can see the full picture, they stop feeling like a small replaceable part of a machine.
We might use the idiom, a cog in a machine.
And they start feeling like contributors who actually matter.
And transparency can be as simple as a manager admitting a mistake or being upfront about difficult feedback instead of trying to sugarcoat it.
So the idea here is that for Gen Z, building trust starts with being honest and being transparent.
Okay, let's look at the phrase under wraps, which you heard a moment ago.
I gave you this sentence.
When they enter a workplace that keeps salaries under wraps, they notice.
When they enter a workplace that keeps salaries under wraps, they notice.
When something is under wraps, it's being kept secret.
Nobody outside a small group knows about it yet.
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