There is a small standoff happening on video calls, and both sides walk away sure the other one was rude. A manager asks everyone to turn their cameras on. A younger colleague leaves the camera off. The manager reads it as hiding; the colleague reads the request as surveillance. Neither of them is wrong about how it feels, which is the surest sign it was never really about the camera.
The camera is just the flashpoint in a larger renegotiation, and American companies have decided to formalize their side of it. In a 2023 survey of 1,000 business leaders, the job-search firm ResumeBuilder found that 45 percent of companies already ran office etiquette training and another 18 percent planned to add it by 2024, which is where the "more than 6 in 10 companies" line in the coverage comes from. The reflex is to file all of this under Gen Z cannot behave. The numbers do not support the reflex. Of the companies running the training, 60 percent said it would be required for every employee, boomers included, and only about 1 in 10 singled out Gen Z and new graduates. The most requested lesson was not deportment. It was making polite conversation (78 percent), then dressing professionally and writing a professional email.
Where the generational story gets its ammunition is the interview data. In a separate ResumeBuilder survey of hiring managers, 13 percent said a Gen Z candidate had refused to turn the camera on in a virtual interview, 57 percent flagged trouble with eye contact, and a memorable 9 percent said a candidate brought a parent along. It is easy to laugh at, and easier to moralize about.
But the young workers the surveys scold are the ones who actually show up. A global study by the property firm JLL found that workers under 24 come into the office about three days a week, more than the average worker. So the real picture is not a lazy generation ducking the norms. It is the cohort showing up more than the average worker being told it has the worst manners.
I keep coming back to one test. A rule of conduct is a manner only if a newcomer can actually follow it. If you have to already belong in order to know it, it is not a manner, it is a password. Cameras-on gets sold as basic professionalism, but as a workplace default it arrived in 2020, and it asks for something specific: show me your room, your roommate, your face doing nothing for an hour. Someone whose whole video life ran on FaceTime and group calls, where the camera flicks on and off as you please and nobody minds, is not being rude by leaving it off. They are following a different rule that is just as coherent, and nobody ever agreed on whose rule wins.
That is what the training keeps missing. Etiquette is a technology for lowering the cost of being a stranger, and it only works when both sides read the same signal. A 55-year-old who feels ignored by a black rectangle and a 24-year-old who feels watched by a green light are each making a fair claim about respect. The honest fix is not a class that teaches one of them to submit. It is naming the rule out loud: cameras on for client calls, off for internal ones, so no one has to guess or gets graded on a code they were never shown.
So here is the one thing worth doing, whichever side of the lens you sit on. Stop treating your own habit as the neutral default and the other person's as a lapse. Ask for the behavior you want, and say why, once, plainly. That works on the manager as surely as the new hire. Be legible, be kind, and leave people a way in.
