Reports are rising lately noting the anxiety many Gen Zers are feeling just as many of them are completing their educations and preparing to enter the workforce. In particular, studies are showing that far too many Gen Zers struggle with the communications skills they need to engage in meaningful, face-to-face conversations with other human beings.
My experience as a college professor is that young adults today need guided practice engaging in face-to-face conversations—plain old talking.
As Maryellen MacDonald, professor emeritus of psychology and language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World, wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed, this is a “desirable difficulty” worth recognizing and addressing because “the cognitive benefits of talking exceed those of listening.”
That may seem contra intuitive, given that we’ve all been taught from early on to listen first before speaking. But for Gen Zers, the reading/scrolling/listening vs. talking dynamic has shifted dangerously far away from building the real-world, interpersonal communications skills so critical to robust social engagement and professional success.
Looking at the disconnect up close
I teach mostly college seniors at Auburn University’s Harbert College of Business, where I frame my four-month sales and marketing classes as a dress rehearsal for their first four months on the job, when they’ll meet dozens of new colleagues, partners, customers and clients.
On paper, my students now produce impeccable reports and slide decks. But work doesn’t live on paper; it lives in moments of unscripted interaction where simply knowing what to say is vastly different from knowing how to relate.
When the conversation veers off the page, as it inevitable does in the real world, they struggle to engage. So, what can we do to get them talking?
A relatively simple change I’ve introduced to the physical layout and opening minutes of my classroom instruction over the past few years has produced outsized results. I scrapped fixed seating and created five minutes of phone-free conversation to start every classroom session.
The rules are simple. First, no seating chart. Students are required to switch seats every class so they meet someone new.
Second, phones are put away for the first five minutes while I set up; their only job is ungraded, unstructured conversation. The point is not eloquence; it’s staying in the conversation.
Within three weeks, the room feels less like rows of individuals and more like a network. Students discover who has interviews or job offers, and they start helping one another—making introductions, sharing intel, even holding mock interviews to firm up responses to potential interview questions.
A hurdle becomes a habit for Gen Zers
If we want more talking, we should engineer it. A small nudge at the start of class turns silence into sustained practice, and sustained practice into the kind of human connection that will help students long after graduation.
It’s not rocket science, but it would be just as effective in an astrophysics course. The activity is not bound by course content or class size. It is scalable, requires no additional materials, and students respond with or without participation points.
A day or two of stilted conversations quickly gives way to effective rapport-building—and they don’t even realize it until I tell them. When talking to new people becomes habit rather than a hurdle, the room loosens, the trust builds and students engage more readily across the board.
The throughline is relationship literacy, and it’s learnable, coachable and accessible—five minutes at a time.
