A senior colleague sends a thumbs-up emoji in response to a detailed project update. To them, it means “got it, all fine.” To the Gen Z team member on the receiving end, it can read as cold, dismissive, or even passive aggressive.
Same emoji. Completely different meaning. Neither person is wrong.
Research confirms what many leaders in pharmaceutical, life sciences and IT teams are already sensing. Older generations tend to use the thumbs-up as a safe, efficient acknowledgement, a quick way to say “message received” without cluttering a thread. Many Gen Z colleagues, however, experience it as impersonal at best and hostile at worst, preferring a heart reaction or a short “thanks” to show they actually engaged with what was said.
That single emoji captures something much bigger. Communication styles in the workplace have never been more varied, the channels have never been more numerous, and most teams have never actually stopped to talk about any of it.
Why the “Gen Z Problem” Is the Wrong Diagnosis
The thumbs-up debate did not begin with Gen Z. Baby Boomers adopted it precisely because it felt like the professional, unambiguous choice. A clean signal. No room for misinterpretation. And for a generation that built its communication habits around formal written correspondence, that logic makes complete sense.
Gen Z grew up in a different environment entirely, one where digital interaction was constant, irony was currency, and brevity without warmth read as indifference. They did not decide the thumbs-up was rude. They absorbed that meaning from the culture around them, just as every generation absorbs its communication norms.
This is where the “Gen Z problem” framing does real damage. It takes a shared misunderstanding and assigns the fault to one side. Meanwhile, the Millennial who thrives on collaborative Slack threads, the Gen X colleague who prefers a phone call, and the Baby Boomer who still reaches for email are all bringing equally distinct preferences to the same conversation.
Communication styles in the workplace have always varied. What’s changed is the number of channels, the speed of interaction, and the sheer visibility of those differences. When everything happens in writing on a shared platform, there’s nowhere to hide the disconnect. For a deeper look at how these generational patterns play out specifically in science and technology teams, this post on generational communication in tech teams explores the dynamics in detail.
What the Thumbs-Up Is Really Telling You
In technical environments, communication breakdown carries real consequences. A misread message on a clinical trial timeline. A blunt Teams response that a senior scientist reads as dismissive. A junior IT analyst who quietly stops raising concerns because their communication style never seems to land.
The thumbs-up debate illustrates three patterns that show up repeatedly in pharma, life sciences and IT teams.
The first is the assumption of shared intent. The person sending the thumbs-up is being efficient and respectful of everyone’s time. The person receiving it is wondering whether something is wrong. Both interpretations are entirely reasonable. Neither person knows the other has a different frame of reference.
The second is platform mismatch. The thumbs-up lands differently depending on context: a reaction from a manager in a formal project channel reads very differently from the same emoji in a quick Slack thread. People have strong, often unconscious preferences about which channel suits which type of conversation, and getting that wrong can signal a lack of care even when none was intended.
The third is feedback style. Many Gen Z colleagues experience silence or minimal responses as a negative signal. More experienced team members may see brevity as professional efficiency and reserve fuller responses for formal review points. Neither approach is wrong. They’re just different, and when teams don’t know they’re different, both sides feel let down. If you’re specifically looking for practical guidance on leading Gen Z colleagues day to day, this guide on communicating and leading Gen Z in the workplace covers the fundamentals.
The Shift That Actually Helps
Understanding communication styles in the workplace means moving beyond generational categories. Generations give us broad tendencies, but they don’t tell us how the individual in front of us actually processes information, prefers to be challenged, or signals that they’re overwhelmed.
This is where tools like Insights Discovery® become genuinely useful in technical teams. Rather than sorting people into generational buckets, Insights Discovery® helps individuals and teams understand their own communication preferences, and those of the people they work with, through a practical framework built around four colour energy types.
A Cool Blue colleague who needs detailed written briefings before a meeting isn’t being awkward. A Fiery Red team member who sends three-word responses isn’t being dismissive. That Fiery Red energy is direct, action-oriented and instinctively efficient. A thumbs-up is probably entirely consistent with how they communicate across the board, not a slight, just a style. A Sunshine Yellow colleague who wants to talk through ideas before they’re fully formed isn’t wasting time. When a team has a shared language for these differences, the conversation changes entirely.
For a full explanation of how the four colour energies work in practice, the Insights Discovery colours guide is the place to start. For a closer look at how the framework transforms communication specifically in technical environments, this post on Insights Discovery and team communication goes further.
The colleague sending the thumbs-up may simply not know that their brevity reads differently to someone with a different communication preference. And the colleague receiving it may not know that, for the sender, it was warm and efficient rather than cold. That is not a generational problem. It’s a shared language problem, and it’s entirely solvable.
Starting the Conversation in Your Team
Most teams never have the conversation about how they communicate. They assume good communication is self-evident, that everyone knows the norms, and that friction is just personality clash. In practice, it’s usually something much simpler and much more fixable.
A few approaches that work well in technical environments.
Name the differences openly. Not as a blame exercise, but as a genuine team discussion. What does a good update look like to different people? Which channel is right for which kind of message? What does a thumbs-up actually mean in this team? These conversations feel almost too basic, but they surface assumptions that have been causing friction for months.
Build communication agreements. Simple, practical ones. Not a lengthy policy document, but a shared understanding of how the team operates. Response time expectations, which platform carries which type of conversation, how feedback works. Teams that have these agreements in place handle communication differences far more effectively than those that don’t.1
Invest in self-awareness before team awareness. Understanding one’s own communication preferences is the foundation for understanding others’. Leaders who know how they come across, and where their own blind spots are, are significantly better placed to bridge the gap with colleagues who communicate differently.2
None of this requires a Gen Z-specific strategy. It requires a human one.
The Generational Label Is a Shortcut That Costs You
Labelling communication friction as a Gen Z issue is understandable. It gives the problem a name and, briefly, a sense of structure. But it also closes down the more useful question: what does this specific person need from a conversation, and am I providing it?
In pharma and life sciences teams where collaboration across experience levels is essential, where the 22-year-old data analyst and the 55-year-old principal scientist need to work together effectively every day, the cost of communication breakdown is too high to settle for generational shorthand.
The thumbs-up is not the problem. The absence of a shared understanding of what it means is.
Frequently Asked Questions About Communication Styles in the Workplace
Building a Team That Actually Understands Each Other
The thumbs-up will keep appearing in team channels. Colleagues will keep communicating in the ways that feel natural to them. None of that is a problem in itself.
The teams that handle it well aren’t the ones with the most elaborate communication policies. They’re the ones that have made space for honest conversations about how individuals actually communicate, built enough shared understanding to interpret a thumbs-up without spiralling into doubt, and invested in the kind of self-awareness that makes those conversations possible.
That kind of team doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built deliberately, by leaders who are curious about the people around them and willing to ask better questions than “why does Gen Z communicate like that?”