I am an Xer who manages a small but crucial team at my workplace (in an EU country). I had a lady resign last week, and I have another who may be about to resign or I may have to let go due to low engagement. They are both Gen Z. Today it hit me: the five years I’ve been managing this department, the only people I’ve lost have been from Gen Z. Clearly I do not know how to manage Gen Z so that they are happy working here. What can I do? I want them to be as happy as my Millennial team members. One detail that might matter is that my team is spread over three European cities.
Happy to provide any clarification if anyone wants it.
I often feel like my supervisors don’t respect my input or my time. I work in IT, our business is solving problems efficiently. Yet when I pitch ways to improve our methods, or when I call out dumb decisions, I get ignored.
On multiple occasions in the past couple years, my immediate supervisor has made bad calls that would lead to unnecessary work for me and my team. I point this out to him, and I am ignored. Last summer, we wasted a couple days fixing computers after an unnecessary BIOS update kept them from loading Windows. We also spent a whole day installing a firmware update on a new shipment of monitors, this update was to fix compatibility with the Mac Studio - we don’t use the Mac Studio at my work.
Since you’re Gen Z, it sounds like you may also be relatively new in your career, and this strikes me as a timeless problem of experience.
Young people come in with a fresh set of eyes and say “why don’t we just do X?” Then more experienced people know all the unfortunate reasons why it’s not that easy. Like in your example, it’s arguably a better policy to just run every patch that gets released, even if it’s not applicable. The alternative is to spend some amount of man hours evaluating whether each patch is needed or not; and occasionally dealing with the consequences of somebody mis-identifying a critical patch and deciding not to install it. The cost from that is greater than the cost of occasionally having to clean up a bad patch that breaks something.
I do agree that Gen Z seems to feel a greater sense of unfairness when they (as less experienced employees) get stuck doing more of the grunt work in a situation like that. I’ve had several issues with Gen Zers at my company feeling like they’re supposed to be working on bigger and better things than the entry level tasks we’re giving them, and becoming disgruntled about it.
Not really sure what to do to manage around that part of the problem though. With millennials in that position, I had reasonable success by giving them a bigger project, then reviewing it thoroughly and helping them see the areas they needed to improve in. The Gen Z’s I’ve tried that tactic with have then felt like they were being “picked on” any time they got critical feedback. I haven’t had it happen enough to know if that’s a generational thing or just those specific people though.