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’m a millennial but have insight. Think about the 90s. Didn’t even have MapQuest yet. No cell phones.
Okay, now you’re at work, and your sister miscarries her pregnancy. When do you discover this? 6pm? 8pm? Later that week?
Gen Z finds out between customers. Or emails.
In the idle time you used to spend daydreaming about your girlfriend or lackthereof, gen Z is learning about wildfires that will reduce their air quality. They’re googling rent worldwide to figure out if it’s time to seriously consider moving somewhere cheaper and colder.
What am I getting at?
We as a society get ever more connected. We are therefore ever less present from our 9-5. There is so much going on that is relevant to us, and an 8 hour chunk of my day is really asking too much to sacrifice.
If your employees are at a computer, let tell them outright it’s totally okay to watch Netflix or YouTube, or reddit, or lemmy, whatever as long as the work is getting done on time.
If your employees are serving customers, let them take frequent 10 minute breaks to use their phone or be away from humans.
Let them know you understand they have WAY more going on in their lives than your job which barely pays bills. Then, act that way.
But also, gen Z knows that no one gives raises like new bosses. So, don’t expect them to stick around long.
Okay, now you’re at work, and your sister miscarries her pregnancy. When do you discover this? 6pm? 8pm? Later that week?
Gen Z finds out between customers. Or emails.
When do millennials find out?
A week late from someone you haven’t talked to in years even after talking to your sister twice since then.
Same time but we had a transition period, smaller time frame depending where they slot in that generation. Gen Z has had since/before they entered the workforce.
Explaining the transition of technology to my boy sometimes reminds me of when I was a kid and heard adults talking about a full room computer.
Back in my day, phones were connected to the house! And all they did was make calls!
I agree with most of this, but this bit
If your employees are serving customers, let them take frequent 10 minute breaks to use their phone or be away from humans.
Is comically absurd.
GenZ are not the first people to have things they’d rather be doing than work, or to be tired due to human interaction. The latter is called emotional labour and has been a thing across all service industries for literally a hundred plus years.
I’m not saying that people don’t need breaks, everyone does, especially in jobs which are physically/mentally tiring, but to say people need frequent breaks solely to check their phone is derisible.
Fine: People need frequent breaks to do whatever the fuck they want
This is an amazing rundown of the significant differences, and more importantly, similarities between these 2 generation, I think you did a really good job of explaining it clearly, and I found it very illuminating, thank you.
Isn’t it insane how managers (and professors for that matter) tend to act like you’re not a person with a whole life and personality outside your job
TLDR they won’t stick around no matter what you do op
If your employees are at a computer, let tell them outright it’s totally okay to watch Netflix or YouTube, or reddit, or lemmy, whatever as long as the work is getting done on time.
… seriously? I cannot imagine ever watching YouTube or even Netflix on the job
Actually my two most senior people are permanent WFH and I’m quite sure they do this (and I do not care at al).
The ones in our offices, yeah that would not go over well with their colleagues, you are right.
I think I’m suited to answer this. I manage multiple people, including Gen Z. I am also Gen Z. People are actively trying to work here.
One of the biggest factors is employee appreciation and respect. A lot of companies will half-ass that front through just giving their employees an occasional pizza party. The problem with that style of management, is that it removes the human aspect. It kind of just turns it into another thing to just “check off the list” for corporate. It’s something commonly thrown back at employees who complain. We’ve seen that happen enough to not want to deal with it.
It’s also important to focus on the little things. Small details are what make up the big picture. If you leave those out, the big picture will be incomplete. Congratulate them when they reach a new goal. Tell them when they do work that would make the company proud, within reason. Encourage them, and actually work alongside them sometimes. If you want to throw free food on top, maybe poll your staff for their opinions on restaurants/food trucks. Show them you care.
Regarding the human aspect, a happy employee stays, and a happy employee is also usually a productive employee. Get to know your staff a bit, casually. Try to give reasonable allowances for time off during stressful life situations, like when their home floods or their sibling dies. Most companies will only allow the legal minimum.
Don’t expect more from them than what you are willing to do yourself.
Accept their imperfections and work with them towards improvement. Instead of shouting, go straight towards the solution, and include them in the process. Allow them to learn how to avoid the mistake and learn how to fix it with you. Don’t baby step it, but maybe show them a cool trick for that process if you have one. Remember that they are human and that there was also a time where you didn’t know how to do it.
I’ll be frank with you. Many of us don’t see a great future over the horizon, so we’re kind of making the best with what we have. We want to enjoy as much of the time in-between as we can. We’ve seen our grandparents, parents, siblings, and other family members become burnt out and emotionally overwhelmed, and we don’t want that for ourselves.
The best way to not have that, is to not go along with it. So, hypothetically, I would go to the next job that treats it’s employees well, even if the wage is the same. Why would I waste my efforts and hard labor on someone who doesn’t value it? Why not spend it somewhere where I can learn, improve, and thrive?
These apply to all employees, not just GenZ. Its just basic respect. GenZ may just be the ones who dont accept unhappiness just for the sake of having a job.
I don’t disagree with you in the slightest.
In my mind, no one really asked to exist. On that basis, we should all be treated equally and fairly. You can’t pick your birth year, home country, etc. In my opinion, it would be wong to judge someone on those aspects, or to treat them differently. In ny workplace, we’re all just people trying to get by.
Those all apply to any employee though regardless of generations. Gen z gonna look for another job after 2 years. Expect it.
I don’t disagree with that. For some reason, a lot of places think that Gen Z will put up with it like their parents and grandparents did. They treat them like crud, then they’re shocked when they leave.
Of course Gen Z might change jobs within 2 years. Most people don’t have their entire life plan figured out in their 20’s, which I think is fair. It’s even more understandable with the craziness of everything going on around the world.
One thing to keep in mind is that they’re young and have fewer responsibilities than Millennials and Xers and can afford to float between jobs. I’m not saying all GenZers, but there are ones that still get some form of assistance from their parents and thereby have a safety net. As they age and start families, they may be less inclined to do so.
Also, maybe they’re not being paid enough to want to stay and feel they can leverage the experience at your workplace to get a better paying position elsewhere.
Just my thoughts, I’m no expert.
GenZ is pretty aware of the doom and gloom of the world right now, being the most online generation yet. Even without meme culture of being sucked into vapid echo chambers of any political spectrum; they know the world is headed for decline, in their lifetime.
They want to be able to live comfortably while they can, and if there is too much work/stress and not enough pay, they’ll shop around. Considering what their living costs usually are to maintain a good job, they’re willing to shop around to find decent comfort. They don’t want to spend their best years stuck working barely making ends meet only to watch it all burn around them by the time they find something that allows them to prosper.
I would ask her directly, say that you want to know why you lose gen z workers.
Just remember that they’re still early in their careers, changing jobs is about the only way to get a raise these days.
Some people here are posting with rather wishful thinking. I think the most cost-effective actionable advice I can give is that Zoomers don’t buy into the whole “we’re a family here” thing. They understand that their success and their company’s success are not necessarily correlated. You can act on this by expressing an interest in your team’s improvements on the basis of the personal goals they’ve achieved rather than with corporate metrics.
This implies that millennials haven’t come to the same realization. Company loyalty more or less ended with millennials, I think. Though helping employees reach their personal goals is a great suggestion in general. Their personal improvement aligns with company improvement anyway.
Yeah, millennials and Gen Z are very similar in their thinking on corporate culture
Except gen z are more marketable so gen x tends to stay (not out of loyalty)
way to give 0 context, what do you want us to say?? Gen Z means fuck all it’s such a wide umbrella term.
how about you give some actual examples of behavior and maybe the pay scale and you’ll get some actual answers
No need to phrase it so hrashly but youre basically right. This post is pure ageism
Exit interviews can be a goldmine. Some people who don’t want to burn bridges might hold back and tell you what they think you want to hear but others will tell you exactly what they think.
As a more “typical” zoomer I’d say that we’re a bit skeptical of exit interviews compared to other generations as a result of the whole “not buying into corporations being a family” thing & not appreciating a checkbox approach to employee wellbeing… I know personally if I was leaving a job where (not even because) I felt like any feedback I gave fell into a void and any I received was on rare occasions and only from my direct manager then I’d consider it a bit of a waste of my time to say why I’m leaving, so just try to get through the interview faster
Not a very big sample size, did you perform an exit interview? Why not just ask their thoughts on the way out?
Many won’t answer honestly and just make up a polite excuse. Still worth a try.
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Gen Z software engineer here. From what I can tell my generation doesn’t care that much about company loyalty and all of that jazz. That’s true for me as well. Companies have a soulless aspect to them. I can’t put my soul into that. If another place is willing to throw more money at me, I will take it. Sure, if my workplace is extra nice I will think twice about it, but most of the time it isn’t.
Then there’s the lack of investment in the younger folks on the part of the company. No mentorship programs, a lack of workshops, etc. Our input isn’t taken into account and is often overlooked. That’s not the right way to show young people that you care about them or their future. In turn they won’t care about you or your company’s future.
Also the fact that people tend to bring their politics to work is a big problem for me. This is especially true with the boomers in the company. They love to stroke their right-wing, often bigoted political opinions in front of us at work. Mostly in the form of complaining about whatever they saw today on Instagram or Facebook. Now this isn’t inherently a problem that can be brought up with HR, mostly because they do it in a subtle and veiled enough manner that there’s not much you can do about it. But I’d say that personal politics is another big factor for me. It makes me not care that much about the workplace/company as a whole.
Milenial here. I was taught to not care about company loyalty by my father, a boomer.
Same here. My mother worked all her life at one place until she retired. She told me it’s not a good idea and to only care about myself, not the company.
How long have they been at your company? A lot of younger people hold zero loyalty to their employer (for better or worse), and combining that with the guidance fo change jobs every two years for maximized income, you’re more likely to see increased turnover regardless of job satisfaction.
I have exactly as much loyalty to my employer as they have to me.
And that’s exactly how it should be. If a company is extremely good to you, be good back. If they’re shitty, you owe them nothing.
Hard agree.
A lot of younger people hold zero loyalty to their employer
Why be loyal to a company? I’ll bet you anything the company won’t show any loyalty when they decide to save money by laying people off.
I’ve learned this lesson way back in the 90s.
None of them were there long, but none of them moved to higher paying jobs either.
Out of curiosity, how do you know this?
Combination of LinkedIn and local contacts. The two cities where the team works are rather tight communities, and you either do what we do or you do banking or FX.
Edit: I forgot one left to become a personal trainer, so that one kind of doesn’t count I suppose.
Not to say that it’s not good to self-reflect and improve, and not to say that there’s nothing you can improve, but there might be other factors at play.
I don’t have the numbers to hand, but going off of my own experience and my memory, younger people are far more likely to leave a job than older people. You can try to find the stats - I’m sure they vary by country, for instance, but I changed jobs relatively often early in my career. As my career progressed (and changed from industry to industry), I tended to stay longer.
Basically, what you want to do is establish the baseline. Is it a you thing, is it a company thing, an industry thing, or just the natural process? It might be a mix, but until you know what you’re dealing with, it’s going to be hard to fix it.
Is there an exit interview? Or anyway to ask them?
Would be interested to know if there’s something in particular or not. Not sure if you do this, but some leadership places do 360 reviews, where you get staff anonymously give details about. It fucking sucks to get but it can be super helpful.
Loyalty is a two way street and when it comes to jobs the company’s loyalty should come first.
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.
What do you mean by low engagement? Are they not doing their work in their given hours?
I’m a millennial but I imagine it’s the same issue.
Work isn’t something I want to do. It’s something I have to do to for money. If someone offers me more money I’m going to take it.
So first thing to check is are they just leaving for better pay. If so paying them more is basically your only option.
In my industry (software development) the average length at a job for younger people is two years because it’s the only way to get a decent pay rise in many cases.
The idea of loyalty to a company is dying a quick death.
If it’s not that the only to find out is to talk to them. Ask them if they’re willing to do an exit interview and see if there’s anything you can improve on.
Work isn’t something I want to do. It’s something I have to do to for money. If someone offers me more money I’m going to take it.
GenX here. Same for me. I take pride in what I do, but the moment the clock hits 17 the whole company can burn down for all I care.
My baby boy, I’m so glad I get to share what’s worked for me.
My younger peeps seem to thrive on mentorship and coaching. If you don’t already do 1-on-1s (even just meeting every 2 weeks), I recommend starting.
During that time, ask each person what their honest career goals are (even if they involve working elsewhere) and then help them gain the skills they’ll need to achieve those career goals. It’s their responsibility to do the work, but you’re the one helping them stay on track towards the things in their life that matter to them.
I’ve helped folks with all sorts of things from time-management to negotiation to coding to project management.
A tool I’ve found invaluable is the book “FYI: For Your Improvement”. It’s basically a manual for helping improve soft skills. I recommend getting an older version that’s cheaper.
Using this philosophy, I’ve only had folks leave my teams because of pay (which is something I don’t control and am constantly in contention with my company about). I’m still in contact with most who’ve left and one if my former peeps even got me a new job one time.
Yeah, this. I lean heavily into coaching, which is specifically helping them apply skills they already have to a problem.
I also draw clear lines between what I can help with and what I need to do for the company, and try my best to display when I am fighting for them and when I cannot. Building trust is a key part of the relationship, and having suspicion that you are two faced kills it dead.
With this and the other things mentioned, I too have only had peopae quit because of money, and in one instance he came to me to ask if he should do so (we talked it out without me giving any advice, just comparing opportunities)
Note:
just like you council people out when they underperform for your org, council people out when they can no longer grow or advance. Those people will also be unhappy over time, and create drag on your whole org. Make opportunites to grow, to grow elswhere in the company, and finally at other companies
Imagine a team lead calling other businesses for opportunities for you because you’ve hit the glass ceiling at your work.
Does that seem impossible? implausible?
For most, yea. Yes it does. Losing a valued member at a company will cost a company, sure. But when that member goes and works for competitors with that experience to tell, your stock amongst peers shoots up 1000%. Reputation like this is from principle, not principals. It’s an earned investment
If youve experienced anything like this, you know how memorable that exp is.
There are few things in life as meaningful as an advocate. And I mean that. Maybe one or two things best it. It’s that important to all life as it is experienced. If the word doesn’t mean much to you - and to most it doesn’t - rethink what you know about it. Refamiliarize yourself with that knowledge sphere. Imagine challanging situations you’ve had in the past. Imagine someone there with you advocating for you. Imagine how that changes a situation. How it couldve changed the outcome. How it would’ve changed you.
Now imagine what it’s like to BE the one advocating for someone else. The relaxed kind of pride when they succeed where they didn’t think they could. The emotional warmth you feel from the fire of their happiness or achievement.
That’s the supervisor to be. That’s the coworker to be. That’s the family to be. That’s the person to be.
Any interaction, be it personal, familial, academic or professional, that isn’t foundationally built from ideation of support, I suggest you remove from your life.
But to surround yourself in support means you’ve also got to be supportive. Hence; my take on advocacy.
Ask them what their goals are (even if it includes working somewhere else) and help them reach those goals
Yes, this. Younger millennials and gen z know better than any generation that their success, their boss’s success and the company’s success are three separate things. You’re gonna have to give a shit about their success too, and in a tangible way.
Are you hiring?
Yes but only if you live in Cyprus…
Well, shoot.
I’m actually leaving management to be a sole contributor again :)
Try paying them better. It really is that simple.
Everyone’s giving you long-winded answers, but this is the ultimate truth.
PAY MORE
I did. I fought with my CEO for two months and got everyone in the department except me a massive raise, 15%-20%.
15%-20%.
FYI, it’s entirely possible that they’ve been undervalued so much even that’s not enough.
I would need a 70% raise to be at market average for my position. Needless to say I’m interviewing.
In addition to the wealth of experiences and opinions in this thread, it is worth reminding:
2 is a really small sample size
