How To Motivate and Retain Gen Z Employees?

By 2030, more than 30% of the global working population will be Gen Z. So, employers need to focus on how to cultivate a working environment that interests this generation. Gen Z craves a collaborative and team-friendly work environment. This tech-savvy generation expects transparency, lower stress levels, and they see failure as an opportunity. On top of that, 38% of Gen Z prefers work-life balance over a high salary. 

Millennials are not interested in anything but entertainment. They don’t know how to work hard. They want a lot of money at once and don’t want to take responsibility for their work. This generation has no executive authority and no default instinct for obedience. HR directors at banks and large corporations are sounding the alarm: a generation of millennials, people born in the age of the Internet, social networks and the heyday of the commodity economy, is entering the market.

Large corporations with an established culture and traditions are forced to become more flexible, to implement digital systems and game methods. The market needs people who are unshackled by past experience, inventors, free and bright personalities. The management system is undergoing changes, and executives are beginning to act as brand ambassadors, setting a personal example of a modern leader for young employees. You can talk as much as you want about the abolition of the dress code and buns in the office, but if the head of the business is a conservative, you cannot fool millennials with a pretty picture.

Work-Quest

Of course, millennials love to have fun and are superior to previous generations, who often worked because they had to, not because they wanted to. These are completely different platforms for achieving engagement. However, if a person does what they love, they relate to it in a completely different way, they put in more of themselves. Millennials have become the first generation to strive to take their place in the career chain based solely on their desires. And it is this factor that allows young people to achieve success much earlier than their predecessors.

The following statement that the new-format youth do not know how to work hard is an excellent complement to the first thesis. Millennials are used to having fun until they can’t get a pulse out of it, which means that work must be turned into entertainment. There are many companies that allow a lot of perks and fun at work. IT companies turned the office into an amusement park: cafes with interests, cinemas, fitness centers, skating rinks and swimming pools, playgrounds for game tournaments, and master classes during working hours. They try new motivation systems with non-material prizes, and organize weekend trips to Europe for the whole department. 

Employees can convert achievements into various bonuses: from an extra day off to a massage chair. For the new generation it is important to work not with managers, but with leaders. The task of the modern manager is to make work an interesting quest, where a person has opportunities for development, a transparent system of bonuses for completed tasks and understanding of his personal role in the overall business system. This is the art of feedback, which modern leaders need to know perfectly.

There are already a lot of professions in which only young people compete: email marketers, target marketers, SMM managers, programmers of narrow specialties, data scientists and analysts. Isn’t that a reason to ask for more money for your work? Millennials have vastly outperform previous generations of office workers in terms of communications, email marketing, digital and SMM, and new programming opportunities. Naturally, people have the right to ask for high salaries at the start, because there is simply no other competitive environment.

The last statement refers to the lack of a sense of responsibility among millennials. I gave my word, I took it, I changed my mind, I didn’t get out, I left – all kinds of reasons. This suggests that businesses need to change the system of hiring employees, move away from gentlemen’s agreements and guarantees of employment after sending an offer. A person needs to be in touch, show their interest, and start getting into new business.

Camp for the employee.

Overseas companies and banks, mindful of millennials’ love of fun, have already started sending employees to summer camps. These are offsite jobs for the summer. Such a practice could resonate well, since the harsh climate puts a strain on productivity. In this case, the employee can even partially compensate the company himself, or work on his own personal equipment. If the company is watching out for data security, it is always possible to pay for a coworking camp. However, such summer camps work only with a very strict management system inside. Rocketbank, for example, organized a “Rocketcamp ” in Krasnaya Polyana in Sochi for its employees. The company covered the cost of the co-working, but offered to pay for half of the hotel accommodation and the flight themselves. And according to feedback from the camp participants, because of the close proximity of the hotel and the co-working room, discipline has become even better – no one is late for the office.

Youth Abroad.

If previous trips abroad, and even more so training were the prerogative of top management, now more and more HR-directors rely on training of young employees of lower corporate levels. In today’s companies, this is available to anyone who has shown results and is really willing to participate in their own development, including financially. If a person takes the initiative and independently learns something useful for the business, the employer will always appreciate it and support it with an investment in training abroad.

Living at work.

Equally important to millennials is the structure of the office itself. Today, developers initially design offices to live in: with showers, entertainment areas, furnished sleeping spaces, and recreational areas. Millennials don’t have the kind of attachment to places that previous generations had, they can spend a lot of time where they feel comfortable and comfortable. Accordingly, if such an environment is created in the office, a person will spend maximum time at work. At the same time, traditions of non-work time in the office are often formed spontaneously. For example, it can be tennis tournaments, as in Modulbank, or computer game competitions, sports programs, and film clubs.

A motive to work.

Remote work no longer surprises anyone, yet few have learned how to make a truly effective management system. Millennials like no one else have a hard time staying personally motivated, so there is bound to be a pump-up of emotions, personal relationships in a corporation. Large companies today are moving to flexible working hours, with employee hours tracker as a backbone to ensure efficiency during the workday. Such a system gives a sense of freedom – you are not tied to a certain place, you can come in later, you can leave earlier. But all the same, young employees need an office environment, a team where they can spend time, socialize and, of course, work. Remote work can’t provide that. In addition, there are many other ways to boost the morale of remote employees. 

Equally important for millennials is social responsibility of business, sensible consumption, and environmental friendliness. Corporate philanthropy today is no longer a way to build some external image, but a tool for creating deep interpersonal emotional relationships. People have to help not only financially, but also with their personal time and emotions. Often in such trips you can learn a lot of new talents and abilities of employees, as well as increase the interest of the team to each other. Ffo

Your Business

What else motivates today’s employees? There are no bans on running your own projects. For example, Philip Morris employees, when they perform a certain task, not only become the head of the relevant division, but also receive company options or a percentage of the product. In the U.S., 6.5% of all entrepreneurs started their business as a division of an existing company in which they worked.

The relationship between employer and employee must be formalized, but this does not prohibit office workers from having an additional source of income and self-employment. For example, we often hire people who are individual entrepreneurs. Having a sole proprietorship can be partly related to what a person does at work, or it can be part of a hobby at all: baking, coffee shop, making souvenirs and costume jewelry. But a person who has the courage to take responsibility for his own business, employees, obligations to clients, partners, suppliers, contractors, a priori cannot be a bad manager. Such employees initially have an entrepreneurial mindset, and they translate their business approach into the solution of corporate problems.

Mistakes of HR-directors

Very often HR directors do not want to take back employees who once decided to leave the company. And this is a huge mistake with millennials. A generation of young professionals is focused on high-speed personal growth, they never tire of self-improvement and building professional skills. Such employees are not easy to bring back, but if you are lucky enough to reconnect with a talented manager, don’t be afraid to hire them. This is especially common in the HoReCa segment. Top chain restaurants are constantly rotating employees because different approaches, hard work and burnout require a change of environment, manager and tasks. At some point in his life, the person decided to leave the company, gained a different life experience, and came back with a whole new outlook, fresh ideas, and high brand loyalty. Businesses should already be implementing CRM databases on company talent, not lose contacts and conduct mailings to a loyal base of employees, including former employees. Often these are the kind of people who bring new, stellar candidates into the business.

The next complaint of HR directors regarding millennials is that they spend a lot of time on building interpersonal relationships in the team. Resentments, understatements, and some inflated expectations are frequent reasons for layoffs among millennials. To solve this problem, you can use a classic tool used by marketers – the NPS Loyalty Index (employee job satisfaction). Once a quarter, an anonymous survey of employees is conducted about the team, management, business objectives and general atmosphere. Then the average loyalty score of each employee and department is derived, and these answers are parsed at strategic sessions. If one manager’s score is below the critical level, the issue of replacing the leader arises.

Fortunately, HR managers can also do a lot to improve employees morale. Keeping an eye on the atmosphere in the office team is really important, and the manager should be directly responsible for it. For example, one bank has implemented a system of holacracy in its management. It implies regular elections of the main representatives of certain work groups. And this representative is not the boss, but a voluntarily chosen candidate, to whom the team gives power and the right of veto. In other words, an employee’s salary does not grow from the new title, but it increases the efficiency of the whole team and smoothes out any difficult or conflicting situations.

Despite the rather large number of complex psychological nuances, the millennial generation nevertheless has great potential. To draw an analogy with children, the most talented of them are almost never comfortable. And it remains to be seen who is changing who more, the corporations of millennials or the corporations of millennials.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash