The Gen Zers have arrived.
As the fastest-growing component of the nation’s labor pool, people in their early twenties are having a major impact on business operations everywhere.
“Gen Zers are the new workforce, whether management from previous generations likes it or not,” says Zachary Ginder, executive director at Pine Siskin Consulting.
To effectively deal with Gen Zers, employers must retool their work environments to meet the needs of a generation that sees the world in a radically new way.
“It’s necessary to have people on your business team who can communicate with Gen Zers in their language and with their way of thinking,” says Michael Gibbs, CEO of Go Cloud Careers.
The most visible change is a growing level of racial and ethnic diversity – a transformation also apparent in the nation’s customer pool. Gen Z is the first American generation where multicultural groups make up more than half the population, according to Natalie Griffith, director of product and content at Collage Group.
“Brands must understand the massive demographic shift toward multicultural America that Gen Zers represent,” Griffith says. “While it may be obvious that focusing on this cohort will attract Gen Z dollars now, it also future proofs a business as the nation’s shift toward diversity is here to stay.”
The more diverse workforce also demands employers take a stand on more significant social issues. Collage Group found that Gen Zers are likely to support brands that offer support to women, Black people and people with disabilities. Wise employers will create a sense of larger purpose for business activities and then emphasize how employee actions contribute to that initiative.
“Management needs to regularly reinforce how each individual’s work fits into the greater good of the organization,” Ginder says. “How do the business operations have a positive social impact? That speaks to purpose, to inclusion and to social justice.”
Meeting the challenge
While understanding the younger generation can be difficult in any era, Gen Zers represent a particularly tough challenge. One common error is to expect favorable results from communication styles that worked well in the past.
“I have to say that I speak with a lot of managers who are scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to connect effectively with post-millennial folks,” Ginder says. “We’re talking about a totally different group of people who grew up with different influences and cultural values and norms.”
A good starting point, Ginder adds, is to understand the anxiety felt by people in their twenties, due largely to their experiences with the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In their early impressionable years, Gen Zers saw their parents get laid off, get upside down in their mortgages and maybe even lose their homes,” Ginder says.
It’s little wonder that Gen Zers are more cautious than previous generations and view with skepticism the promises of prospective employers.
“Driven by anxiety, Gen Z mostly seeks a stable 9-to-5 job that pays the bills,” Griffith says. “This point was recently corroborated by survey data from Handshake, an employment site for Generation Z, which asked 1,800 new graduates what they wanted most from their future employers. The overwhelming majority – 85 percent – answered ‘stability.’
“Pay and benefits also ranked high, but both of them, in my estimation, are proxies for the same thing,” Griffith adds. “The desire for ‘a fast-growing company,’ on the other hand, garnered only 29 percent of the vote.”
It makes sense, then, for prospective employers to accentuate the longevity of their firms and the dedication to career support that can go hand in hand with long-term employment. This is even more the case due to the unsettling tendency of the generation to job-hop.
“Gen Zers are likely to switch jobs faster than previous generations who would typically stick things out a lot longer before deciding to move on,” Ginder says. “This has a lot of financial implications since the cost of turnover can exceed 20 percent of a position’s annual costs.”
At first blush, a tendency to job-hop may contradict a desire for stability. But the fact is that an aggressive series of career moves can provide more security than blind faith in the loyalty of a single organization.
Additionally, many G-Zers have “gigs” on the side, and management has to be comfortable with that.
“Gen Zers don’t just look at the current job, but at the next job and the job after that,” says Bob Verchota, senior consultant at RPVerchota & Associates. “And they don’t think anything about working in a gig environment. They’re fine with that. They may have six gigs going at once.”