Born between 1996 and 2010, Gen Z is just starting the process of graduating and entering the workforce. While we’re well aware of what millennials value in the workplace, a whole new understanding of what Gen Z individuals want, and how they work, is imperative. Early research has shown that this generation appreciates a social, flexible yet professional work culture. If your company doesn’t plan to adjust its culture to prepare for these young professionals, you run the risk of losing out on their creative ideas and fresh insights.
What can your company do to attract new Gen Z employees?
Implement Flexible Working Arrangements
Gen Z most craves the ability to work from anywhere and outside of traditional 9–5 hours. While they value hard work, friends, travel, and fitness are also very important to this group, so they often seek jobs that offer a healthy work-life balance. Gen Z feels that work shouldn’t get in the way of personal activities and don’t want to use their PTO for anything other than vacation, such as appointments.
To make it as easy as possible for your employees to find the work-life balance they want, consider adopting a remote or flexible work arrangement. This allows your workers to choose what hours they work and where they work them from. While this idea seems scary at first, remember that modified variations of this policy are possible. Also, modern technology allows your employees to get just as much work done from home as the office. As long as they have internet access, your workers can even communicate with customers by utilizing Voice over Internet Protocol phone systems. VoIP hosts phone signals through cloud servers, which means that your workers can connect with others through any device with internet access.
Provide Social Opportunities
Many young professionals rank having a social work environment as extremely important and specifically seek companies that provide it. These individuals, therefore, value office activities and social events that provide them with an opportunity to mingle with their coworkers. While this might seem like a way to invite distractions into your business, social environments actually encourage collaboration and communication, which can help your company work more efficiently.
Reports have shown that it’s important to Gen Z to bond with their coworkers. To help give them this social environment they so crave, provide an array of different events for coworkers to mingle. These events should include office-wide activities during work hours, mentoring programs, planning speaker series’ for young professionals, and hosting social and volunteer events. This way, employees with families or other obligations after-hours have many different opportunities to attend and be included.
Gen Z may already be in the building so to speak—especially when you’re looking to hire entry-level positions and/or interns—so the time to educate and prepare for them is now. Make the effort to learn what separates this incoming generation from their older counterparts and cater your company to be a place they want to be!
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