The not-so-wild youth

Au­tonomous and pur­pose­ful, yet mo­ti­vat­ed to work hard: the needs of Gen­er­a­tion Y have al­ready been recog­nised. Firms must now adapt. But what do the next gen­er­a­tion re­al­ly want from their em­ploy­ers?

Project-based work, short­er hours, free­lance as­sign­ments and ide­al­ly ta­ble foot­ball in recre­ation­al ar­eas: is this the pre­ferred world of fu­ture young tal­ent? In­creas­ing amounts of project-based work and in­creas­ing­ly short­er work­ing hours are now a re­al­i­ty, even though this may not be due to em­ploy­ees’ re­quire­ments, but to changes on the part of the com­pa­nies.

While Gen­er­a­tion Y’s de­mands on firms have in­creased, val­ues are in­creas­ing­ly the fo­cus, with pur­pose over prof­it the buzz­word.  But clichés such as ‘the con­stant de­sire for per­son­al ful­fil­ment’ or ‘a lack of mo­ti­va­tion’ have al­so be­come firm­ly es­tab­lished when we think of Mil­len­ni­als in the work­place.

Soon to be the ma­jor­i­ty

Gen­er­a­tion Y now ac­counts for a quar­ter of the cor­po­rate work­force, and this is ex­pect­ed to rise to three quar­ters in ten years’ time. Ac­cord­ing to a study by Uni­ver­sum, the ‘lack of mo­ti­va­tion’ cliché is sim­ply not true; Mil­len­ni­als are ex­treme­ly will­ing to work hard and put in over­time if they can climb the ca­reer lad­der. Fi­nan­cial in­cen­tives are sec­ondary, how­ev­er — in fact, they pre­fer per­son­al de­vel­op­ment. The lat­ter is es­pe­cial­ly no­tice­able among Swiss Mil­len­ni­als, as is the high lev­el of part-time work and flex­i­ble work­ing con­di­tions.

Com­pa­nies must get a move on

Due to the ever-in­creas­ing num­ber of Mil­len­ni­als, com­pa­nies no longer have time to adapt, es­pe­cial­ly as re­gards their man­age­ment style: Gen­er­a­tion Z wants to act au­tonomous­ly and make a valu­able con­tri­bu­tion to an organisation’s suc­cess.

What does the next gen­er­a­tion want?

Hav­ing on­ly just come to un­der­stand the needs of Gen­er­a­tion Y, we find Gen­er­a­tion Z wait­ing in the wings. The mem­bers of this gen­er­a­tion were born be­tween 1995 and 2000. At Brand­soul, our Trainee Manuel rep­re­sents the in­ter­ests of the new gen­er­a­tion and iden­ti­fies how the next gen­er­a­tion are prepar­ing for work and what re­quire­ments and ex­pec­ta­tions they have of fu­ture em­ploy­ers. Learn more about this via this chan­nel in two weeks’ time.