Full steam ahead?

Gen­er­a­tion Z – dig­i­tal, per­ma­nent­ly on­line and glob­al­ly net­worked. An of­ten-used de­scrip­tion, but not very mean­ing­ful. Who are Gen­er­a­tion Z and what do they ex­pect from their em­ploy­ers?

Re­searchers have turned their at­ten­tion to Gen­er­a­tion Z. While var­i­ous stud­ies have been pub­lished on our use of so­cial me­dia and at­ti­tude to­wards brand im­ages, a qual­i­ta­tive per­spec­tive re­mains large­ly lack­ing. Of course we use Snapchat and In­sta­gram more than our old­er col­leagues, but this says very lit­tle about what I feel makes an ide­al em­ploy­er. And this is ex­act­ly what em­ploy­ers need to know: what do we ex­pect from our em­ploy­ers, how do we like to work and what are the im­pli­ca­tions for the em­ploy­ment world?

In­ner val­ues are key

When I speak to my younger col­leagues, it soon be­comes clear that the tra­di­tion­al ca­reer lad­der has run its course. Be it cook­ery ap­pren­tice­ships, IT stud­ies or bank­ing in­tern­ships: if the pro­fes­sion for which they have trained no longer ap­peals, they sim­ply change it. Thanks to the open ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem, any­thing is pos­si­ble, even af­ter com­plet­ing their ini­tial train­ing, as Gen­er­a­tion Z is on­ly too aware. No mat­ter how good the em­ploy­er – if they don’t like the job, they won’t do it any­more.

This is re­flect­ed in their ex­pec­ta­tions of their pre­ferred form of work. Whether work­ing from home or in an of­fice, as a free­lancer or per­ma­nent em­ploy­ee – all this is of sec­ondary im­por­tance, pro­vid­ed the work con­tent is right. They do ap­pre­ci­ate a cer­tain de­gree of flex­i­bil­i­ty, how­ev­er.

Will­ing to de­liv­er out­stand­ing per­for­mance

But this is al­so where em­ploy­ers have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to dis­tin­guish them­selves. If you trust Gen­er­a­tion Z and give us the chance to per­son­al­ly ex­cel, we’re ex­treme­ly will­ing to go the ex­tra mile. Even if we do take this op­por­tu­ni­ty, how­ev­er, it’s still on­ly a ques­tion of time un­til we leave the com­pa­ny. It shouldn’t on­ly be em­ploy­ees who are loy­al to their em­ploy­ers, but al­so the oth­er way around.

In my opin­ion, Gen­er­a­tion Z rep­re­sents young peo­ple en­ter­ing the em­ploy­ment mar­ket, who are mo­ti­vat­ed, open and flex­i­ble, but al­so head­strong in terms of work. If you want to ex­ploit our full po­ten­tial, you need to recog­nise and ac­cept this. When start­ing work, our em­ploy­er, and even our job, are in­ter­change­able – this is what em­ploy­ers need to change, there­by en­abling them to in­spire young peo­ple to stay with a com­pa­ny, even in the long-term, and trans­late their mo­ti­va­tion in­to ac­tion.