Alyson Krueger, Gen Z Knows What It Wants From Employers. And Employers Want Them. NYtimes, July 31, 2022.
In the past year, Legoland New York has joined a growing number of companies that are working to create an environment that is attractive and stimulating to younger employees and that embraces who they are and where they hope to go. By recruiting Generation Z workers — born in the late 1990s and early 2000s — the employers aim both to tap their energy and creativity and offset an acute labor shortage, with some 11 million unfilled jobs in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Last fall, Legoland began to allow employees like Ms. Ross to have piercings, tattoos and colored hair. A national hospitality company has begun to experiment with a four-day workweek. The health care company GoodRx is permitting employees to work not just from home but from anywhere in the country, enlisting an outside company to provide ad hoc offices upon request. Other companies are carefully laying out career paths for their employees, and offering extensive mental health benefits and financial advice.
The goal is not only to get younger employees through the door but also to keep them in their jobs, not an easy feat. Surveys show that younger workers are comfortable switching jobs more frequently than other generations. But, with these efforts, many companies have so far avoided the labor shortages afflicting their competitors.
Attitudes about work are changing:
According to Roberta Katz, an anthropologist at Stanford who studies Generation Z, younger people and previous generations view the workplace fundamentally differently.
“American Gen Zers, for the most part, have only known an internet-connected world,” Dr. Katz wrote in an email. In part because they grew up using collaborative platforms like Wikipedia and GoFundMe, she said, younger employees came to view work “as something that was no longer a 9-to-5-in-the-office-or-schoolroom obligation.”
Andrew Barrett-Weiss, the workplace experience director of GoodRx, which provides discounts for prescriptions, said giving employees that kind of autonomy and flexibility had helped the company close more than one deal. GoodRx offers employees the opportunity not only to be fully remote but also to have a desk wherever they want to travel in the United States.
There's more at the link.
Other posts on the changing work-week:
- Beyond work [freedom and dignity],
- Has the pandemic made Americans less willing to tolerate bullshit jobs?
- Work isn't all it's cracked up to be [more naps!]
- Four hours a day, tops, for maximum creativity
- Is the 40 hour work-week going the way of the Dodo? Are we about to give up on this fetish about the inherent virtue of work?
- Why are we as a culture addicted to work? [Because we have forgotten how to play.]
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