Over the past two years, COVID-19 has shifted workplace expectations dramatically. Many managers are struggling to translate their in-person strategies to remote and hybrid environments, signaling that it might be time to take a step back and rethink our attitudes towards work.
This is especially important when it comes to Gen Z employees. Aged between 10 and 25 years old, Gen Z makes up the majority of the entry-level workforce but has never experienced work pre-pandemic.
This lack of anchoring, along with major generational shifts, means that Gen Z is primed to bring radical change to workplace expectations. But only if you can keep them motivated and engaged.
Recently, I talked with both Gen Z employees and their managers to synthesize a new management playbook.
In this article, we will dissect Gen Z attitudes while discussing the top 3 strategies to motivate, develop and retain the next generation of talent. Spoiler– it’s going to take a lot more than Seamless gift cards and remote coffee roulettes.
It’s going to require managers to shift their assumptions, which takes real work.
Those who take on the challenge will find that they have built a team of highly motivated, innovative, and engaged Gen Z employees that will grow with them.
So let’s break it all down.
Meet Our Author
Doa Jafri is an Operator in Residence at Reforge and an early-stage engineering leader. She most recently built and led teams at Glossier and Thrive Global.
How To Motivate Gen Z
Maintaining day-to-day enthusiasm is a challenge for any workforce. In the past, it could be something as simple as offering a free gym membership, a dog-friendly office, or catered lunch to your employees.
Those perks aren’t going to cut it for Gen Z, especially as companies allow their employees to go fully remote.
In this section, we’ll explore the three principles that seem to impact Gen Z’s daily engagement the most.
The Space to Seek Truth
Motivating Gen Z is impossible if you don’t understand the influences that differentiate them from other generations. Unlike most Millennials, Gen Z doesn’t remember life before smartphones or social media.
With unfettered access to under-moderated social media platforms during two politically divisive presidencies, Zoomers came of age trying to make sense of conflicting opinions and realities.
Moreover, they felt that those in power were not transparent about their motives based on the lack of action on key socio-economic problems.
As a result, “truth-seeking” is second nature for this generation. Instead of taking statements at face value, Gen Z questions and explores diverse opinions on a topic before coming to their own conclusion.
When this behavior is supported, it can spur innovation by uncovering new perspectives and opportunities. As well as keeping your Gen Z employee highly engaged with their day-to-day work.
On the other hand, asserting a narrow or singular way of doing things makes Gen Z feel disempowered and unengaged.
For instance, rather than asking an employee to read an onboarding document, ask them to read the onboarding document and then list some ways to improve it. An approach like this will give them space to seek truth and think critically about a text instead of just skimming through the information.
In fact, I have used this exact tactic to ensure high engagement during a new employee’s first week. But the need for this kind of engagement is much higher with the Gen Z population. So plan your tactics accordingly!
“They’re not ticket takers,” says Lydia, Director of Product Engineering at Data.World, “they want to think about problems and attack them holistically.”
One key managerial strategy that you can use to increase engagement with Gen Z is turning “tasks” into “problems” for your teams. A simple way to do this is to add a “why” element to any task.
Instead of asking an employee to fix a bug, ask them to investigate one. Even if you can fix a bug faster than your entry-level report, they will engage with the problem at hand and produce higher-quality solutions. All you have to do is give them the space.
Conclusively, creating space to seek truth means turning your “tasks” into “problems” and allowing Gen Z to take some of the legwork you may be accustomed to doing off of your plate.
It’s a win-win. Less work for you, and they feel a sense of accomplishment.
Community and Connection
Establishing connections with your coworkers was much easier in a physical office.
For example, even though Lydia entered a job market ravaged by the recession in 2009, she found a silver lining.
“I had lots of peers to lean on and learn from, all with the same culture and experience,” Lydia says. Her cohort of peers got her through the unexpected nature of the recession and kick-started her career with a strong network of individuals.
In sharp contrast, Gen Z’s entry into the workplace during COVID and the rise of fully remote work has created a sense of isolation.
Whereas the rest of us are maintaining or building new professional relationships in a context where we understand the rules, Gen Z is trying to pick up on unspoken workplace etiquette. All while trying to build brand new relationships.
As a result of this insecurity, Gen Z tends to opt out of workplace friendships entirely. A quick scroll through TikTok reveals video after video of Gen Z employees logging off at 4:59 pm and setting aggressive boundaries with their co-workers.
However, individual conversations reveal a stark reality – Gen Z craves meaningful relationships and friendships at work but struggles to build them.
So, how can we as managers facilitate a sense of community and deep connection?
Lydia supported this need by creating a mentorship program that matches entry-level and mid-level employees based on their interests. The idea here was to directly develop a single deeper relationship instead of providing free-form opportunities for connections that may not be maintained.
Another powerful connector for any generation is in-person interaction. Pranavi Javangula, who graduated from Berkeley in August 2021, chose both her internship and workplace because of the option to work in-person part-time. She felt that it was a critical element at her current career stage.
Not everyone is going to have that option. For distributed teams, I would strongly recommend occasional co-location.
When I managed a distributed team before COVID, we built team rapport and culture by meeting in person for a week a few times each year. During these periods, we focused on highly collaborative work, like planning and relationship building. Because of these in-person meetups, our team ended up a lot closer than many other teams that were co-located at all times.
In fully remote environments, it is very critical to intentionally create a sense of community and connection for Gen Z. Especially as companies continue to embrace fully remote work and new employees join from all around the world.
Empathetic Managers
As Millennials move into management, the slightly controversial “friend and manager” management style continues to grow in popularity. Older generations felt this style created a conflict of interest, as friends tend to prioritize individuals over the company.
Gen Z actually responds best to this management style. They want you to value them as individuals while also being incredibly direct and transparent.
One thing is for sure, Gen Z despises a manager that hides behind layers of formality or corporate jargon.
This experience is in line with a recent survey conducted by Robert Half. It found that 45% of Gen Z’ers felt it would be challenging to collaborate with Baby Boomers in the workplace. Compare that to only 5% that felt it would be challenging to work with Millennials.
Brianna, an Account Supervisor at a top-tier ad agency, has an exceptional relationship with her Gen Z reports.
“My first managers were two incredible [Millennial] women who had a friendly, supportive management style,” Brianna says, “I try to emulate that.”
Brianna focuses on creating direct lines of communication and offering a lot of hands-on support. She even socializes with her team off-campus and outside of work hours.
In contrast, Paulina, who manages a bar and restaurant, was initially trained and managed by a Gen X manager. She recalls her early days at the restaurant as “highly structured and strict. There was a list of things you had to do each night before you were allowed to go home.”
Paulina, a Millennial, always disagreed with that approach and feels her employees need to enjoy their work, or they won’t show up.
The Great Resignation created a massive labor shortage for hourly workers, and in order to survive, Paulina has had to shift expectations dramatically for her Gen Z staff. “It’s kind of like… okay, just spot sweep and go live your life.”
Some of the other generational shifts include less formal communication, high empathy for the individual, and an understanding that people’s lives come before the company’s needs.
A good way to decrease the formality of communication is by forgetting any public-relations-style training you may have had. Imagine you’re addressing a friend instead of a large group of people.
It’s no longer enough to have relevant experience that entry-level workers can learn from. In a generation that does not buy into work as the core of their identity, Gen Z respects managers who are empathetic, authentic, and independent thinkers.
Gen Z Career Development Needs
How can managers set Gen Z up to succeed at work, as well as succeed them in their roles?
As opportunities continue to pop up at other companies, you are going to have to put in extra work to make sure your employees are sticking around to grow with your company. A vague promise of career growth is not going to cut it anymore. Specific milestones, goals, and more need to be put in place from day one.
The path to career advancement presents a few unique challenges for Gen Z as well.
Cross-Functional Career Paths
Gen Z tends to have a large cross-section of interests and hobbies outside of work.
Early access to the internet and a strong desire for individualism allowed them to easily try new things in their formative years.
Unlike previous generations, they don’t live to work. Especially if they are doing a singular task every single day.
In the book Gen Z @ Work, father and son co-authors David and Jonah Stillman reveal that “75% of Gen Z would be interested in a situation where they could have multiple roles within one place of employment.”
All of the managers we spoke to noted this desire when asked to characterize Gen Z.
“They’re very capable, multi-faceted, with so many passions and hobbies outside of work that bring them joy,” says Lydia.
Translating this to the workplace, Brianna believes the secret to her team’s high engagement is the fact that their account managers interact with the social, creative, and strategy team.
“One of my reports is very creative outside of work,” she says, “so he gets to weigh in on that aspect and use his other skills.”
To meet the needs of Gen Z, managers will need to reconsider the rigidity of present-day career paths. Try to embrace cross-functional roles and leverage them to spur innovation and break down silos.
In the shorter term, managers will need to create opportunities for Gen Z to explore other roles and interests. Outside of their day-to-day work that could include shadowing, rotational roles, passion projects, hackathons, or 10% time.
Regardless of how you choose to implement this learning, align your strategy with your company’s values and ensure you aren’t asking your reports to do more work without additional time.
Help Setting Boundaries
In the wake of the pandemic and an uncertain job market, a whopping 71% of young adults aged 18-24 had returned home to live with their parents.
Living and working at home was a difficult shift for all generations. New boundaries with our phones, families, and jobs had to be set almost immediately. But for Gen Z, many of whom missed graduations and senior year celebrations due to COVID, working from home was an even more difficult step back.
Instead of striking out on their own, Gen Z was forced to return home, where they were less likely to have control over their environment or peer group.
“They struggle with work-life balance because they have nothing else to do at home,” says Lydia, who largely manages Gen Z employees living with their parents.
While many of Brianna’s reports no longer live with their parents, the experience of entering the workforce remotely has lingering side effects. She was surprised to discover that many of her reports had Microsoft Teams notifications turned on, even on weekends.
“When I started, you left your laptop at work at the end of the day,” Brianna says, “Gen Z’s always-on culture has led to the burnout cycle accelerating because they struggle to set boundaries.”
Unsurprisingly, Gen Z agrees and feels they are or could be more productive in an office. At home, there are a lot of minor distractions that lead to extended work hours, a lack of breaks, and burnout. In turn, early burnout makes learning new skills difficult and decreases Gen Z’s ability to foster positive work environments.
Setting expectations for positive work-life boundaries and moving Zoomers away from the “always on” culture sets the scene for long-term development.
Thankfully, we can use remote and hybrid environments to our advantage when modeling positive boundaries because everything is timestamped.
One of the most influential moments of my career was when I pushed a code fix at 7:30 PM during my first week at a new company. The next day, my manager replied, “Glad you fixed this! but please don’t work that late again.”
And I never did. Well, maybe once or twice.
Explicitly calling out when people are working too late can help bridge the gap and model remote work-life balance effectively. You also can encourage your employees to set hours on their calendar that are “Outside Working Hours” or turn on “Do Not Disturb” on Slack.
But for any of those behaviors to really stick, you’re going to have to model them first.
Encouragement to Ask Questions
In a physical office, employees have ambient exposure to all kinds of benign employee interactions. They see other employees asking questions, problem-solving, or simply chatting at the water cooler. In a remote world, these simple behaviors are lost in a flood of messages or hidden in private communication streams.
For example, instead of tapping their neighbor on the shoulder and asking them to pair programs, a mid-level engineer is more likely to direct message their co-worker on Slack.
This lack of behavior modeling is one of the reasons Gen Z struggles to ask questions.
“You don’t know what you don’t know,” says Pranavi, “but I was hyper-aware of what I was missing when I was remote.”
Pranavi saw her growth accelerate significantly once she was able to work in the office. Now she could ask questions without scheduling a 30-minute meeting with her manager or coworkers.
While she acknowledges that people at different stages of their careers might not see a similar impact, she feels the in-person experience is crucial for entry-level employees.
“I am definitely afraid to ask questions [remotely],” Pranavi laughs, highlighting how awkward it can be to interrupt someone with a question during a Zoom meeting.
Beyond the lack of modeling and low opportunity to ask informal questions, Gen Z struggles to ask questions because they grew up with massive amounts of information at their fingertips. Rather than asking questions, they tend to look for the answer themselves, which is not necessarily a bad thing. We have already seen that “truth seeking” is a very positive element of Gen Z employees.
However, this approach breaks down in the workplace, where that “truth” is cultural, hyperlocal, and not necessarily reflected online.
To remedy this, Lydia encourages collaboration and question-asking in public Slack channels. She uses friendly "question quotas" to normalize the behavior for her Gen Z team members.
As a manager, I try to always provide opportunities for my less extroverted coworkers to ask questions that don’t require speaking in front of a group or interrupting a presentation. Adding important projects or decisions to a document and asking your team to read it on their own time and comment with questions is an easy way to put this idea into practice.
You can follow up that document with a meeting if necessary too. Give equal space to any concerns that are outlined and then follow up with the original question-asker. Otherwise, they might not speak up in future meetings.
As managers, we should strive to create an environment where curiosity is celebrated and encouraged by developing mechanisms focused on question-asking as a primary responsibility.
After all, the best insights often come from those who are doing the work day to day.
How To Retain Gen Z
With the Great Reshuffle and the Great Resignation currently taking place, retaining your employees just got a lot more important.
Recently a study came out that said that for every two open jobs in the US there is only one unemployed person to fill them.
Retaining Gen Z is going to require new and innovative strategies. They don’t live to work and can easily find a handful of other new jobs if they don’t enjoy their current position. Let’s break down a few of the principles that Gen Z reports as most important.
High Job Ownership
Lydia’s most common retention issue is that her Zoomers are leaving to start their own companies.
“They’re very entrepreneurial,” says Lydia, “and they have more work experience under their belt than we did at graduation.”
Instead of working at the local grocery store for rigid hours and low pay, Gen Z’s unprecedented access to the gig economy allowed them to start their own “small businesses.” They worked as Uber drivers, Postmates, and Depop Clothes Resellers, where they were able to choose their hours and pay.
The impact is evident, as a survey from Ernst & Young reports that 65% of Gen Zers who have entered the workforce plan to start their own company in the next 10 years.
With this in mind, managers need to challenge stereotypes associated with the abilities of entry-level candidates.
Top Gen Z talent wants the opportunity to own meaningful initiatives early on, and are willing to job hop if they aren’t given those opportunities.
This tendency is often mischaracterized as “needing creative careers.” But Brianna has noticed high engagement on traditional and creative projects alike.
Giving her Gen Z employees space to innovate and take ownership is the common factor in all of those projects.
A great example of this is Zaria Parvez, the social media manager behind the personality of the Duolingo Owl.
In a few months, Zaria revolutionized corporate social media strategy by giving the Duolingo Owl a distinct, relatable personality.
It was a big risk, but they trusted Zaria to post TikToks that would previously never have been approved by PR. And it paid off, Duolingo now has 4M+ TikTok followers.
Managers of Gen Z should work to identify those entrepreneurial reports early in their careers. You can help them envision a future at your company where they get to act as “mini CEOs” by owning a specific function. And then give them opportunities to own and innovate on smaller initiatives long before a promotion.
The earlier you allow Gen Z to exercise their entrepreneurial tendencies, the better chance you have at retaining them and making them feel like their work is meaningful and self-directed.
Fair Compensation and Promotions
As the gig economy continues to expand, Gen Z feels less pressure to accept traditional jobs.
Their rejection of consumerism and increased focus on their quality of life means the traditional allure of a high-paying salary holds less weight. Through the gig economy, Zoomers can choose how and when to make their money, and change their mind about it at any point.
Pew reports that only 58% of Gen Z aged 18-21 are traditionally employed, as compared to 72% of Millennials at the same age in 2002.
Those who choose traditional employment are still exposed to the accelerated career paths and high autonomy of their entrepreneurial peers, shifting their expectations around compensation and growth opportunities.
Brianna notes being taken aback when her report asked for a promotion after only 8 months.
“Promotions require consistency to be shown, usually over 2 years at least,” she says, “but [Gen Z] are more outspoken and self-interested. They put themselves first, tell you when they’re not happy, and tell you what they want.”
Although this might seem like a negative characteristic on the surface, it’s actually a fantastic opportunity for managers.
You can’t intervene if a report doesn’t tell you what they want or need. But once you know their goals, you can tailor a unique growth and compensation plan for them.
On the flip side, like Brianna, you’ll find yourself in many more situations where you have to say, “no” or “not yet.” Use this conversation as an opportunity to lay out some specific steps that your report can take to help move them closer to a promotion.
Overall, managers will need to openly tackle the issue of fair compensation as well. Being open about growth paths, offering pay increases between promotions, and designing standardized, public competency matrices can help Gen Z feel like they are being fairly compensated.
Transparent Ethics & Values
From Greta Thunberg to the Parkland Students, Gen Z is already known for being radically progressive and willing to fight for change. Their strong belief in ethics and willingness to change their environment directly translates to the workplace.
Paulina notes that Gen Z does not tolerate bad behavior in the workplace. She was pleasantly surprised when a server reported a more senior employee who sexually harassed another co-worker.
When Paulina first started, she noted that this type of behavior was almost expected and rarely reported. Employees were instructed to come to work “dressed for a date.”
Gen Z is unwilling to sexualize or gender themselves in these ways, and the restaurant’s dress code is no longer centered around the male gaze.
67% of Gen Z reported that company values are more important than the CEO. As a result, companies that have allowed bad behavior to exist will need to reevaluate consequences and communication around incidents in order to retain Gen Z.
At present, most HR departments tend to avoid addressing controversial, divisive, or negative topics with their companies at large.
Since Gen Z is highly accepting of conflicting opinions, their communication preferences are very different. They would be happier if an opinion they disagreed with was openly stated, instead of being given a “PR answer” that dodges the subject.
At one of my previous companies, employees had requested backup childcare as a highly desired perk. A previous leader told us that, “priorities had shifted, and would be re-examined in the future.”
A traditional and vague response like this would be particularly upsetting for Gen Z because it doesn’t provide any insight, timeframe, or reasoning.
When new leadership entered, they addressed the issue by telling us very plainly that the perk was not funded because the company was not yet big enough to take advantage of economies of scale around childcare. They also explained that choosing to fund this perk would have meant losing critical perks like free health plan options.
This type of answer is much more satisfactory for Gen Z because the company accepts responsibility for its decision and explains why it was made.
As Gen Z makes up more and more of the workforce, managers and companies will need to learn to communicate transparently, even if it requires admitting to an unpopular action.
Furthermore, companies and managers will need to acknowledge important social movements and the political climate, which greatly impact Gen Z’s day-to-day happiness.
Wrap Up
Gen Z’s unique beliefs combined with the timing of COVID create an unexpected set of trends and accelerate the speed at which we need to shift workplace norms.
To motivate Gen Z, give them the space to seek truth instead of menial tasks. Furthermore, buck the trend of corporate jargon and normalize speaking authentically and casually at work. Lastly, acknowledge that Gen Z needs human relationships as much as the rest of us, and invest in ensuring they have community and dedicated mentors.
To grow Gen Z, expand the notion of “functions” and accept Gen Z as generalists. Promote cross-functional collaboration as the future of innovation. Help them set boundaries and decrease time to burnout. And finally, ensure we aren’t all just talking heads on Zoom by creating mechanisms that encourage Gen Z to ask questions and meaningfully engage.
To retain Gen Z, allow them to make their mark by giving them ownership of projects and the opportunity to try radically new things. Dismantle the secrecy around company decisions, compensation, and promotions to allow Gen Z to make their own conclusions about company ethics and accountability. Companies must also take steps to align their ethics with those of Gen Z or prepare to openly defend their choice not to.
Overall, I hope this guide has helped you – I have personally learned a lot from writing it, and am excited to see the future workplaces that Gen Z will build!