I am an Xer who manages a small but crucial team at my workplace (in an EU country). I had a lady resign last week, and I have another who may be about to resign or I may have to let go due to low engagement. They are both Gen Z. Today it hit me: the five years I’ve been managing this department, the only people I’ve lost have been from Gen Z. Clearly I do not know how to manage Gen Z so that they are happy working here. What can I do? I want them to be as happy as my Millennial team members. One detail that might matter is that my team is spread over three European cities.
Happy to provide any clarification if anyone wants it.
Edit. Thanks for all the answers even if a few of them are difficult to hear (and a few were oddly angry?) This has been very helpful for me, much more so than it probably would have been at the Old Place.
Also the second lady I mentioned who might quit or I might have to let go? She quit the day after I posted this giving a week’s notice yesterday. My team is fully supportive, but it’s going to be a rough couple of months.
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Just pointing out that we didn’t invent that mantra for ourselves. I’ve heard that same thing incessantly from teachers and professors which were gen x and boomers over the years.
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because retaining long-term employees is generally expensive, so companies do things to make sure job hopping is the only way to earn what you’re actually worth. this is 100% a response to companies own policies and not anything labor is doing.
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usually the savings are in benefits, and the expectations of raises. You’re also assuming they’re hiring from similarly qualified and experienced. They’re not. they’re hiring inexperienced people with lower qualifications… and frequently, the new people will be low balled as well.
And I’m not arguing that experience is valuable, but the large companies don’t see it that way. large corporations are quite literally only concerned about short term profits- the get rich quick schemes. they’re not not concerned at all about producing quality products over the long term, or developing healthy work environment sore anything else. strictly what yields the highest profits in that moment.
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Mostly it comes down to companies being owned by institutions like black rock or vanguard, who don’t really care about anything other than what makes money- and are perfectly okay jumping ship when it doesn’t.
This means that they’re controlled by shareholders that only care about steadily increasing profits over a very short period (quarterly).
Also just to point out that buffet doesn’t just dump everything into the s&p like he advised every one else to do. He utilizes a broad mix of strategies- including things like swing trading across opportunities his horde of fintel peeps find for him.
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Warren Buffett will buy and sell quickly if his investment meets or exceeds his targets. Berkshire Hathaway has a stock portfolio in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
What he won’t do is act without a plan. He has a unique ability to see long term advantages, that’s why he holds over the long term. Short term opportunity exists too, but many people who look for it are impatient.
Every single job I have left is because I literally couldn’t afford to stay. I know you want to pin the phenomena on some obscure difference in generational ideology. It’s not that difficult. It’s not that obscure. We grew up in places we will never afford. You come from a generation that could pay 100% for college with a summer job, and you turned around and added a requirement for a college degree just to get that summer job which now days doesn’t even cover the rent.
Pay has dropped relative to cost of living year over year since the 90s. I couldn’t get my employers to give me raises just to match inflation. And still, I hear boomers crowing about how uncommitted millennials and zoomers are from their half a million dollar homes. My gen x coworkers owned boats and I was struggling to make the rent.
The problem here is not that younger generations aren’t capable of committing, it’s that older generations have grown out of touch with modern day cost. Some boomer rear ended me last year and was furious that I wouldn’t take his $150. He laughed when I told him his insurance would give me $2k easily. They paid out $2800. I am honestly still confounded how far out of reality you’d have to be to think that a bumper would only cost $150. You could argue that he was only trying to cheat me but that only proves my point more that us getting royally fucked by older generations is not from our own doing.
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Yeah yeah yeah, I get it. I mean, I promise it’s you who doesn’t have the full picture - I live in Alaska, there are no cheap boats up here, there are no cheap houses, there are no cheap hobbies, etc. - you don’t qualify for all of those things without the ability make at least the minimum payments. Nevertheless, you missed the point. I didn’t have the credit to get a single snow machine or motorcycle, let alone enough of them to also need a toy hauler to tote them around. There is a vast difference between struggling to make rent, and being able to acquire myriad recreational vehicles regardless of how “paper thin you may feel their outward appearing lives are”. And the difference in experience and skill was not that much. I had to teach those idiot x genrs how computers work and a few of them still today “don’t use email”. So I’m just not buying the “evaluation” argument. I know what they brought to the table, because I was the asshole fixing their sloppy ass work.
My god man, you are missing the point. You seem to only see my problems through the lens of your own life, which sounds like it has been mostly affordable. That’s my point. You have grown out of touch. Things are not affordable. I’m not talking about fucking jet skis. I’m talking about groceries and rent.
JFC, I had to live out of my occasionally running car for two years and I’m getting boomersplained about perspective. 🙄
Short-sighted behavior: People are incentivized to not stay.
The only thing that I have seen personally work is private companies doing a company stock program. You only share with the owners and other employees, thus you get a bigger piece of the pie. I have seen coworkers retire holding a $1,000,000 in shares (plus the same in their 4K)!
However, this was a large private company.
Definitely this - you can stay with a company and get a small raise yearly (maybe), or switch roles and advance quickly
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I think it works really well for some people, but personally I feel like you
Yeah, I wonder if pay is competitive with the market and they are getting pay raises to stay competitive. I am making less than new hires with less experience only because I got hired years ago.
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I’m also gen X, but the two year rule has been around my entire career, at least for tech jobs. In the first half of your career, in order to build experience and increase compensation, you need to change jobs frequently. Anything less than 2 years is a problem with stability, so change jobs every 2+ years. Anything more than you need to, and your pay lags your peers, and you likely are not gaining sufficient experience to advance your career
I had an interesting conversation with an interviewer about ten years ago - I’m in part of my career where I thought stability is desired, but they were concerned whether someone at the same place ten years could adjust. LoL. Apparently even in the latter half of your career, it’s important to switch jobs regularly
Same, and same.
I ended up making a lot more money in my career by moving around.
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Not just a path to advance, but a path that feels fair and is faster than changing jobs. A lot of places that do pay well still make it easier to go up a level as an external hire than they do for an internal promotion. In other words, it’s easier to get “promoted” by switching jobs.
Which is pretty weird. Companies would rather make the decision based off a few hours of interviews for someone who knows nothing about their company, over years of data for someone who knows the company well. I think it’s partly “grass is always greener” and also partly companies wanting to pay people less when they already employ them. They’ll pay more for external hires cause they want to get em, but once they’re there, there’s less reason to pay more.
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Or at the very least, lower level employees often don’t get to give big ideas. A big way to get your ideas listened to is to get promoted in the first place. Small ideas only do so much. Sometimes there’s big, systemic problems that need big ideas to fix.
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