What Everyone Should Know About About Managing Gen Z | Wisdom - Thrive Global

Here's how to get the best out of a generation with strikingly different expectations and motivations than any generation before it, according to Stephanie Fairyington, contributing writer at Thrive Global. 

Photo: courtesy of G-Stock Studio / Shutterstock

Carrie Viohl, the co-owner of The Square, a restaurant in Moultrie, Georgia, manages a team of Gen Zers (those born between 1997 and 2012, the oldest of whom are just entering the workforce). But she wasn’t optimistic about hiring them at first. “Restaurant life is hard. It’s demanding work. We went through hundreds of employees in the first year of the restaurant — people would show up and not even finish their shift,” she tells Thrive Global. Initially, she believed the worst stereotypes about Gen Z, including a greater propensity to ghost employers, and wouldn’t consider bringing them aboard. “I thought they’d be even worse than the people we’d been hiring,” she says. But when she finally did, she realized some facts she hasn’t foreseen.

Some of the emerging criticisms hurled at Gen Z  — they’re non-resilient, extremely anxious, addicted to screens, perpetually stressed, and hyper-sensitive — are, in fact, supported by several studies, books, surveys and news reports, including Thrive Global’s own Thrive on Campus, which investigated the complicated reasons college students today are suffering the highest rates of anxiety and depression in history — so much so their school’s mental health facilities can’t accommodate their needs. As Gen Z enters the workforce, employers are scrambling to address their mental health needs, which cost the global economy $1 trillion annually, according to the World Health Organization. In fact, the quest to create a culture sensitive to their vulnerabilities so resonated with employers that a Wall Street Journal article on the topic, “The Most Anxious Generation Goes to Work,” went viral earlier this year...

Generation Z Leads:
A Guide for Developing the
Leadership Capacity of
Generation Z Students

Roberta Katz, Ph.D., a researcher at Stanford University who studies Gen Z and is co-authoring a book on them, explains why their quest for meaning and purpose outweighs other considerations. “This group, from a very early age, was being exposed to a lot of human suffering,” she tells Thrive. Having grown up amid chronic mass shootings, two wars, the Great Recession and an inescapable and disturbing 24/7 news cycles has made them acutely aware of the precariousness of life, and may give them an urgency to make each moment count, she says. “Their desire to make a difference may also stem from witnessing the complex problems facing society today through the overwhelming amount of news and information they are exposed to, and wanting to help solve those problems,” Corey Seemiller, the co-author of Generation Z Leads: A Guide for Developing the Leadership Capacity of Generation Z Students, told Thrive.  
Read more...

Source: Thrive Global