Gen Z Business Expectations

One of the reasons that companies choose to study employee satisfaction is because they want to work to try to keep good employees from leaving the company, since the cost of replacing an employee is high, while the value of a great employee is higher still. Employee satisfaction is correlated pretty well with employee longevity, saving the company money and keeping the best employees active and earning revenue. But a new generation of employees is coming to the workplace – younger employees that have been trained to not see a job as anything more than a way of making money. That means that the way you handle young employees may need to change, and understanding their satisfaction may need to change with it.

One thing should remain true with young employees, however – the more satisfied they are with a job, the more likely they are going to stay in the long term. The issue is whether or not that satisfaction is going to decrease, how fast, and if the new generation has a different baseline for what is considered “enough” to stay at a job. You will need to adjust your expectations – and possibly your measurements and surveys – to understand how the younger generation thinks and acts.

This is a generation that did not grow up with the idea that a job was something you hold on to, and many are looking for the next “score” when it comes to their careers. At the same time, however, you may not have to adjust your expectations too heavily. The younger generation did live through an economic collapse, and it’s likely that their parents have started to teach them how important it is to stick with a job when they have one.

But even if you ignore that times may be changing, another thing to consider is that one of the reasons that younger people leave so quickly is because they overreact to a lack of satisfaction. Most of Generation Y feels as though they’re entitled to being treated well for their skills. They’re not, of course, but if you find a great employee that you hope to keep with your company long term, by targeting their satisfaction and trying your best to make them want to stay, you do greatly increase the chance they’ll stick around with each progressive year.

The young generation is going to require that you change a lot of your expectations – at least if you want to keep them around. But not everything needs to be changed, because the basics (employee satisfaction will lead to long term commitment) still holds true. The only difference is that how you both measure and create satisfaction may have to change.