Article: Gen Y & Z: Bringing fresh to the table

Talent Acquisition

Gen Y & Z: Bringing fresh to the table

As corporations around the world have become a play ground for millenials and centennials, it has become important to know how different these generations are from the preceding generations.
Gen Y & Z: Bringing fresh to the table

Gen Y has given to this world many notable and innovative entrepreneurs like Sachin  Bansal and Binny Bansal who founded Flipkart and of course the popular Gen Y icon Mark Zuckerberg who dropped out of Harvard to fulfill his dream. Gen Y has taken over majority of the offices worldwide and Gen Z gear up to become a part of the global work force. According to a 2014 PwC report, by 2020, millennials will form 50% of the global workforce. Gen Z, a generation which is largely understood to be full of youngsters with ADHD, have their plus side, they are more associated with technology than millenials. According to a recent Sapient report, India is home to one of the largest Gen Z population. 

As most of us would believe, anybody who is good enough for a particular job profile deserves to take the spot. But it only makes sense that for an organization to sustain the changing times, the newer workforce is a necessary entity to be the directional strength of an organization. Gen Y and Gen Z with their innovative and confident approach are changing definitions as to how a particular job needs to be done. The older generations were more loyal to an organization; they comfortably stayed in their roles for 3 to 5 years until they were promoted to a higher designation. They were not too experimental, at least not with their career. However, the younger generations look for instant gratification. They exhibit a lot of audacity and they want to be challenged.  They’d readily change their employer if their jobs stop being an enriching experience. Gone are the days when young unmarried men cared only about having a well paying and respectable job just so they could impress the father of the girl they want to marry. For today’s generation, being employed is about living a passion. They want to pursue a career in something they love doing – no matter how offbeat it is. The younger working population don’t mind taking challenges and experimenting with their career. Finding a young premium college graduate today, who quit his or her high-paying job to become an entrepreneur is anything but a rare incident today. The new generations also do not exhibit any functional barrier, most of them seek continuous learning and lateral movement within an organization; they readily try their hands on various cross functional activities.

Several writers until now have iterated the importance of being courageous and exploring life to the fullest.  India, a nation with world’s second highest middle class population, is currently seeing a wave of daring young minds who believe that they have just enough to fall back on if they feel the need to try out different options of their liking and see what fits them the best. The younger generations also exhibit a strong interest towards working abroad. Money, even though is a priority, it certainly isn’t the most important decision making factor. Srivastav Iyer , a Human Resource Management student at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, says “Money is a hygiene factor, today’s generation seeks a job that is not only pays well but also has other intangible benefits.” In short, it wouldn’t be too farfetched to say that Gen Y & Z want their jobs to be satisfying at every level.

 

Bringing generations together should be a priority task for HR. Employers struggle with two major risks related to multi-generational workforce. The first is the nature of ambitious new generations X & Y to switch employers quickly when their jobs stop fulfilling their needs. The second risk is that over the coming years, millennials and  centinnials will find themselves managing co-workers who are older than them, and few will be comfortable with the fact. The new generation also seeks recognition for their efforts at their workplace.  As businesses worldwide equip themselves with new strategies and a more amicable culture to accommodate centennials, it has become an imperative for them pay attention to the finer details as well as the larger goal of creating a harmonious workplace for multiple generations to fit in. Prateek Rathore, an intern at Godrej, says “(For the newer generations at workplace) Recognition, monetory or non-monetory, needs to be defined at a finer level such as the timing and nature of recognition for an organization to become more adaptable and friendlier towards the new times.”

 

 

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, #TAWeek

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