Figuring out strategies to accommodate younger workers entails being open to ways of working that are taking new directions.
One recent direction involves when employees want to work. While working at home has somewhat altered the exact working hours, work is still generally done around a 9-5. schedule.
Well according to a survey from Adobe which interviewed over 5,500 workers globally, the youngest generation of workers are three times more like to prefer logging into their laptops to work well into the night as compared to older generations, as reported on Yahoo Finance.
Only 6% of Boomers work from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m., while 26% of Gen Z likes working during these hours. Looking at millennials, 18% prefer after-hour working as does 13% of Gen X.
How important are these preferences? Well, 70% of the younger workers said they would quit their job in favor of one with more control over their schedule, according to the article.
Research from the study showed that currently, more than 50% of Gen Z workers plan to leave their companies because of time and productivity issues. Conversely for those who stay at companies schedule and location flexibility are at the top of the list.
As is the case with other preferences for younger workers, managers need to adjust the philosophy that it's not the hours that are important, as long as the work gets done. In an article on Fast, a couple of years ago , Robert Pozen, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution said that "People should spend real time figuring out what their goals, priorities, and objectives are, and agree on success metrics on how you can tell after a week or a month whether you have achieved those.”
Collaboration on this is an excellent way to feed into the overall desire of younger workers to work in a collaborative environment. In a recent article from the Harvard Business Review, the authors note that helping Gen Z workers includes giving them room for autonomy. They say: " Gen Z seeks to make informed decisions on their own. They need room for experimentation to prove themselves. Thus, in order to keep them motivated, flex your management style and give them greater room and autonomy to explore and figure out improvements in work processes. They might surprise you with a better outcome."