Great Resignation: What Gen Z and Millennials want employers to know

Jeffery Tobias Halter: Hi, I'm Jeffery Tobias Halter. Welcome to Win(e)d Down Wednesdays. We're going to be examining the Great Resignation today. This is such a hot topic, and there are so many areas that you can look at that it's impacting both the business world and people's lives. And so I'm here with my co-host, Amanda Hammett, and Amanda, what is your wined down beverage of choice today?

Amanda Hammett: All right today, I am drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Banshee, out in Napa Valley. So cheers.

Jeffery Tobias Halter: Very nice, enjoy that. And, uh, and I'm going the seasonal route. I actually have a Pumpkin Spice Latte, that I'm enjoying today as part of the seasonal flare

Amanda Hammett: Who is the millennial here?

Jeffery Tobias Halter: That's pretty funny. So anyways, so the Great Resignation, you know, we wanna, give our listeners really a couple of things today, uh, talking about. What can companies do? I think one of them is acknowledging the issue and then, you know, talking about, uh, what are the answers? Uh, I've got some data that I'll just throw out there that I think is so critical about the current state of this. This came out of a business insider headline, another 4 million workers quit for the fifth month in a row, an average of 3.4 million workers per month quit during the first half of 2021. This is unprecedented in the last 20 years. And so, you know, we're going to explore this from, from age Millennials, Boomers, Gen Z. We're going to look at the impact of COVID. And so go ahead and kick us off what are your, what are your thoughts around this?
and really, you know, what are, what are the employers need to be doing?

Amanda Hammett:You know, Jeffery, I, I'm not going to say I told you so, but I did at the very beginning of COVID say this is going to be a perfect storm. Whenever cyclically, the US is coming out of a recession, we always have a massive amount of voluntary turnover. So those are the people that are quitting their jobs of their own volition. And, I said, it's going to be a perfect storm between, you know, seeing how they were treated with COVID seeing how they were treated, uh, with all the rise of the social justice issues. And just, being burned out from just 2020, this is going to be a perfect storm. And it has been a perfect storm in every company is clamoring figuring out how do we hold on to people? How do we bring in new people? And it's actually creating, I think, a bigger problem within companies because they are they're causing it themselves internally. So one of the things that I'm seeing specifically, not just with my Gen Z's and millennials, but with my Gen X-ers and with my boomers is that company culture is tightening the ropes. They're trying to control a lot when they really need to be saying, Hey, we're individuals, we're people first. We need to be treating our employees as people, and that is something I think that's been missing. It's been really bottom line focused when we really need to focus on the people. That's something across the board generationally, but from our millennials, my Gen Z's, they are really looking at diversity, actually great places to work just put out a study that came out today, in fact, and it says the top five things that Gen Z is looking for in a workforce.

Amanda Hammett:Number one, Diversity. Diversity at all levels. They're looking at these things. When you're trying to recruit young employees, they are looking for diversity, diverse slates at all levels. So not just the people that they're going to be working with directly, but the people throughout the entire company. And I think that COVID and 2020 did not do us any favors. As far as diverse slates were concerned throughout leadership.

Amanda Hammett:Yeah.

Jeffery Tobias Halter: Can you talk about the other, uh, two or three top ones?

Amanda Hammett:Yeah.

Amanda Hammett: So the other two or three top ones, where of course flexibility was one and then, um, you know, being able to learn and move up and not just having a very linear career path.

Jeffery Tobias Halter: And you know, and I think it's interesting and I'd love your perspective because you also work in, uh, you spend a lot of time in tech. You spend a lot of time in startups. you know, we think this is a, we think this is a big company issue when in fact it's everywhere. And it's not just food service, uh, it's truck drivers. We need a hundred thousand truck drivers. We've got a supply chain issue. Well, it's not just the ports. There's no truck drivers. We've got construction issues. We need general laborers. Uh, we need IT professionals. Uh, you know, what are your Uh, leaders talking about doing a, when you talk to them, cause you talked to some of the smartest people in the biz and how are they solving this?

Amanda Hammett:That's a great question, there is a lot of hand wringing going on. You know, we don't understand where we're offering more money. We're going out with more perks. And I keep explaining, it's not a perk. It's not about beer taps in there, you know, kitchen or bean bag chairs, or even more money, even though the money is nice. Um, but it's also about, and this is something we're going to check check-in on in the next riffing session is empathy. Those frontline leaders developing them to actually communicate human to human with those early in career employees or, or everybody treat everybody as a human, not as a number. And that is something that we need to develop in within our company cultures. Yeah.

Jeffery Tobias Halter: And I think that's so important. It just, you know, and it's something as simple and yet it's so hard, right? It's it's the once a week asking your employees, how are you doing? How are you really doing? I mean, you know, I'm going, gonna use my self first-person and I'm embarrassed to acknowledge this. Um, I worked in the field, but I had an admin in the, in the company headquarters three. I worked, uh, she supported me for three years. I never knew the name of her husband or her children. It was just kind of, we put our head down, we worked, she supported me. She supported about eight of us. And we never thought about this. We never thought to check in. And just the simple question, how are you doing? I think leaders need to add this at a macro basis and say, how are you really doing and what's going on? Because you know, for, for boomers, it might be aging parents. Plus COVID for millennials. It may be school aged kids, you know, we're going through yet another surge. Our school is going to be opened. Our school is going to be closed. Um, you know,this is just mind-boggling.