When you know what Gen Z need, just give it to them!
My daughter was 3 when she received her first iPad. She’s 20 now. At the age of 5 he was navigating all of the exercises on the Telly Tubbies website by herself. She dived into her iPod at 7 and her first iPhone at 9. She’s a whizz on the Xbox and Playstation and today uses Google extensively for answers to anything she needs. I don’t think there is anything remarkable about this technological journey. All of my daughters peers seemed destined to take the same route, and did.
What this digital journey taught my daughter (in hindsight), is that information and data was (and is) available immediately which in turn vastly accelerates the process of achieving something, owning something, or knowing something. Immediacy seems to define Gen Z’s and their reaction to not having this immediacy satisfied leads to frustration and the monicker ‘Snow Flake’. If they don’t get what they want they often give up. Milleniuals, Gen X and Baby Boomers never had this issue. We had to wait, and wait, and wait for things to happen.
At 18 my daughter joined the hotel work force and was immediately met with a very typical and very analogue situation. ‘Here’s a pen, fill that in’. Suddenly all of her IT prowess seemed useless due to a working environment shaped by a Millennial, Gen X or Baby Boomer. The problem here and in many places is that work place work processes are often set out and structured by Millennials, Gen X or Baby Boomers with perhaps not enough thought to Gen Z’s. This may work for Millennials, Gen X or Baby Boomers on your team but the gap between the expectations of the very digital Gen Z colleagues and your older colleagues is wider than in any concurrent generation.
As a GM I got round this by rationalising two key factors to keep Gen Z happy.
- Gen Z typically either want something NOW, or need to know when they can get it.
- Gen Z want how to achieve and what they want to achieve in the palms of the hands – their smartphone.
Realising this as a Hotel GM I launched the Hotel Academy (used in dozens of hotels) which by it’s very nature provided the entire playbook of SOP’s, Training Videos, Online Tests, and everything and anything they needed, in the palm of their hand. Whilst the Hotel Academy provided immediate satisfaction to Gen Z colleagues it was mildly interesting and quite useful for the older staff. The online testing for example raised the bar, gameplay style, and drove competition to achieve higher and higher scores, along with pretty advanced, practical knowledge acquisition.
The second initiative was to introduce a really cool live appraisal system. Each colleague was/is assessed against 100 KPI’s regardless of their department. Each KPI was divided into Below standard, Core, Supervisor and Manager. This appraisal system was introduced at the interview stage where the Gen Z challenge was thrown down. If you want to progress, earn more money, get promoted, buy a bigger house and car and have great holidays, I’m afraid you can’t have any of that right now. But if you click into the appraisal system you can have everything you want as fast as you want it. In doing this I couldn’t provide what the Gen Z colleague wanted right there and then, but crucially I could provide the next best thing by providing a genuine proactive career road map. The live appraisal system was updated every 6-8 weeks. The only real challenge I had with this system was that the appraisal system needed to be managed by Millennials, Gen X or Baby Boomers and not all of them had an intuitive approach. Some thought we were pandering to snow flakes. Why couldn’t they learn as we did etc etc? It was only when this system lit up Gen Z colleagues that the older generations bought into it, as after all, a better performing team made life easier for the managers who didn’t hesitate to take credit for their departments success.
The results of this approach has been transformative. Not only did I connect fully with Gen Z digital cravings (Hotel Academy on a Smartphone), but I also gave them a road map to success (Live Appraisal System).
Hotel life by its very nature is diverse. As a Gen X worker (born in 1969) I’d like to think that I’ve been as inclusive as I can by seeing people for who they are, rather than just what they do. The multi-generational approach is key in todays industry. If Millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers continue to judge others by their own historic standards then progress will be slow, fractious, and we’ll continue to struggle to inspire new young people.
If you’re 40+, go get a Playstation!
