Cultivating Growth for Your Gen Z Workforce

There are more members of Generation Z working in your retail stores than ever before. That means that, to engage them in the workplace and develop their career skills, it’s vital to look at what they personally want to get out of their job. One of the most noteworthy characteristics of Gen Z is their expectation of advancement. 76% of Gen Z believe they should be promoted within a year of starting their first job, with 32% believing they deserve a promotion within their first six months on the job.

It’s crucial to understand what these expectations say about them. They want to grow and learn while they’re at work, they want to build towards having more responsibility in the workplace, and they want to make a difference at their organization. So in our current tight labor market, it follows that an essential part of keeping your Gen Z staff engaged and retaining them is being able to help them grow professionally.

Here are a couple strategies you can utilize to help your Gen Z employees with professional development:

1. Provide More Opportunities for Coaching

Gen Z wants feedback as often as possible. Many desire performance reviews on a weekly basis at their jobs, sometimes even daily. But it’s often difficult for store managers to provide individualized, in-person coaching at that frequency, especially when they’re stuck in the back office answering emails and creating weekly labor schedules. To improve coaching, you need to give store managers back some time.

By streamlining store execution, you can eliminate the burden of manual task delegation. Real-time task management utilizes a sophisticate rules-based engine to automatically prioritize and throttle the correct tasks to the correct associates, saving store managers hours every week. This saves managers’ time, while providing store associates with a single, mobile interface where they receive alerts and notifications about the critical tasks they need to complete.

Optimizing labor scheduling also gives your store managers back the time they’d typically spend manually creating and fine-tuning weekly schedules for their associates. Mobile employee self-service solutions can improve this as well; by providing store managers with a tool to approve schedule changes from anywhere in the store, they save hours of time that they can now spend coaching store associates and personalizing training for them.

2. Improve Two-Way Communication with Store Associates

Broad performance reviews only provide some of the professional development that Gen Z desires. Retailers need to pair in-person coaching with immediate feedback after major tasks and projects are completed, so Gen Z can quickly adjust their actions to meet expectations. Peer-to-peer communication systems make it easier for store managers to provide feedback and direction as they need to instead of waiting until regular performance reviews. They also give store associates the opportunity to ask their managers questions if they are confused, and follow-up on specific tasks when they need more direction.

Real-time task management also helps accomplish this. As store associates complete projects and managers receive alerts that the projects are complete, personalized feedback can be sent specifically addressing performance on tasks completed. This way, store associates can receive immediate feedback.

By simplifying store execution, providing opportunities for peer-to-peer communication, and optimizing labor scheduling, you can empower your Gen Z workforce with the professional development they’re looking for, helping to meet their goals and achieve company objectives.

To receive more strategies on how to engage your Gen Z workforce, request, “How to Empower Your Gen Z Retail Workforce.”