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When millennials entered the workforce years ago, management and leadership experts had a field day with Millennial madness. New theories and research emerged constantly about the youngest generation, at the time, to join the workforce. That was then, this is now - and the workforce today welcomes Generation Z to the ranks.
No generation is a monolith, but there are growing trends of expectations and preferences that change as culture and worker demands change. As with any generation, engaging Generation Z will present unique challenges and opportunities that may change the world of work forever.
Working to understand Generation Z may tell leaders something about the generation, but isn't meant to be one-size-fits-all advice for personal engagement. It's important to consider characteristics emerging as indicative of Generation Z, how they differ from their closest generational relatives (Millennials), what they want and expect from work and the implications for HR.
Meet Generation Z
Generation Z is the latest demographic to round out the five generations working side-by-side for the first time in the history of the modern workforce. In many ways, Generation Z is manifesting a continuation and extension of Millennial demands at work, but with many key differences, Generation Z was dubbed the "Anti-Millennials" by Fast Company (Segran, 2016).
In a New York Times (NYT ) essay introducing Generation Z, NYT reporter Alex Williams summarized the slight disagreement between demographers and marketers on the beginning and end of the youngest working generation (Williams, 2015). Williams wrote that while academia considers Generation Z-ers born between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, marketers ("who tend to slice generations into bite-size units") mark the 15-year span from 1996 to 2011 - making them between 6 and...