Millennials are the largest generation currently representing the workforce. Meanwhile, the oldest members of Generation Z are starting to enter the workplace themselves.
You better believe that these tech-savvy young adults are going to have some influence—and expectations of their own.
Just how important is technology to Gen Z? Well, 98% of them own a smartphone and half claim to be connected online for 10 hours a day. So… very important. While Millennials pioneered the mass use of mobile, Gen Z was born into an age of instant communication. They are mobile natives.
Despite all this chatter about how “different” each generation is, new research on the future of work shows that all four generations that make up the labor force (Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z) actually have something in common: they want greater flexibility in their work schedules.
The Current State
Companies are slowly but surely starting to take notice of the important role technology plays in achieving flexibility. To appease Millennials and Gen Z alike, employers are providing mobile-first HR tools. According to the research, only 14% of workers used both mobile devices and desktops to handle HR tasks five years ago; today, the number has shot up to 43%.
When asked what their ideal work schedule would look like, 73% of employees preferred at least some form of flexible scheduling, whether it’s a compressed work week, hours based on their personal circumstances, or complete flexibility as long as their work gets done. 51% of employers currently offer some type of flexible schedule, but that still leaves nearly half of organizations sticking with more rigid, set schedules.
In short, it’s a start, but employers need to ramp up their adaption of workforce management technologies if they want to attract incoming Gen Z workers—and retain their current employees.
The Next Step
We understand that for most shift-based work (manufacturing, public safety, energy production, etc.), delivering on certain expectations like remote work is infeasible. For the work to be done, your employees need to be physically present.
But that doesn’t mean that your organization gets a “pass” for tossing out the idea of flexibility completely. There are other ways you can adopt less rigid scheduling practices.
If you want to meet expectations for more accommodating processes to stay competitive, automated scheduling needs be a part of your recruitment toolkit. Here are the ways automation will make both employees and HR alike happy:
- Allow employees to see their schedules in advance, from the comfort of anywhere
- Do away with forms/emails/frenzied calls and digitize the leave request process, making time off requests both simple and transparent
- Give your employees peace of mind with real-time updates to their schedule when leave is approved
- Improve process efficiencies and employee satisfaction by giving employees the tools to control when they want to volunteer or swap assignments
- Relieve sick employees from the stress of having to find their replacement with automated vacancy-filling
- Distribute overtime more fairly by doing away with unintentionally biased manual processes
With this level of visibility and transparency, automation is everything your employees need to be more engaged, and everything you want to effectively communicate with your workforce.
The Indeavor Solution
Each generation approaches work differently. Your recruitment strategies need to adapt to do the same. To put your company in a better position, it’s time to get serious about automating the scheduling process—demand is dictating that this will need to become the new normal eventually.
Workloud is our workforce management SaaS solution which offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling, time & attendance, and absence management system. Workloud integrates with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems to create a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data.
Learn more or request a demo here.
