How to get the most from Millennial and Generation Z employees | Research News @ Vanderbilt | Vanderbilt University

How to get the most from Millennial and Generation Z employees | Research News @ Vanderbilt | Vanderbilt University



Millennials—those who were born in the 1980’s and 1990’s—have emerged as the largest age cohort in today’s U.S. workforce, bringing digital savvy and an “always-on” mentality to most jobs.

Yet, millennials and Generation Z, who were born in the late 1990’s and 2000’s, are also challenging traditional employers with their professional restlessness and increased need for feedback and mentoring.

They work hard, they work all hours of the day. But if they are not passionate, good luck with that.”“When millennials are passionate, there’s no one better,” said Cherrie Clark, professor of the practice of management at the Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management. “They work hard, they work all hours of the day. But if they are not passionate, good luck with that.”

New attitudes

Clark’s research has found that there are many reasons why Generation Z and millennial attitudes about work are different from Gen X and Baby Boomers—growing up in turbulent times and with ever-present technology are just two—and those reasons lead to some compelling evidence that managers need to treat this generation differently.

Because millennials are often more comfortable with technology than their managers, supervisors might feel that their traditional influence over these younger employees is diminished.

But Clark said there are things managers can do to engage their younger workforce, such as providing regular feedback that they are accustomed to receiving in other aspects of their lives, especially in social media.

“What they are really looking for is challenge and recognition,” Clark said. “You can create challenge by special projects…If they are passionate about it, they will work around the clock to make it happen.”

Making progress at work

Recognition doesn’t have to mean constant praise; it can also come in the form of helping these employees gain skills so that they feel like their career is progressing. That’s a huge concern for millennials, whose attitudes about work were greatly shaped by the economic recession and the student loan crisis, Clark said.

“Our millennials are more highly educated than any generation in the past,” Clark said. “They find themselves with more education, higher expectations, but actually the median income for millennials has fallen.”

Clark is teaching a new two-day course for executives designed to teach them how to inspire and retain their millennial workers.

What Every Woman Must Know: Parenting and Working Should Never Be The Death of Women : Family Life : Parent Herald

What Every Woman Must Know: Parenting and Working Should Never Be The Death of Women : Family Life : Parent Herald





Women who work 60 hours per week or more over 30 years actually triple their risk of cancer, heart trouble, diabetes, and arthritis according to a report on The Ohio State University. At just 40 hours, the risk begins to climb, and takes a decidedly bad turn over 50. On the other hand, men can naturally get healthier the longer they work. Researchers believe that this is due to the fact that women face additional pressure in their home lives.

For couples, most especially those with kids, it is the woman who usually does nearly all domestic chores. A research of twenty-two developing nations revealed that men do thirty-four minutes of housework and cooking for every female hour, and provide twenty-four minutes of childcare to a woman's hour as cited on Telegraph. The 15th worst is the UK pay gap at 17.4%. This means that women are not only literally killing themselves working, but also doing it on the cheap.

This system is obviously not working for anybody, for both men and women, as nobody wants his wife/colleague or 50% of the population thrombo-ing out because of the way society is structured. Thus, there is really a need to put a stop dismissing all this stuff as merely a "women's issue" and begin talking about it as a collective problem, a dilemma that must be immediately addressed.

What Do Women’s Career Paths Really Look Like?

What Do Women’s Career Paths Really Look Like?

What Do Women’s Career Paths Really Look Like?

We know that women’s presence in the workforce has increased dramatically over the last several decades, but is it true that all women are working more? And if not, which women are most likely to work full-time across adulthood?

Typically, researchers answer these questions by taking a snapshot of women’s lives at one point in time to see whether or not women are working for pay. While this certainly tells researchers a lot about changes in employment – many more women are working today than in previous years – we wondered what this looked like over the course of a work career. We wanted to identify whether – and which – women were working full-time for years at a time, and which women were staying out of the paid workforce across adulthood.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we looked for “group-based pathways” – broader patterns that emerge over time – for women’s workforce participation across their twenties, thirties, and forties. The data came from annual (and then bi-annual) surveys with women who were born between 1957 and 1964 and recruited into the study in 1979. The women are now in their fifties; our dataset spans from 1982 to 2010.

What we found, in research recently published in Demography, is surprising: over 90% of Baby-boomer women spent much of their 20s, 30s, and 40s engaging in paid work. Moreover, 60% of the women followed what we would think of as a traditionally “male” work pathway—they worked full-time or engaged in “overwork” (working over 50 hours a week) through middle adulthood.

Our long-term view also shows a very different picture of women’s time spent out of the workforce. A snapshot of women’s employment – examined in any one calendar year – shows that about 20 percent of mothers were not employed in a given year, but our research suggests a much smaller subset follows this pattern long-term. Only about eight percent of women in our sample followed a “stay-at-home” pathway for the majority of these years.

Women’s work patterns do remain diverse, with about 30 percent of women reporting that they worked either part-time or intermittently over this period. Over time, some women increased their work hours, others decreased their work hours, and still others worked full-time in their twenties, left the workforce for a period, and then returned to full-time work by their forties. It seems likely that most of these strategies were used to accommodate women’s greater childbearing and childrearing responsibilities.

This leads us to our second question: Why do some women work steadily while others do not? Surprisingly, we found that women with the greatest financial needs – those who experienced poverty when they were young, were unmarried and lacked access to a second income, or were less educated – appeared to face the greatest barriers to continuous full-time work. While it is often common to think that women work because they “need” to do so for their families, our work supports findings from Sarah’s first book, which argues that women who have the greatest financial needs are the least able to find steady full-time work. Women who worked “like men” – that is, full-time for the majority of the years we examined — were more advantaged both during their childhood and throughout young adulthood relative to their peers.

Even some part-time work options seemed limited to more-advantaged women. White, well-educated women were more likely to enter, leave, then re-enter the workforce than were women of color or their less-educated white peers. Importantly, this suggests that women’s work “choices” are more narrowly constrained than is often imagined. While full-time work is often seen as a necessity, our research shows that stable full-time employment is an accrued advantage that requires that women enter the workforce early on with a specific set of advantages to which not all women have access.

We think our research points to two important takeaways:

• A majority of women – beginning with the Baby-Boomers – work full-time across adulthood. A nontrivial proportion of women return to work after their children are a bit older. Yet a stream of research suggests that women’s commitment to paid work remains under suspicion, particularly when they have children. We need to move away from outdated understandings of how women work.
• Supportive work-life policies matter: women who stayed employed were advantaged in many ways, which suggests that they were also more likely to work in places where they had access to better work-life policies. Extending paid parental leave policies, paid sick leave policies, and universal childcare to all, not just people privileged enough to work for companies that provide these “benefits,” may expand the workforce and help both women and men maintain employment.

https://hbr.org/2016/06/what-do-womens-career-paths-really-look-like?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

This Is The Surprising Career Path Of Many Women | MONEY

This Is The Surprising Career Path Of Many Women | MONEY

Using data from women born between 1957 and 1969, researchers from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Akron examined broad patterns in women’s participation in the workforce. They found that, contrary to popular belief, 60% of women followed a traditionally “male” career path, working full-time or more than 50 hours a week up until roughly age 50, they wrote in the Harvard Business Review.

Although women are often criticized and sometimes penalized for leaving the workforce to start a family, the researchers’ findings suggest that’s not quite the case. About 20% of mothers were not employed in any given year, and in the long term, just 8% of women studied followed the trajectory of a stay-at-home mom for the majority of those years.

The research also found large variety in women’s working habits. About 30% of women work part-time or intermittently, while some altered their work hours throughout their careers. Others worked full-time earlier in their professional life, left for a period, and returned to full-time work by the time they reached their forties. The researchers reasonably attributed these gaps to childbearing and rearing needs.

Interestingly, the women with the greatest financial need—defined as those who grew up in poverty, did not have access to a second income in adulthood, or were less educated—were less likely to work full-time continuously. While common sense might dictate that women work out of necessity to support their families, the study instead found that those with the greatest need were the least successful in finding regular full-time employment (and even some part-time work). Meanwhile, those women who worked full-time during the majority of the years studied enjoyed more privileged childhoods.

The employment trajectory also favored educated white women, who were more likely than women of color or less-educated white peers to reenter the workforce after taking time off. Their findings raise the interesting point that stable full-time employment is an advantage rather than something that can be earned by any women.

The researchers’ proposed solution? Expanding work-life policies, like paid parental leave and universal childcare, to all companies—which would expand the workforce and help both men and women stay employed.