Business NewsProfessional Comment

Gen-Z & Care: Improving the Workplace to Attract the Under-25s

By Becky Mundie, RotaCloud (www.rotacloud.com)

Under-25s (Generation Z) have much to offer the world of care, especially as it progresses. In a constantly adapting industry, young people are key to helping care companies grow with the times, especially surrounding technology.
However, young people make up only 11% of care workers. Why is this? What is keeping Gen-Z from joining and staying in the world of care?

With the average care worker aged 45 and over a quarter of the workforce potentially choosing retirement in the next 10 years, there aren’t enough young workers to pick up the many mantles left behind. With social care already having the highest number of vacancies in the UK, care providers cannot afford for this number to grow and for their workforces to decrease.

Supporting service users is no 9-5 or Monday to Friday job. This alone can be off-putting to the under-25s, who may juggle education and prioritise a larger social life.

This is what Gen-Z values. They have entered the career world understanding the importance of mental health and their worth in the workplace – and they are often viewed negatively for this. But they couldn’t be more correct.

Just as care services get a bad rep for offering a poor work-life balance, Gen-Z gets a bad rep for prioritising a healthy one. You can see the dilemma. So, how can this be fixed?

Irregular, unsociable hours, poor workload management, and low resources can easily lead to poor staff retention. From the most recent findings in 2021-2022, care saw a high turnover rate of 53% for those under 20 years old while care workers over 60 had a rate of 24%.

It’s common for shift-based workers to feel they have very little control over their working lives, leading them to accommodate the shifts they have no say over. Especially due to last-minute scheduling and changes, many shift workers often must change or completely scrap personal plans – or wait until after shifts are allocated – resulting in lives only revolving around work.

As much as someone can be a work-first individual, removing time for personal and social lives – and simply downtime – can be damaging in the long run, causing stress and mental health issues. Factor in graveyard shifts or being on-call, and the feeling is greatly exacerbated.

Is there any wonder, when combining this with the high workload and responsibility that comes with care, that the under-25s – the generation valuing mental health – make up so few care workers?

There are simple ways to remedy this, however.

Simply offering flexibility, allowing staff to have a say in the days and hours they work, and offering the ability to oversee shifts further in advance, can make all the difference.

Implementing digital automation allows staff to feel more in control of their work and lives. This alone can greatly improve employee experience.

Surprisingly, employee experience can go hand-in-hand with updated technology – and what goes hand-in-hand with technology? The generation that has grown up with it.

Not only does digital automation benefit your service users, employees, and overall business growth, but it will also make your workplace more attractive to the new generation – who, once joining, can make adopting these new technologies and processes all the smoother.

Under-25s are the future, as well as new technologies. It’s time to start investing in both.