Danielle Ross is a 26-year-old who lives in a small town in upstate New York. She describes herself as artistic and creative. She paints in her spare time and she has worked as a mermaid for children’s parties, swimming in a tail that she has made herself.
Ms. Ross, who identifies as LGBTQ, couldn’t imagine having a job where she had to downplay her identity or her skills, so she was thrilled when Legoland New York Resort, a theme park in Goshen, NY, hired her to to be the first female master builder. Ms. Ross has been given a lot of freedom to use Lego bricks to create miniature cities in the park, taking advantage of her artistic side and her desire to promote diversity and inclusion.
“I’ve made people of all different races and nationalities and religions and everything I can think of because I want everyone to feel represented,” she said. Her miniature figures are blind and plus-size. They have prosthetic legs and wear burqas. Recently, she created a Hasidic Jew.
The creative freedom has made Ms. Ross love her job – and that’s the point. Over the past year, Legoland New York has joined a growing number of companies working to create an environment that is attractive and stimulating to younger workers and that embraces who they are and where they want to go. By recruiting Gen Z workers — born in the late 1990s and early 2000s — employers are looking to tap into their energy and creativity as well as offset a dire labor shortage, with some 11 million open jobs in May, according to the report. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Last fall, Legoland began allowing employees such as Ms. Ross to have piercings, tattoos and colored hair. A national catering company has started experimenting with a four-day working week. The healthcare company GoodRx allows employees to work not only from home, but anywhere in the country, and engages an outside company on request to provide ad hoc offices. Other companies carefully lay out career paths for their employees and offer comprehensive mental health benefits and financial advice.
The goal is not only to get younger workers through the door, but also to keep them in their jobs, no easy task. Surveys show that younger workers change jobs more often than other generations. But with these efforts, many companies have thus far avoided the labor shortages faced by their competitors.
“We currently have more than 1,500 employees,” said Jessica Woodson, Legoland’s chief human resources officer, “and I can confidently say that at least half are Gen Zers.”
At Sage Hospitality Group, which operates more than 100 hotels, restaurants and bars across the country, 20 percent of employees are Generation Z members.
“We need this staff,” said Daniel del Olmo, the president and chief operating officer of the company’s hotel management division. “We recognize that Gen Zers seek different things than other generations, and we’re trying to adapt to that.”
After the pandemic began, the company became acutely aware that many younger employees wanted a healthy work-life balance. In fact, studies such as one recently conducted by ADP Research Institute show that many employees would quit if an employer demanded a full-time return to the office.
Sage Hospitality is now testing a four-day workweek at select accommodations for roles such as cooks, housekeepers and receptionists. These jobs were the hardest to fill during the pandemic, and the company has about 960 job openings.
The four-day work week has helped, Mr del Olmo said. “Instead of having this negative feeling, I have to go to work because I have to earn a living,” he said, “suddenly it is, I want to work because I can combine it with my life that I love.”
Employees at the company’s home office in Denver are allowed to work remotely at least one day a week, and all employees are allowed to bring their dog to work one day a week.
“A team member takes care of the dog when an employee needs to clean a room or show a guest something,” said Mr. del Olmo.
Mason Mills, 26, a marketing manager for one of the company’s hotels in Denver, said the pandemic had changed her generation’s perspective.
“We started to see that having a career is incredibly important, but also living the life you’ve been given,” she said. “Allowing dogs in the office and having a work-from-home schedule to meet some of those needs shows that the business is evolving.”
According to Roberta Katz, an anthropologist at Stanford who studies Generation Z, younger people and previous generations see the workplace fundamentally differently.
“American Gen Zers have, for the most part, known only an internet-connected world,” wrote Dr. Katz in an email. Partly because they grew up using collaborative platforms like Wikipedia and GoFundMe, she said, younger employees came to see work “as something that was no longer a nine-to-five obligation in the office or classroom.”
Andrew Barrett-Weiss, the workplace experience director of GoodRx, which offers discounts on prescriptions, said giving employees that autonomy and flexibility had helped the company close more than one deal. GoodRx not only allows employees to be completely remote, but also to have a desk wherever they want to travel in the United States.
GoodRx also provides financial advisors for employees. “A Gen Zer may not have enough money to have an investment account, but they can have this,” Barrett-Weiss said. Career coaching and fertility benefits are also offered.
“We’re trying to solve big health problems,” added Mr. Barrett-Weiss, “so we need the freshest, young perspectives we can get.”
Sydney Brodie, 27, an account supervisor at Le CollectiveM, a communications agency based in New York, was delighted when the company owner told her she would give employees a home in the Hamptons in July, where they would bond with each other and their customers.
“I’ve been so loyal to the company,” Ms. Brodie said, “but now I’m like, why look elsewhere?”
She was also given a membership to Soho House, an exclusive private club, partly as a means of networking. “My company sees what I need as a person,” she said. “They give me the tools to excel personally and professionally.”
Kencko, a food service with a subscription to fruit and vegetables, focuses on mental health. All employees, as well as members of their households, get six sessions with a therapist, not an insignificant benefit as hourly rates for such services have risen to $400 in some parts of the country.
Still other companies are trying to respond to the desire of younger employees to grow in their careers. In a LinkedIn questionnaire this year, 40 percent of young workers said they were willing to accept a 5 percent pay cut to work in a position that offered advancement opportunities.
That’s why Blank Street Coffee, a chain of 40 coffee shops in the United States and England, is making career growth a part of its recruiting talk, said Issam Freiha, its chief executive. Employees who want to grow in the company are shown a clear path that they can follow.
After Alex Cwiok, a Blank Street barista in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who has a passion for coding, told her manager she wanted to sit in front of a computer, “he told the seniors, and they eventually took me to the corporate office, ” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought in a million years that one day I would be plucked off the field and given a desk and a salary.”
Ms. Cwiok, 27, now treats customer emails and reviews as an aide to customer success. She is also working on updating the brand’s app.
For baristas who see their jobs at Blank Street as an afterthought, the company helps them take their next step. “We use our network of alumni and investors to get people where they want to go,” said Mr Freiha. “We have a barista on a TV show.”
Blank Street constantly asks his younger baristas what they want. “We have to keep innovating,” said Mr Freiha. “This generation doesn’t want to work for something that is old.”