3 secrets to increase retention among Gen Z employees

Daniel Blaser (00:00):

Hello everyone, my name is Daniel. I'm with Workstream, and it's my pleasure to be here today with Terese Fogleman. Therese is going to talk all about increasing retention among Gen Z employees, which I know is a hot topic right now. So Therese, welcome. I'm really excited to chat.

Terese Fogleman (00:17):

Thank you. Looking forward to our conversation, Daniel.

Daniel Blaser (00:20):

Yeah, absolutely. Me too. I'd love to hear, just to kick things off, like a brief background, your experience in the industry and maybe what you're currently doing.

Terese Fogleman (00:33):

Okay, sounds good. So I began my career with Chick-fil-A when I was a teenager, and I didn't know it was going to be a career, but I applied to work at a girls camp in North Georgia and worked for the family that actually owns Chick-fil-A, the Kathy family, and have the opportunity to get to meet them. The two summers that I was a camp counselor and got to know the founder, Truitt, his wife Jeanette, just beautiful people, very caring people, had an amazing heart for young people, and that touched my heart. And so when I left school and moved to Atlanta at that time, I looked for opportunities to continue to work with Chick-fil-A. And I did work at several different stores, one with a family that I used to be a part of, and I was an hourly employee, which we're going to talk about throughout this webinar.

(01:39):

And I learned so much for working for different owners of businesses, of how to treat employees and how not to treat employees. And it wasn't until really I was in my late thirties, early forties that I left the hourly wage earner status. So I just learned so much through all of that. And eventually I held different positions through throughout the years with Chick-fil-A in restaurants. And I eventually applied to become a franchise owner 13 years ago, and I've been doing that for 13 years, running a Chick-fil-A in a university town. And I would say probably 80% of the people who work for me are students. And it's taught me a lot about flexibility and working with their school schedules and caring for them. For many of them, it's their first job and it's their first time away from home.

Daniel Blaser (02:42):

Awesome. Well, what a great background and very cool to hear that you actually worked with the Kathy family and that I wasn't aware that your Chick-fil-A roots ran so deep, but that's very cool. Now, I know that in speaking to a lot of workstream customers, HR directors, I feel like there's been a little bit of a shift from 12 months ago. It was just hiring speeds, hire as fast as possible. We got to get people in these positions. And I feel like there's been a shift recently to a little bit towards hiring quality. And we don't need to just hire anyone as quickly as possible anymore. Now we can really hire the right person for the role. I'd love to hear what's your personal philosophy around hiring maybe with more long-term objectives in mind?

Terese Fogleman (03:39):

So I have always hired with a long game perspective. At the end, it builds a stronger organization. It builds stability into the organization. When you hire people that you think, okay, they're going to stick around, they're going to learn their job, they're going to become good at it, and one day they may even be a leader. So it surprises a lot of people to hear this, but I've done my own interviewing and hiring for the last 13 years. It's only been in the last two years that I've really worked to train an HR specialist to help with those interviews. She does probably 80% of the interviewing now, but I still do the interviews with people who are trying to come in leadership positions because I need to make sure they're a good fit with our existing leadership team. And going back to what you were saying about the hiring speed, that was a knee jerk reaction of so many employers of the great resignation because the well was dry for about eight to nine months.

(04:56):

The well was dry, and so you were hiring anybody who walked through the door simply to have enough staff to keep your business open. That has turned around. It is definitely improved. People started going back to work. I would say at least what we saw in our community last year or the beginning of this year, really the numbers of people coming back to work spiked. And then once again, I could say, okay, we're going to hire for quality because just like everybody else, for about eight months to a year, it was like, wow, just need to hire somebody. There were definitely days where I had to shorten my business hours or I even had to close because there weren't enough people to run the business. Those were tough days for everybody.

Daniel Blaser (05:54):

Yeah. Well, I'm glad we're no longer in those days. And it's interesting to hear that your experience, I feel like does align with what I've heard from a lot of other people. Now, before we jump in, we kind of frame this around three specific secrets or three specific ways that you can increase retention among Gen Z employees. Before we jump into those though, I had love to just talk a little bit about what sort of retention have you achieved at your Chick-fil-A location and how maybe that compares to the industry average.

Terese Fogleman (06:31):

Well, retention is something that I've always worked hard to have a low turnover rate. And prior to Covid, our retention was very strong. It was 65% annually. The average turnover rate in the restaurant industry prior to Covid was 120% annually. So we were seeing only 35% turnover versus 120% turnover. Now, again, during the Great resignation and right there at the end of Covid, I was seeing a hundred percent turnover in that year. I would call that the crunch year coming out of covid, straight into the great resignation, straight into inflation. It was definitely the highest turnover I've ever seen, but we're stabilizing back out and it's normalizing again in our retention is becoming much stronger again. Thank God.

Daniel Blaser (07:33):

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. For my quick math, without that anomalous year or two outside of that, you're achieving retention. That's three times or more than national average, which is pretty awesome. So I think everyone listening is probably like, oh, write that down. I need to pay attention. If that's the kind of numbers that Therese is achieving

Terese Fogleman (08:02):

It, it's a top priority for me.

Daniel Blaser (08:05):

Yeah, that's great.

Terese Fogleman (08:06):

Absolutely a top priority to hire well and train well and keep our team members in place.

Daniel Blaser (08:15):

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let's move on to the three ways, the three tactics, secrets or whatever we want to say to creating better retention among Gen Z. Do you want to kind of preview those three buckets and then we can jump into each one?

Terese Fogleman (08:32):

Yes, yes. And for those who are listening, just a little bit of information about Gen Z. That's considered anyone who was born 2001 and forward. So it's people basically who are 22 years old and younger, and for those who have hourly employees in things like restaurants, hotels, theme parks, all of that, that really is your labor pool, that age group. So that's what we're talking about when we talk about Gen Z and those three buckets that you were referring to. We talked about creating a culture of care, predictable scheduling and flexibility in scheduling.

Daniel Blaser (09:19):

Awesome. And thank you for yes, defining what Gen Z is. That's great context to add. Now, you said creating a culture of care is kind of the first one. Maybe we start with that. I'd love to hear what that means and also maybe how your own children kind of influence this one.

Terese Fogleman (09:41):

Okay. Well, I have four children, two stepchildren and two biological children. My biological children, I have two sons, and they're in their late twenties and early thirties, and they really did teach me a lot about caring. I came into motherhood with a decent amount of experience because I had my own babysitting and nanny business in high school and college. I really cared about children. I thought I was going to be a teacher. But as I started looking into that more, I just decided that wasn't my path. But I knew that I liked to work with children. And then with my children, both of them had issues when they were young. One had very strong A DHD, and the other was born with some physical handy caps that had to do with his hands and his stomach. So being faced with those challenges as a young mother, I had to be very innovative with how to raise them because one of the things that was going on when my oldest was a little boy is everybody was getting on Ritalin, kids were getting on Ritalin in preschool, and the research that I had done, I just thought, I don't want to go that path.

(11:18):

So I contacted a specialist and he said, there is a different path, but it takes a lot of planning and working to take this path, and it had to do with diet, exercise, certain types of attention exercises to teach him. And we walked that path, and he did very well with it, but it required more of me as a mother. And I learned to be very patient, to be innovative, to be very consistent, and to be caring with a child that sometimes was quite all over the place. But he is doing great. He's had his ups and downs, but he, he's doing great now. But younger brother was born with physical handicaps that required surgery and a special diet and all of that. So again, I was like, all right, I got to step up to the plate. And part of that for me is researching, trying to understand, putting in the work and helping each of my children to live the healthiest life that they could live with the cards that they were dealt.

(12:37):

So I grew a lot in patience and caring during those years. And it translates so well to working with young people now because one of the things about Gen Z that people sort of poke fun at, but it's true to extent, is they might be the most diagnosed generation that's ever lived. And when people come and they're sitting down with me and they're interviewing, they're telling me right out of the gate, I struggle with depression, I struggle with panic. I have a DHD, I'm on the autism spectrum. And none of that scares me because my life as a mother and working with young people and it's prepared me, I think, okay, well, you can work here. It'll be great. And if you need assistance, accommodations, whatever, what's important is that you learn the job and that you can do the job, but we're not going to look sideways at you if you have a DHD, welcome to the club. We've got 25 people here with a DHD. So it's really uniquely prepared me for a generation that does talk very openly about mental health issues, physical issues, all of that.

Daniel Blaser (14:10):

Yeah. Well, what an inspiring kind of background and really the way that you have connected your own experiences to now managing young people. It's very cool to hear that. And I had love to hear, obviously you mentioned the process of interviewing somebody and having them confide these certain challenges that they're going through, and you being willing to move beyond those and not just have those disqualify a potential employee, which I think is great. What are maybe a few other specific things that you have done as an owner to reinforce this culture of caring among your employees?

Terese Fogleman (15:02):

One of the main things is consistency and respect from the beginning. So I'll tell you that workstream has been such a help with that. So I moved to working with Workstream about 13 months ago after working with a different company for many years. But the ability to communicate quickly with potential employees in that turnaround time was great. And I stayed away from anything that had to do with texting for such a long time because it was just strange and digital, text 1, 2, 3 and then press no, then stop if you, but workstream was able to make that personal so we can text and respond immediately. So as soon as it pops up on my phone, reaching out to that person, letting them know we're interested, and oftentimes a personal text sent along that says, Hey, your resume looks fantastic, please come in and interview. So from the initial contact, there's a caring human element that's a part of it, and that goes through everything.

(16:17):

So when people communicate with us, we always respond. Now, not a hundred percent of the time, some people perhaps that we do not want to come in for an interview, but I would say all of those that we want to come in for an interview, they know that there's a person on the other side of that transaction, we have a name and we want to meet you. So it immediately establishes warmth. And then our interviews are, we take them seriously. We sit down with a person, we're there with them, we're on time, we have their resume in front of us, we have questions to ask them that I create the questions and change them up every six months. And they're questions to get to know that person. And they're aimed at their age group. What's your favorite type of music? What are you binging on right now on Netflix?

(17:16):

Where's the most interesting place you've ever visited? Who do you admire most in the world? So we're asking them things that they can relate to so that we can get to know them a little bit as a person. We're not just saying, so can you start work tomorrow? So we establish that personal connection. It follows through. If they're hired, they are paired with our onboarding specialist, and then they go straight into our training department where we have training managers that work with them. And everything is very laid out and understandable. And if you don't understand it, there's someone who will help you understand it. Once you get into our organization, you're not alone. And we let them know that you, you're not alone. We are not pampering them, but we're saying, Hey, we're here. We're here. We'll help you along the way. And that level of respect, it means so much to people in Gen Z because one of the things that I hear as the most common reason for people to leave a job is that they just had no communication with the managers that people, they didn't receive their schedules on time, they didn't have any consistency and the schedule that they received, they went into a job and said, I need 40 hours a week paying my own rent.

(18:47):

And then they consistently get scheduled eight hours a week, just massive miscommunication. And so that's not what they're experiencing with us. So a lot of people are like, yeah, I like this.

Daniel Blaser (19:05):

Yeah, I mean it makes sense that they do. I love so much of what you said about just establishing respect from the very beginning, that very first text message, that first touch point, and then having that persist throughout the interview process, onboarding, et cetera. Because I agree with you, I think you see all these headlines about Gen Z, this and Gen Z that, and before that it was Gen Y or millennials. There's always these kind of articles that pop up and try to paint different generations as one way or another. But ultimately we all value respect. And I think most of us will reciprocate when we feel like we're given respect. And I think it's kind of painting someone in a corner. If you dismiss them or you think that they don't need that respect as they're applying for a job because oh, they're only 20 or whatever it is, you're kind of starting off on the wrong foot. So anyway, I love what you said about doing exactly the opposite, showing them respect the whole way through.

Terese Fogleman (20:16):

And we find that majority of people who work for us show that respect to us too.

(20:26):

And it builds a culture of respect from the ground up. Because one of the things I tell people in the interview is, we are going to respect your time. We're going to respect your availability, and we ask for respect from you. If you have to change your availability, let us know. Communicate with us, we will work with you. We will be flexible as far as we can because there are situations where someone of course doesn't tell the truth in an interview. They say, I want to work 40 hours a week. And then you hire them in a certain wage rate and then two weeks later they say, oh, sorry, I've got another job. I'm only going to work 10 hours a week, but I really need you to keep me at that full-time wage rate. And so in situations like that, that's not respect coming from the other side, and we're just like, we can't accommodate that. But respect is so important. It's just so counterintuitive to treat young people with disrespect when these are the very people that you need to work in your business.

Daniel Blaser (21:37):

Yeah. Well now you kind of touched on this a little bit with some of the scheduling stuff and how that respect extends to if someone makes a specific request on a schedule hours, trying to accommodate that as much as possible. So maybe we jump into number two, which it was kind of this predictability and scheduling. So let's talk about maybe what that means specifically and how does predictable scheduling counter the other option, which is haphazard scheduling? How are they kind of different and maybe why do some stores, some businesses end up in kind of the haphazard scheduling rather than the predictable scheduling?

Terese Fogleman (22:33):

So I have been a part of scheduling for hourly employees for 19 years now, and I've learned a lot about scheduling, how to actually make a schedule, how to work around a schedule request. And I've had anywhere from a staff of 50 that I was scheduling to cover six days a week to a staff of 125. So it is very challenging, but I would say there are a couple of foundational things about scheduling. The very first one is that you must have a dedicated, committed, and intelligent person who does the scheduling. It might be more than one person in your business. If you're the owner and your business is small, it might be you, but I would recommend that it not be you because to build a good schedule takes four to six hours a week. When you have a staff of about 70, when you go over that number, it takes longer.

(23:40):

And a schedule is a lot like that game that we played when we were kids, Tetris, where you've got the blocks coming down, it is just a puzzle every week because every week you're starting out with people wanting different things. So the mechanics of a schedule are difficult, and to leave it to just anyone who has time to do it in a business, you're just going to be shooting yourself in the foot every week. And then the other thing about a schedule is it is what your employee depends upon. And if you don't come through for your employee, they are going to resent you and you can't get mad at them for resenting you when you are not fulfilling your end of the promise. So a schedule is like, it is the foundation for a business with hourly employees. So a committed person, very important one or two of those people in your business who makes that schedule every week or as we do now, we schedule two weeks out.

(24:53):

That works really well because our team members love it. It gives them more flexibility. They get that schedule and they're like, okay, I know what I'm doing for the next two weeks. This is great. But I think this is something that a lot of employers will or in HR directors will resonate with that if you get the wrong person doing your schedule, it can cause major cultural issues in your business because people can use a schedule to gain popularity, they can use it to do favors, and they can use it to punish other employees that they don't care for. I've seen that done in my business and I had to take the schedule away from that person. So you need to have somebody who's going to be objective and fair if you don't have an HR director than just a manager, that is not going to be petty because people who make the schedule, they hold a lot of power in a business, but it is just very important to figure out what your grid work is going to be, figure out what your consistency is going to be, whether that's one week, whether that's two weeks, and choosing a trustworthy objective person to do the schedule.

(26:11):

And again, if you're running the business, I don't know that I would encourage you to be that person because a schedule, it just takes time.

(26:23):

But it's so important because when you get that piece down, it creates such consistency in your business. And of course you'll always have employees that will bump up against that. They won't want to put in their schedule request on time, they won't want to respect time off, or they'll just come to you and say, I a trip to Disney, I already bought the tickets and I'm leaving. I don't care. But those become less and less issues, and you just are with an organized schedule, you're chugging ahead and you just deal with the little issues as they come up. But I will tell you that was a game changer when I realized when I had to take the schedule away from somebody years ago and I started doing it and I was like, yeah, this is going to change the culture no more. Hey, you're my friend, make sure I get every Saturday night off. It creates fairness for the entire staff to have an objective person doing that weekly or biweekly schedule.

Daniel Blaser (27:31):

Yeah, I can definitely see that. It obviously makes sense too, how that respect it ends up in the scheduling phase as well. They both are so connected. I would love to hear if you have any recommendations talking a little bit, you've kind of talked about the philosophy and how to do scheduling, right? Prioritizing it, choosing the right person to be in charge of it. Are there any tips or recommendations you can give about the nitty gritty process side, whether it's a specific platform or tool or how have you navigated those things to find a good solution?

Terese Fogleman (28:14):

Well, we have an internal app that we use. It's called Hot Schedules, and I don't think it's specific to Chick-fil-A. I think it's an application that anyone can use. And so in essence, you build it out, you would input, okay, I'm open these days of the week. I need people here from 5:45 AM till 10:30 PM You've got your hours that you need to fill. And then you look at your employees and see what their availability is for that week, and then you plug and play. And that is why it takes several hours, especially if you're like, you have a business like mine where most of your folks are part-time, time. I mean, we have a great full-time core and that helps us so much. You just plug in those 20 people who are working 40 hours a week, and that covers a large span, a large chunk of that grid. But then we're plugging in part-time people and those part-time people, many of them are students, so their schedule is changing every semester.

(29:37):

So it takes time to put the puzzle together. It's also very important to get your schedule out at the same time every week. That is another respect thing and leads to greater retention when your employees know, okay, I get my schedule on Thursday and I can make my plans with my friends and family. I can do what I need to do. Because when people are haphazard about scheduling, they kind of hold their employees hostage and then they get angry if they shoot that thing out on Sunday night and somebody had a class on Monday and they scheduled them, why aren't you here? Well, I didn't know until after I went to bed on Sunday night. I was supposed to be there tomorrow morning. So that haphazard scheduling, it just causes chaos and it builds resentment between the people who are running the business and the people who are working in the business. I think I would put it up there as one of, in the top three reasons for employees to resent their employers.

Daniel Blaser (30:57):

As you were chatting, I did a quick search and confirmed the hot schedules is it looks like an open platform for anyone to try that out. Definitely. I'm thinking to my first restaurant job in high school and our scheduling, if we had to take a day off, it was write it on a little slip of paper and put it in a coffee can. So it's good. I'm glad that we've gone far beyond that. That process was not

Terese Fogleman (31:24):

Great. No, all they need to do is use their mobile device to schedule, I mean, to request a time off.

Daniel Blaser (31:35):

Yeah. That's awesome. You talked a little bit about accommodating a student's schedule and how when you're talking about scheduling at the restaurant, how you need to be conscious and how that information of when their classes are and be able to accommodate that. I feel like that's a good segue into our third principle or our third tactic, which is flexibility. Can you talk a little bit about, I feel like it's very related to the scheduling piece, but how does the flexibility connect to the predictable scheduling?

Terese Fogleman (32:16):

Well, I think that my situation is unique being in a college town, but I know there's many businesses in our town that rely mostly on people in high school and college to staff them. So if you are in that situation, you learn to adapt your scheduling model to that. So it's like I have two tracks in my business. I have people who work full time. I have a group of them who this is their career and it's set. We've got Monday through Friday and two weeks of vacation, a year paid time off, and they're there the rest of the time. And then this other larger group that they're going to have one schedule in the fall, then they may leave for six weeks over Christmas break. And then I believe they have two more semesters. I went to a college with quarters, so I still get that mixed up.

(33:17):

I think it's two semesters at university and three at a quarter. But in the winter spring they have another schedule and then many of them go home for three months. So I learned a very long time ago. I have to ebb and flow with that, and that's why I focus so much on hiring because I find out months ahead of time, I'm asking people, what's your schedule? And this is how we'll schedule you, and then are you leaving for the summer? And I know that by mid April and then I decide how many people I need to hire and I start hiring so that I'm not shocked when summer comes along because my very first year Christmas break came along and 20 people told me they were leaving. And I was like, what? I only had 50 staff

(34:17):

Members. And I was like, oh my gosh, I guess I'll be living at the store and the children will be having Christmas at the store this year because I'm going to be working around the clock. So I only got caught by surprise one time. And then I said, okay, my schedule

(34:37):

Is the university schedule. So as the university goes, so we go, so we actually have the schedules for the two universities in town plus the high school. We have those up in our office and we use those when we're looking at scheduling because we're in a town that the university has a great football team and we're scheduling around those days too, football Saturdays. So it's really just being conscientious of who are your employees? What type of town are you living in, what are the events? It's having very much a global view so that you can organize your business accordingly.

Daniel Blaser (35:25):

It makes so much sense rather than trying to fight some of these things or trying to pretend they're not happening, that's just going to make everyone frustrated. So just in embracing reality, embracing some of those moments and those kind of set in stone schedules. Anyway, it makes a lot of sense.

Terese Fogleman (35:48):

And I don't resent that I need to do that because I'm grateful that there's a college with 22,000 students five minutes away, and I have a great talent pipeline because of that. So yeah, I'll work with it.

Daniel Blaser (36:08):

Yeah, yeah, great perspective. I'd love to hear about how kind of this willingness to be flexible, how has it impacted retention specifically that, and then maybe tied to that is how has it impacted referrals that you've gotten from other student employees, gen Z employees?

Terese Fogleman (36:31):

So we have a really good word of mouth referral system. One of the things that I do with that is if you bring a friend or family member into the business and we hire them, they stay for three months and they have good work performance, you get a $500 bonus. So people do it all the time. And it was really funny, a couple of years ago, there was a young man who worked for me who was a freshman in high school and he was recruiting his friends hard. He made like $2,000. And I was like, this is great, because he brought four or five of his friends into the business who all turned out to be really hardworking people. And they're all still there. They're seniors in high school now. So it really helps when you treat people in your business well, because tell their buds or their friends or their siblings who are coming up to a SU, they'll say, Hey, you need to work here.

(37:39):

They'll work with your schedule. They'll understand during finals week. So yeah, so the referral part of that has been good. It's always been good because people want their friends to work at a good place too. People we're all happier when we like where we work, whether we're 14 or we're 50, it impacts our life. And then with the flexibility, I would say that is very much a part of my strategy to have a caring culture. One of the things about people is that we are people. We're not machines and none of us run it a hundred percent all the time. What happens in our life impacts us. One of our sayings at work, which we took from a very smart business person, Ken Blanchard, is tough on processes, tender on people, excuse me, not processes, tough on results, tender on people. So we have a thought process, which I've trained my leaders to think this way as well as my human resource specialist. When something comes up in a person's life, we're going to do what we can to help 'em out.

(39:04):

But on the flip side of that, they have a responsibility to let us know and they have a responsibility to try to find coverage. And of course we've got people who lie to us about, I was sick, but of course they were hungover. It was Friday night and they're conveniently sick every Saturday morning. So we deal with that too. We're not living in la la land, but we have things that happen all the time with our students. A parent might pass away, a friend might get in a car crash, somebody may end up in the hospital. We have students that have dealt with epilepsy, heart disease, different things, and we just come alongside them and we're like, okay, this happened. We'll help you find some coverage there, bring a doctor's note, and then we can ease you back into the schedule. We treat our team as individuals because they are individuals, and it creates such a sense of loyalty on their part because life is pretty difficult and a lot of people just don't care. And you don't always find that out until you go to college and you're like, wow, nobody really cares about me except my parents. So we have a family atmosphere in that sense, and really we don't get taken advantage of very much.

Daniel Blaser (40:37):

Yeah, I think that's great. And I feel like that's an overarching theme of a lot of what you're saying is just this reciprocated respect is the more that you show it, the more that you receive it. And when you're having a challenge, a personal challenge in your family, whatever it is, it's just this list of things that you're trying to resolve. So for you as an employer to remove one of those things, it's like you don't need to be stressing about losing your job at the same time. It's just such a great perspective, such a great way to do it. Yeah, I think that's awesome. I'm looking at our list of questions here, and I feel like we've covered everything and I think that everyone watching has gotten a lot out of this. I know I have personally, but I would love to hear just in summary or if you wanted to leave one final perspective or takeaway with everyone about increasing retention among their Gen Z employees, what would you say?

Terese Fogleman (41:49):

I would say that this is a generation that expects to be cared for. And if as an employer that drives you crazy, I would say start looking at it differently. And I do have a great book that I want to reference. It's a book by a gentleman, his name is Tim Elmore, and it's called A New Kind of Diversity and Making the Different Generations on Your Team a Competitive Advantage. And Tim is a, I would call him a personal friend. I only see him maybe once a year or so, but I've gone through some of his training in Atlanta and he has such a heart for creating unity among generations. And one of the fascinating things is right now in the workplace, there are five generations. So there are people 80 years old to 14 years old in the workplace, and particularly if it's an hourly employee situation like Lowe's or a grocery store or a Chick-fil-A restaurant or Walmart.

(43:11):

And that is causing a lot of problems because people are setting themselves against one another rather than trying to understand each other and help each other do their jobs well. And I'm not advocating, we just sit around and try to understand each other all the time. That's not what I'm talking about. I mean, I have a very high performing business, a successful business, but we do take the time to create unity and to talk through things, and when people have issues, we talk with 'em. So that's what I would just say when it comes to Gen Z, that they just expect people to care. And if you don't, they're out of there and you cannot accommodate everything.

(44:09):

There is the almost sort of caricature of a Gen Z person that people like to bring out as they're entitled, they're selfish, they're this, they're that, they're stuck. Their head is stuck in their fall and all that kind of stuff. Well, every generation has a caricature, but to be realistic, you need to work with the people who are applying for your jobs. I think if you wanted to work on attracting and retaining Gen Z employees, look at your hiring practices. Start with your hiring practices. Start at the beginning, look at your job descriptions, see what you're putting out there. And is it something that, is it too wordy? Is it too technical? Is it eight paragraphs When you need to understand that so many people, they're going to read one paragraph and oftentimes they're only going to read the first sentence. And you need to have pay transparency and post the pay and post the benefits. And really we can succeed with Gen Z employees. Every generation is different. And the fascinating thing is every generation thinks that the generation after them is terrible. That's one of the things I've really enjoyed reading about the Tim Elmore book, that he has a quote in there that talks about someone is talking about children are rude, and I can't believe they don't do this, and they don't do that. And it was Socrates, so

(46:00):

A couple thousand years ago that an older person was saying, this new generation, they're so terrible.

(46:06):

So I would say work on changing your perspective and do some research. Try to understand the people who work for you and don't just write them off. It is difficult and it's real. I mean, I know I have really not always been good at it in my own home. My kids and I have butted heads really hard at times because I expected them to think more like me than how they think. And it is caused serious conflict at times. But they've challenged me to be open-minded and be practical. So that's what I would encourage employers out there. Be open-minded. Don't fear that if you are open minded minded, that you're somehow giving in, you're not giving in, you're making your business work with the most current generation.

Daniel Blaser (47:14):

It's great advice. And yeah, I definitely love so much of what you just said. Before we jump off, I wanted to give you the chance, you mentioned earlier that you're looking for opportunities to help other businesses improve some of their culture. And a lot of the things we've talked about, if you wanted to mention an email address, I can put it up on the screen in case anyone wants to chat more about that.

Terese Fogleman (47:41):

Okay, thank you. So a new venture in my life is I am doing just part-time speaking and training specifically to work with people who have smaller businesses and have hourly employees who are looking to build a culture of care and looking to be successful with working with Gen ZA team members team. So you can reach out to me if you have any interest. I would be happy to come to talk to you or talk to your leaders or just email with you. And my email address is Therese fogelman1@gmail.com.

Daniel Blaser (48:23):

Awesome. Well, I definitely hope some people reach out and if nothing else, I will probably be contacting you in a couple more months to hear another great perspective. This has been really awesome, and thanks again for sharing your wisdom and experience with everyone.

Terese Fogleman (48:41):

Thank you. It was a pleasure.