How to implement DEI initiatives in your company for Gen Z coaching

Indian gig economy includes Gen Z and millennials. 19-25 years old professionals add up to 48% of the complete gig workers, and 26-40 years old professionals  account for 32% of the group, as per Taskmo Gig Index. The gig economy is on the rise! 

By 2025, India is estimated to have 90 million gig jobs in a 5-trillion economy with 1.25% of GDP, observing a whopping market size of $40 Billion. 

Today’s gig economy comprises minorities, women, people of all color, and individuals of different sexual orientations. Though it is quite a long way, the gig economy’s transition will provide Gen Z with a workplace with more differences and challenges. This raises the importance of DEI culture in a company with Gen Z employees, majorly for the health, development, and productivity of the company from a business and humane point-of-view.

Offering an inclusive and diverse work environment to Gen Z

Gen Z’s expectations at work are value-driven and supported by their personal goals and morals. Data reveals by 2025; the Gen Z workforce will be around 27% of the total workforce.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are highly relevant and important to Gen Z members. According to a study, 67% of the Gen Z workforce experienced bias depending on gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. With such grave numbers, Gen Z raises the standards in their expectations. 

They expect open and respectful communication and emphasize a racially, sexually, and ethnically diverse workplace. 

So, Gen Z chooses a culture of trust, acceptance of differences, and transparent communication that helps support diversity. You can attract and retain diverse talent if your company culture aligns with workforce diversity.

Gen Z prefers to engage in companies with an inclusive culture. 83% suggest being engaged when their company fostered an inclusive work culture, while only 60% were engaged in a company that did not support it.

What role does coaching play?

A few stats on millennial-employee engagement and loyalty reveal that half of the workforce between 18 and 25 years of age are likely to leave their job in the first years. And 70% of millennials say an organization’s sustainability will affect their retention decision, and 64% say that benefits play a vital role in loyalty. It also said that only 29% of millennials have a high work engagement rate, while 55% are not engaged and 16% remain actively disengaged.

What’s important to address in the above numbers is that Gen Z is changing how organizations engage their talent and helping maintain work-life balances. In the Gen Z era, the old school training methodology using PPT slides has given way to experiential learning and coaching. Coaching Gen Z through behavioral therapy, group learning, social learning, role play, upskilling, relaxation techniques, inserting DEI initiatives, and gamification doesn’t just enhance engagement and retention but also boosts innovation and creativity.

The diversity in Indian businesses, markets, customers, and employees has vastly transformed the perspective of what skills a leader should have to lead efficiently. While nurturing the Gen Z staff, leaders should adopt a leadership coaching method as nothing helps drive Gen Z better than the inner voice. The DEI coaching initiatives are mixed with experiential learning as they support advanced knowledge through teamwork and self-analysis. But, what do we mean when we say “coaching”? 

According to the ICF, “coaching means working with clients in an innovative way that helps them enhance their personal and professional abilities in today’s complex and unexpected environment.”

Ways how coaching can boost Gen-Z retention

There are distinctive ways in which executive coaching for Gen-Z can help enhance their retention and engagement. 

• Clarity: Executive coaching allows leaders to ascertain their position in the company and boosts interaction processes to develop a collaborative and shared environment.
• Commitment: Coaching aims to increase the commitment level to help employees succeed. It enhances their skills to develop a better relationship with colleagues and employees. 
• Courage: Coaching boosts leader’s courage to manage interpersonal and organizational problems by being interactive and open. It also helps avoid all confrontations and allows leaders to deal with frontal challenges.
• Challenge: Coaches enable leaders to challenge their potential and go out of their comfort zone to maximize efficiency, thereby nurturing their skills to develop positive and resilient behavior.
• Compassion: Executive coaching helps leaders develop a transparent and positive workplace environment, thus becoming more approachable and developing a culture of transparency, honesty, compassion, and trust, wherein Gen Z can learn and respect each other.

Establishing an inclusive environment for Gen Z through Coaching to boost their Productivity, Engagement and Skill Development

Research suggests that Gen Z and millennials are hardworking and more than 73% of them work for over 40 hours every week. Gen Zs are long-distance runners with their eyes on their goals, planning their next move quite efficiently. Paychecks don’t motivate this generation; they look for a purpose, respect, progressive culture, and motivation. Hence, companies need to know what inspires them to draw retention strategies.

Coaching emerges as a vital tool to drive, inspire and retain this lot. It also ensures the company’s leadership is abled and well-adjusted to lead the company to success. Here are some DEI-supported coaching strategies to drive Gen Z at work and boost their engagement, productivity, and retention.

• Develop interpersonal and incredible cognitive social abilities

Gen Z relies on connectivity with technology. While they add an extraordinary series of technical skills, it is difficult to avoid their trepidations to communicate with peers and develop interpersonal relations. 

Gen Z acknowledges the significance of in-person interaction while acknowledging the challenges simultaneously. Efficient organizational coaching helps them develop social-cognitive skills such as problem-solving, collaboration, strategic thinking, and critical thinking. 

In a workplace culture where around 92% of HR professionals lay stress on social and emotional abilities, it is important to develop coaching tactics to bridge the gap.

• Enhance tacit knowledge

Tacit knowledge involves coaching specific to their job roles, practices, and other companies’ refinements like culture. Tacit knowledge helps with leadership development and boosts long-term success. So, coaching helps Gen Z focus on this too.

They need to ensure that, along with technical knowledge, they become skilled and self-reliant and align with the company’s goals. Such workforces improvise with time and recognize improvement opportunities quickly.

• Make it contextual 

Gen Z has a questioning nature. They are prompted by relevance and situation. They are invested in learning and want careers, not mere jobs.

Hence companies should offer them learning opportunities with rigid possibilities for leadership development. Coaching for Gen Z plays a major role. 

Organizations require focus and result-oriented coaching interactions. UExcelerate AI-based platform offers on-demand online coaching services to aid the coaching process by ensuring the perfect coach coaches the employee.

Actionable insights on performance, engagement, skill growth, and more can be enhanced with high-quality coaching to help the generation grow well. When their personal transformational aligns with the organizational goals, it boosts their engagement and retention.

• Unlock the potentials of Gen Z

Every individual adds a new skill to the team, and when joined together, it works as a powerhouse of accomplishments. Coaching team helps them align and coordinate with the company’s goals. Gen Z demographic should account for upskilling. Along with skill upgrading, they also need behavioral skill upgrades to prepare the workforce for new roles/

By understanding the diversity of your team, leaders can upskill them individually. Each employee will have their own thought and knowledge base; thus, by putting the diversity in an inclusive environment, you can ensure a sense of belongingness and foster engagement. 

Value and validate the skills of every team member, and don’t judge them. It will help break down barriers and foster inclusion and open communication.

• Bringing diversity into the workplace

Companies should boost their diversity strategy to meet Gen Z’s expectations, providing a more collaborative environment that offers open participation from people having different viewpoints and ideas.

Coaching helps companies bring out and bear everyone’s talent, minus the traditional diversity viewpoint. It helps teams develop a safe space where people from all background, races, and genders are encouraged to support team building so that everyone remains connected and avoid biases and conflicts. 

Coaching encourages diverse thinking and will help nurture a diverse and inclusive work culture in a workplace.

• Coach them about diversity and inclusion

Gen Z employees have a different viewpoint of diversity at work compared to older generations. Diversity and inclusion are not just about age, religion, community, gender, and physical talent. It is about getting different viewpoints accepted and valued.

Young workers define diversity as a blend of experiences, perspectives, ideas, and opinions, not just underrepresented racism and gender biases.

Coaching helps narrow down the difference and supports better team alignment and overall improvement by offering effective communication, supporting peer learning, and aiding knowledge sharing. It explains diversity is all about integrating people of different demographics into one work environment.

If things would have been like that the Great Resignation situation may not have followed.

Wrapping Up

Leaders can easily retain their Gen Z employees by choosing an effective executive coaching strategy. Using the right coaching, leaders can get the knowledge to include DEI initiatives in their daily work life and provide employees with an environment that supports equality, diversity, and inclusiveness. It offers them a chance to openly share the issues with their workforce and learn and address their issues to provide them with a culture that promotes engagement, productivity, and skill development.

Coaching has come as a comprehensive and robust approach to ensure leaders are sufficiently groomed to transform their Gen Z staff and enhance productivity in their company. With learning and development getting highly customized, you can hire well-trained external coaching to help employees enhance their learning journeys and gain the most from it. Talent development has become highly personalized, data-driven, and digital and uExcelerate understands all needs and hence offers specialized coaches to meet your goals.