Young employees are more checked out at work than a wine mom on her third glass of rosé. Unfortunately, the consequences of having a disengaged workforce are a much bigger headache than a pink wine hangover.

As the generation born between 1997 and 2012 continues to join the workforce and grow professionally, workplace experts believe there are some ways employers can step up to engage them and retain them better.

Zoom in. Young workers have experienced a drop in engagement, according to a January 2023 Gallup poll. In 2020, overall employee engagement dropped four points, to 32% active engagement, with young millennials and Gen Z experiencing a bigger dropoff than older workers. According to the report, this disengagement comes from younger workers feeling less cared about, lacking someone who encourages their development, and feeling as though they have no opportunities to grow at work.

And Gen Z is more likely than older generations to quit their jobs without another lined up, according to a 2023 report from Oliver Wyman Forum, so engaging them effectively is imperative. The study also found that 70% of workers who consider themselves loyal are still actively or passively looking for work elsewhere.

Communication and gratitude. Younger employees don’t have to be in the office to be engaged, Orin Burg, HR manager at Fiverr, told HR Brew. The Gallup poll found that remote, in-person, and hybrid workers all experienced a decrease in engagement. For Fiverr, a company with employees in 10 countries from Israel to India, as well as the US, a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators is key to consistent engagement.

Intrinsic motivators may include a pat on the back or a note to acknowledge a job well done or express how appreciated an employee is.

Keep reading.—KP

While many companies grapple with RTO policies and procedures, one tech company made that decision very simple, by making like Billy Joel and “Movin’ Out”…of all of its offices.

Nylas is a decade-old communications software company whose growth pattern has been fairly typical of a tech startup. It launched in San Francisco, then opened a New York office because that’s where an executive was based and started hiring team members there. Then it opened an office in Denver and a couple of international cities as it grew out other functions like sales and customer success.

“Different places have different concentrations of folks with different skill-sets,” CEO and co-founder Gleb Polyakov told HR Brew. “[We felt] we’d like to have access to that as we grow as a business.”

When the pandemic hit, the company had five offices, including London and Toronto. As people started working from home, Nylas employees started migrating away from the offices.

“What we saw is that the folks had diffused a bit,” Polyakov said. Many of them “found that they get a better quality of life by moving outside the city to a suburb or a place that has more land.”

Have you seen rent in SF (or New York or London or Toronto)? After realizing that most employees did not live close to an office, Polyakov and the Nylas leadership team considered the financial feasibility of keeping an office space.

“We had this budget that we were spending on physical assets…but that budget started to make less and less sense as we got more distributed,” Christine Spang, co-founder and chief technology officer, told HR Brew. “At some point last year…we realized that the amount of support spending that we were doing was very unbalanced.”

They decided more funds should be spent on enabling remote teams and gathering employees.

Keep reading.—AK

Welcome to our regular HR advice column, Ask a Resourceful Human. Here to answer all of your burning questions is Massella Dukuly, the head of workplace strategy and innovation at Charter, a media services company that aims to transform the workplace. Dukuly has trained over 10,000 leaders at startups and global enterprises, including Squarespace and the New York Times. Sign up for Charter’s free salary transparency playbook here.

Got a question for us? Use this form to submit it.

Employees have expressed interest in more learning and development, but we’re not sure how to evaluate providers. Do you have any suggestions?

Learning and development programs can be an investment with priceless benefits. But if done badly, L&D can be a big investment that goes down the drain.

Evaluating a provider has what I’ll call an “inside-outside” approach, which means focusing on your needs (the inside), while also focusing on the provider (the outside). I recommend starting from the inside so that your provider’s success criteria are clearer from the beginning.

You’ll want to do a listening tour, or survey your employees to understand their preferences. Ask about learning styles, scheduling preferences, and areas of interest. This is an opportunity to bring your team into the process. The more bought-in they are and the more they see the offering as a solution to a problem they’re having, the more satisfied they’ll be with your efforts.

Once you’ve determined what you need, you’ll want to learn more about the product offering. I’d recommend asking providers questions like:

• What’s your learning philosophy?
• Is the program asynchronous or synchronous?
• Can you tell me more about the trainers?
• What follow-up support do you have available?
• How long is the training?
• How do you measure the success of a learning program?
• How relevant is the training to (my industry, global context, specific team)?”

This will create a great baseline for you to compare providers and match their offerings to your needs.

Further, don’t be afraid to go deeper to understand the logistics of programming.

Keep reading.—MD

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Some 72% of workers report that they can be themselves at work all or most of the time (Pew Research Center)

Quote: “Different people have different ways of managing tasks, focus, concentration, and getting the best performance out of themselves…And it’s really important to embrace that diversity and understand it rather than try and have some really retrogressive approaches, which have little imagination and only fit certain people who will fit inside a certain shape box.”—Rachel Garrick, a county councilor in Monmouthshire, Wales, on why employers should not penalize people who use activities like knitting to help them focus at work (the New York Times)

Read: Employees are building work-focused social personae and some employers are embracing it. (BBC Worklife)