Young employees are not motivated by money

With the increasing need to attract and retain staff in the hospitality sector, research from the iOpener Institute for People and Performance has made some important findings.

In order to understand what motivates the up-and-coming senior management class of the future, the study clearly showed that Generation Y – the digital cohort born after the early 1980s – are motivated to stay with their employer, and to actively recommend their organization to friends, according to job fulfilment and not pay.

This new analysis established that factors such as belief in the firm’s economic or social purpose and pride in the organisation and its work, had a strong correlation with the likelihood of someone staying with business. Virtually no correlation was found between increased levels of pay and someone’s likelihood of staying in the job. There was also a strong correlation between someone’s job fulfilment and their likelihood of recommending the firm to a friend – a critically important finding for Generation Y who are widely networked and use digital platforms to share opinion.

Jessica Pryce-Jones, founder director of the iOpener Institute and author of Happiness at Work – Maximising Your Psychological Capital for Success, notes: “This Generation Y insight report provides an important wake-up call for management to pay attention to employee feelings of engagement, empowerment, purpose and future development if they are to retain and foster young talent in their company. This is a particular issue in the hospitality sector where more than three quarters (77 per cent) of the restaurant industry’s waiting staff are currently under 30.

“The science of identifying and improving people’s happiness at work is now an exact one, with proven method and, most importantly, measurable commercial advantages. Recruiting talent is expensive, so measures which retain younger staff saves hard cash, and avoids expensive business disruption. Positive word-of-mouth recommendations across a Generation Y employee’s social network play a powerful role in attracting talent, and therefore provides employers with hard financial advantage.”