Your Practice: 5 Tips to Engage Gen Z Nurses within Your Multigenerational Team

With projected hospital margins down and staff shortages showing no sign of improving, 2023 healthcare trends presented earlier this year in a HealthStream webinar by Thought Leadership Consultant Robin Rose, MHA, are coming to fruition in many ways. She noted some key challenges in the webinar that perioperative nurse leaders are likely feeling, including:

• Competitive markets and tight margins that necessitate a greater focus on efficiency and cost-savings.
• Technology advances to be adapted for better data analysis, team communication, and practice advances.
• Staffing vacancies requiring a shift in hiring and orienting newer nurses to maintain high quality care and prevent costly turnover.

But where there is a challenge, there is also opportunity and that is certainly true with another trend Rose highlighted—the surge of Gen Z nurses entering the healthcare workforce.

Engaging A New Kind of Mutigenerational Workforce

With staffing shortages bringing Gen Z nurses fresh out of school to orient into perioperative care, there’s a stronger need for periop leaders to engage Gen Z nurses in the ways they are looking for, while helping a multi-generational workforce find common ground, according to Joanne Muyco, DNP, RN, NE-BC, CNOR, nurse scientist in the Center for Nursing Research, Education, and Practice at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas.

She’s been testing evidence-based strategies to integrate Gen Z nurses into a newly evolving multi-generational perioperative workforce and offered these five tips to help periop leaders bridge the gaps.

1. Know Where Gen Z Nurses Are Coming From

Gen Z is defined by change, instant connectivity, diversity, and a focus on well-being. “They are truly one of the first generations defined by diversity, growing up with friends from a diverse background and with more acceptance of diversity because they have never known anything different,” Muyco said. This means Gen Z nurses are more open and willing to share, embrace change and champion DEI initiatives. However, she said this generation is also considered the “new realists,” being privy to the harsher realities of the world that grounds them in not-so-positive shared experiences such as gun violence, war, recession, and the dark side of social media.

2. Shift Your Recruitment Mindset

Organizations are no longer simply interviewing nurses to see if they are a good fit for the organization. Nurses, especially Gen Z nurses, are also interviewing the organization to see if the organization and the individual leader is a good fit for them.

“Be sure to come to an interview ready to explain how you can provide them with support and guidance,” she said to periop leaders, and “make sure to sell professional development opportunities, leadership training opportunities, scheduling options and even ways you engage as a team in community service.”

3. Leverage “Stay” Interviews

Retention interviews are a proactive strategy that leaders are using to find out why an employee chooses to stay and what might trigger them to leave. “Gathering this information can help you as a leader develop an actionable plan that can be executed to improve staff satisfaction and engagement,” Muyco said. For Gen Z nurses, “stay interviews can help leaders understand how to bring their individual needs into the fold of the multi-generational perioperative workforce.”

4. Create a Team Goal and Purpose

Do you know what your team does better or different than other teams? Building these strengths into a shared goal is a great way to help connect Gen Z nurses to their team, Muyco suggested. Why? “Because you are recognizing that although each person has unique strengths, weaknesses, and contributions that that they bring to the table, the team is united by a common goal and a shared purpose for achieving it.”

Remember, education and professional growth is a common denominator, she added. “As each generation comes around, they continue to pursue more education. Gen Z also aligns with this trend and even more of them will continue on to pursue more education and they will be looking for organizations that support lifelong growth and learning.”

5. Engage in Self-Reflection and Self-Awareness

By making time to reflect upon your own beliefs, attitudes, values, and perceptions, Muyco suggested leaders will be more open and willing to hear people out. Not doing this can lead you to making your own assumptions or stereotypes about generational differences. “Leaders cannot afford to be unaware of their own perspective because this can lead to very subtle actions that can undercut the respect and progress you have and make as a multi-generational team.”