Particularly conscious of environmental issue, young workers are far more attentive than their elders to their employer’s environmental impact. This is reflected in the criteria they prioritize when looking for a job.
A quarter of the Generation Z and Millennials polled in the latest edition of Deloitte’s "Gen Z and Millennial Survey" said they had already researched a company’s environmental impact and policies before applying for a job. More generally, some 70% of young working people say they place importance on environmental credentials and policies when looking for an employer [1].
Furthermore, young workers have a strong desire to be useful to society. For young people, working in a profession that goes against their value system is out of the question. That’s why 20% of Generation Z and 19% of Millennials have already decided to change their job or sector of activity because of environmental concerns. Others plan to do so in the future to avoid a potential conflict of environmental ethics at work.
Others prefer to act from within. Nearly half of Generation Z (54%) and Millennials (48%) say that they and their colleagues are pressuring their employer to take action on climate change and its impacts. This trend has been growing steadily since 2022: at the time, 48% of Gen Z and 43% of Millennials said they were doing so.
The young professionals surveyed by Deloitte are not short of ideas on how their employers could take concrete action to help fight climate change. They would, for example, like employers to offer workers training to help them adopt more ecological behaviours in their daily lives, or to rethink their offices in line with climate issues.
However, the young working people surveyed have the overall impression that their employers are taking the seriousness of the situation into account. In fact, 59% of Generation Z and 58% of Millennials feel that their employers are taking steps to address climate change.
