September 2, 2025 – A new Gallup report suggests that the work-from-home tide has decisively turned among younger employees, and the Gen Z newbies in particular are now the group of employees most interested in flocking back to the nest – at least on a hybrid basis.
It seems that the bloom is finally off the rose and the gig economy fantasy of working – occasionally in your PJs and according to your own schedule and timetable – has collided with many of the immutable facts of life concerning how the world and especially hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations actually operate.
I’ll detail these epiphanies and painful discoveries later because smart employers need to address them, but, as the pitiful saying among the now-disgraced and departed heads of some of our grandest academic institutions used to go: “the context matters.” And the story starts with COVID, which for about half the country’s workforce looked for a moment like this century’s great emancipation.
If you asked owners and managers about their entire COVID experience, many would tell you their biggest issue was they couldn’t get rid of their kids quickly enough by sending them back to their schools, which were closed. As a result, they had to deal with childcare issues that they had never imagined. Pets were much less of an issue since you could just bring them to the office, as long as you had an office to go to rather than a grocery store or a factory floor.
This is why the Gallup survey showed a rock-solid 35 percent of Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials who were perfectly happy to continue working exclusively at home. They had their homes, their positions and perks were secure, they didn’t feel like they had a lot that was new to learn, they were totally invested in preserving and protecting the status quo, and frankly, they really didn’t want to deal with all the noise, angst, confusion, and anger that’s a growing part of the new normal in the workplace.
On the other hand, less than 25 percent of those born after 1997, which is to say the bulk of the workforce of the future, were interested in remote employment and permanent WFH. The overwhelming majority of Gen Zers – more than 70 percent – said that a hybrid solution was the only way to go. They also clearly said that they don’t want to return to the office full time. In fact, between 4 and 10 percent of all the cohorts surveyed said that they had no interest in ever returning to the office on a full-time basis and working on-site again.
So, it’s abundantly clear that new business leaders – along with any entrepreneur or business owner looking to attract, engage, and retain these critical workers and their inchoate talents – need to have a hybrid plan in place and a comprehensive program to address all of the needs, desires, and expectations of the new wave of workers as they return to the office.
Of course, planning in a vacuum without clearly understanding what these folks are looking for is like winking at your date in the dark. You know what you’re doing, but no one else does. You can plan all the plans you like, but you can’t plan results without the appropriate inputs and data.
Here are the four most repeatedly expressed concerns that are driving the Gen Zers back to the office. Your plan, approach, and strategies should address as many of these issues as possible. In addition, regularly acknowledging these issues and reinforcing the newbies’ belief that they are critically important matters is crucial to your success in demonstrating to these team members that you’re listening, that they’re being heard, and that you’re taking action to address each of these areas.
1 There’s no one at home to learn from. There’s no watercooler.
It turns out that you can’t learn everything from books, manuals, or YouTube. You learn a great deal by doing, but the real key to stepping up your game is by watching, listening to, and learning from older, smarter, and more experienced players in your company.
Examples, war stories, tried and true solutions to recurring problems, and even just gossip around the watercooler or the Keurig machine are all essential tools and channels to gather additional knowledge, “tricks of the trade,” and important cautions and instructions on how and when to deal with certain others in the firm or tough customers out in the wild.
Needless to say, you get next to none of this at home sitting in front of your monitor. It’s long been known that far more communication and intelligence is passed between peers before and after meetings (or Zoom sessions) than when the meeting is going on and the whole world is listening and watching what’s being said. You’ve got to be there to be part of the informal conversations, which is where the real action always is.
2 There’s no one at home to share the ups or the downs with.
Entrepreneurs learn early on that it’s not smart, helpful, or productive to bring your problems home from work. Sharing the pain and the bumps in the road just multiplies the people with bad stomachs and sleepless nights. And frankly, new business builders also learn that bragging about the wins doesn’t buy you much goodwill at home either. Doubling the sales at Smart Mart doesn’t really matter to a spouse stuck at home with a sick kid while you’re locked in the basement on a customer call.
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It’s your peers and buddies at the office – the other soldiers in the struggles – who can really understand and appreciate what you’re going through and what you’ve accomplished as well as the sacrifices that those things have entailed and required. |
Company, community, and camaraderie are a far more important emotional component of our work that we don’t appreciate and value enough until we’re without these things.
3 No one’s a hero at home. Out of sight is out of mind.
Not surprisingly, feats of remarkable salesmanship, clever coding solutions, and great marketing ploys aren’t really understood or appreciated at home by your spouse and kids. You just don’t get the strokes. They’re civilians, not sophisticates, supplicants, or soldiers. There’s no one at home who sees how hard you’re working or frankly always understands why it matters.
And, even more importantly, absence these days doesn’t make the heart grow fonder, it makes you forgettable and invisible to the guys in charge, the ones handing out new projects and assignments, and those making promotions. It’s dawning on people sitting on the sidelines that the bus is passing them by.
4 There’s no one at home to keep you on task. Too easy to lose focus.
Chores, calls, errands, and kids are all flow busters and make it far too easy to get distracted, interrupted, and pulled away from getting the work finished that needs to get done in a timely and professional fashion. It’s no longer cute to have your kids or your cat busting into your conference calls. It’s a reminder to others – like it or not and accurate or not – that you’re not fully engaged, totally focused, and a serious player anymore. It’s also too darn easy to take a break, spend an hour online doom scrolling, watch a zillion videos on YouTube, catch a ball game, or just kick back and take a crack at your favorite video game.
Needless to say – productivity problems aside – none of this is a good look for those looking to get ahead.
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Boston Consulting Group released a report a little while ago that 75 percent of employees working at home were just as or more productive than they were in the office. I’d like some of what they’ve been smoking. |
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The bottom line is, the newbies are coming back because they’ve realized that it’s lonely at home, that you can’t do much of anything important all by yourself, that your friends and family aren’t a substitute for being an important part of the team at the office, and that, if they want to get ahead, they’ve got to be in the rooms where it happens.
