Why Gen Z have become part of Lendlease’s plan to get workers back to the office

Getting staff back in the office has proved tricky after the pandemic. But one of the nation’s top property developers thinks it can lure Gen Z back. Here’s how.

Lendlease sees an opportunity in Gen Z to bring workers back to the office. Picture: iStock

One of Australia’s largest commercial property developers has a plan to get people back to its offices, and it includes targeting the least likely generation of all.

Lendlease’s plan to bring workers back to its facilities includes a generation of only about half of whom are of the legal working age.

That demographic is Generation Z, people born between the years of 1997 and 2012, a cohort of people who crave in-person connection and are actively looking for mentors, said Lendlease’s chief software architect Ciaran Hennessy.

“Interestingly enough, one of the outliers particularly we’re seeing in some of our research is Gen Z. They are a generation of employees who have had the start of their careers really heavily interrupted by Covid,” he told a room at Zscaler’s Zenith Live Sydney summit.

“A lot of them are craving a sort of cultural attachment to companies. Gen Z are looking for opportunities to physically interact and bond as well.”

While Lendlease sees an opportunity to bring people back to the office beginning with Gen Z, it would be no easy feat winning the up-and-coming generation over. In fact, the situation is, he describes, a “catch 22”.

Gen Z want to have mentors.

“This is the catch 22: They’re used to working in a digital mode, so a lot of those things are table stakes,” he said.

“If you don’t give them the opportunity to be able to work wherever they want to, that’s not going to attract them to your organisation … but they’re also looking at physical attraction as well.”

When it came to productivity and working from home, Mr Hennessy said Lendlease benefited widely during the pandemic when it found its employees were completing more work than ever before.

“Like everybody, we were a little bit sceptical about how productive people could be working from home and also, part of our main business is building offices, so we actually really didn’t want people to be productive working from home,” he said.

However, they were “enormously productive” he said, “getting through 60, 70, 80 per cent increases in productivity”.

“We were getting through more work than we’ve gotten through in like 10, 20 years.”

Lendlease has recorded productivity gains from staff working from home, according to the company’s chief software architect Ciaran Hennessy. Picture: Jeremy Piper/AAP Image/

Lendlease “ripped the Band-Aid off” and allowed staff to use what were previously in-office only tools while working from home rather than giving limited access, he said.

While many have spoken about a fall in productivity during the work from home era, Mr Hennessy said Lendlease research suggested the opposite.

“Previously people had to come to work because that is where they were productive, but now that paradigm has been destroyed,” he said.

Office developers had to reimagine the need for physical spaces and consider what a space could do for workers.

“Part of the challenge for a lot of people with large commercial footprints is to sort of think about what’s the need for physical places now,” Mr Hennessy said.

“A lot of that is about culture and building different styles of work. How do you actually use space in different ways? And your digital workplaces are now for deep thinking sort of activities where you can drive high levels of productivity concentration.”

The research also signalled that some workers were doing longer hours from home than they had when working from the office.

A young worker sets up her laptop in a cafe. Picture: iStock

Originally published as Why Gen Z have become part of Lendlease’s plan to get workers back to the office