Slack co-founder says young people who work from home will find it ‘harder to be successful’

A leading tech executive has weighed in on the contentious work-from-home debate with a warning for young people.

Young workers in certain industries such as finance and sales may find it “harder to be successful” if they don’t spend face-to-face time in the office learning from senior colleagues, a leading technology executive has warned.

Cal Henderson, co-founder and chief technology officer of instant messaging platform Slack, is the latest business leader to weigh in on the contentious debate around remote work, as a growing number of companies wind back Covid-era work-from-home policies.

Major global firms such as Meta and Google are mandating staff return to the office at least a few days per week, while in Australia companies including CommBank are facing pushback for similar edicts.

Software giant Salesforce, which acquired Slack in 2021, plans to call employees back to the office at least three days per week.

Speaking to Insider, Mr Henderson said the push was partly because some roles and industries are apprenticeship-driven and “you learn by watching somebody who’s more experienced than you do the job” and it was harder to “replicate” that experience in “a hybrid way”.

“You sit next to them, you ride along on a sales phone call, you watch a finance person put together a spreadsheet in the middle of the night — like the people who are working at Goldman Sachs,” he said. “It’s a very different experience if your VP isn’t there in the office with you as you work overnight on something.”

Mr Henderson said at his company the people who came into the office the “most, by far”, were interns because it was their first experience of work and many were living in smaller apartments or share houses.

“I think there are certain kinds of roles in which it’s much harder to be successful unless you’re able to learn from other people and those roles won’t necessarily evolve anytime soon to make that not true,” he said.

Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson. Source: Supplied

Career development and mentoring for younger employees via face-to-face contact is one of the most common arguments touted by those advocating a return to the office.

IBM’s global chief executive Arvind Krishna recently warned the company’s 260,000 staff that while he was not ordering them back to the office yet, those who continued to work remotely would struggle to get promoted.

In May, a research paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found remote work “negatively impacts workers’ career trajectories”, mirroring similar findings from earlier studies.

“Remote work reduces the frequency of one-on-one meetings with managers and training sessions devoted to developing workers’ skills,” the report said. “Before the offices closed, remote workers were promoted at less than half the rate of their onsite peers — once the offices closed, this difference in promotion rates disappeared.”

New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway has previously warned young people about the perils of staying home. “You should never be at home,” he told The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in May.

“That’s what I tell young people. Home is for seven hours of sleep and that’s it. The amount of time you spend at home is inversely correlated to your success professionally and romantically. You need to be out of the house.”

Young people ‘can’t have it all’. Picture: iStock

He added, “You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at once. And while we all know that guy or gal who has a great relationship with their parents, is in amazing shape, has a food blog, donates time at the ASPCA, and is a DJ on the weekends, assume you are not that person. If you expect to be in the top 10 per cent economically, much less the top 1 per cent, buck up. Two decades plus, of nothing but work. That’s my experience.”

Speaking on 3AW radio on Tuesday, ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliott admitted fewer than half of his staff came into the office “on a good day”, with just three quarters of employees working onsite at any time throughout the week.

ANZ, like CommBank and Westpac, has asked employees to return to the office at least 50 per cent of the time.

“We’re in a service industry where a lot of people can work from home pretty successfully,” he said.

But Mr Elliott said he worried about younger workers missing out on mentoring from more experienced colleagues.

On Wednesday, the Finance Sector Union (FSU) lodged a dispute with the Fair Work Commission over CommBank’s return-to-office edict, which kicks in next week.

“We will be asking the Fair Work Commission to order the CBA to offer all affected staff remote working arrangements on mutually agreeable terms,” FSU national secretary Julia Angrisano said.

It comes after more than 170,000 Australian workers this week won the right to work from home as much as they like under a new agreement struck between the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) and the Australian Public Service Commission.

The new allowance applies to union staff working in federal, ACT and Northern Territory public sectors, call centres, telecommunications, employment services, commercial broadcasting, aviation and science and research.

Originally published as Slack co-founder says young people who work from home will find it ‘harder to be successful’