Boomers may dislike WFH, but they’re not the ones in the office

How old are you? Your answer has a surprisingly strong correlation to how you feel about one of the most vexing issues of modern workplaces: the work from home (WFH) debate.

Let’s start by dividing the population into three main cohorts depending on how long you’ve been working: early career, mid-career and late career.

Younger workers are the ones who are the most interested in working from home.Credit: iStock

Early career workers are Gen Z, or those in their teens up to late 20s. They’re still pretty fresh to the workforce, so all the tumble-wash of changes we’ve experienced over the past decade is all they’ve ever known.

If you entered the workforce in the past five years, it’s perfectly natural that most 20-somethings just expect that every job includes some days sitting in an office cubicle, and others inside your house.

For mid-career workers, predominantly Millennials in their 30s and early 40s, the sudden shift to WFH was a rude shock after they’d spent a decade or two getting used to commuting five days a week. However, now that it’s been successfully integrated into their busy lives that often involves raising young families, it’s hard for an employer to take that flexibility away.

For late career workers, or Gen X and Baby Boomers in their 50s and 60s, the home and the office were two distinct locations that rarely crossed over. For many older workers, the concept of spending entire days working inside their houses cuts against decades of deeply ingrained habits, reinforced by generations before them.

Breaking it down by generations, Gen Z had the highest attendance in the office full-time.

Many late career workers hold senior positions of power and have struggled with managing teams and culture in a hybrid world, leading to some of them becoming the most vocal proponents for returning to the office full-time.

Now let’s look at the data. Researchers from the Swinburne University of Technology found last year that people’s reactions to WFH varied by age. They surveyed 1300 Australian knowledge workers and found that only 17.5 per cent of them went into the office for five full days a week, with the vast majority of people – 72.5 per cent – working a hybrid combination of some days in the office and some at home.

Breaking it down by generations, Gen Z had the highest attendance in the office full-time at 22 per cent, but only 11 per cent of them said that this was their ideal working arrangement.

For mid-career Millennials in their 30s, 16 per cent attended the office full-time, and for those over 60, only 15 per cent attended the office full-time, lining up with the exact percentage who said they wanted to be there.

What this shows is that different generations have different experiences with WFH. The older you are, the more ability you have for your expectations of how you like to work to match your reality, while younger workers are experiencing the most dissonance between what they want and what they get.

Most Gen Z don’t really want to be in the office full-time, yet given their junior status, they are the most likely to be required to attend.

I can already hear the chorus of people saying that young workers really should be spending more of their time in the office to soak up knowledge and learn how to do their jobs better. After all, that’s the only way they’re going to progress and get promotions, right?

Well, according to smart minds such as Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom, who has reviewed much of the available data, those who work from home two days a week, regardless of age, are just as likely to get promoted as their fully in-office colleagues.

Another recent review of the 2024 Australian Workplace Index employment data published in The Conversation found no significant difference in productivity between employees who worked from home some days a week, and those in the office.

In fact, it showed numerous benefits, such as increased autonomy (which led to higher productivity), less burnout and an average saving of 100 minutes a day in commuting time.

All of us are dealing with an increasing speed of change, trying to adapt as new policies and technologies are shifting the way that we work. Yes, there is likely to be a correlation between your age and what you think about WFH but all of us can still embrace hybrid working to help make us work better, no matter how young or old we are.

Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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