Citing the need to maintain its unique company culture, Amazon this week announced that it expects all office employees “to return to being in the office” five days a week starting in January. The company may have had its Covid-era Gen Z hires particularly in mind.
A little more than five years from now, in 2030, Gen Z employees (those born after 1996) will fill an estimated 50 million U.S. jobs, about 30% of the total American workforce, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections.
The oldest Gen Z workers, those who started entering the labor force around 2015, will be in their 30s with a decade-and-a-half of work experience. Some will have moved into management positions. Those who attended college immediately after high school and began filtering into the workforce just before Covid-19 arrived, will also be firmly planted in their careers.
Many of those who study employment trends have been telling us that Gen Z workers—especially those who joined the labor force during the pandemic—are solidly wedded to remote work. But, wedded bliss it’s not. Joblist’s 2023 United States Job Market Trends Report, for example, indicated that 57% of Gen Zers now prefer in-person jobs and only 27% prefer remote jobs.
While it’s true that most Gen Zers want the option to work remotely, it’s also true, we’ve found, that most prefer working at the office, or on the job, where they have contact with other real, live human beings, rather than just screen-sized images of real, live human beings. As one of our newest Gen Z hires shared over the summer, “There’s a perception that Gen Z wants to work remotely all the time, and for me, that is definitely not true. I want to meet people and network and have social connections at work.”
What is certain is that most Gen Zers understand that there’s a lot to be gained from developing in-person relationships. As the newest and usually most-junior members of the workforce, they understand that developing those relationships typically doesn’t happen easily when your only contact with another person is on a screen.
Gen Z is the first digital-native generation that grew up with “devices” and looks down, instead of up, when communicating. As such, curious pulse-takers have been surveying them ever since the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, when remote work was at an all-time high. Three distinct employment portraits emerge.
First are those who, for the most part, can’t work remotely. These are the people who truly qualify as America’s “essential workers”: first responders, food-service and lodging employees, doctors, nurses, teachers, farmers, therapists, medical technicians, home health aides, airline and public-transit workers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, maintenance workers, among many others. They should not be overlooked.
Overall, this group of “work from work” workers, accounts for 70% to 80% of all U.S. workers by some estimates —and, with college costs showing no signs of decrease, some Gen Zers are forgoing the “college experience” and training—and aiming—for careers in the skilled trades and other hands-on fields.
Mixed Signals
Among those who do choose desk-based work, or what used to be called “white collar” work—accounting, administration, banking, consulting, finance, journalism, law, management, public service, and the like—a more-complicated picture emerges.
On one screen we see a group of individuals —including increasing numbers of Gen Z employees who were still in school during the pandemic lockdowns—who hated the isolation and need to interact with others in order to thrive. But on another screen we see a group of Zers who are adamantly opposed to giving up the remote work privileges granted during the pandemic. A survey conducted by the digital marketing firm, Kettle, as the pandemic was winding down in 2021, for example, found that nearly half of Gen Z employees said they’d leave their jobs if hybrid or remote work options weren’t offered at their workplace. As noted earlier, more-recent surveys show the percentage of remote-work absolutists significantly down.
The bottom line is that remote and hybrid work are here to stay. While fewer people are working remotely than during the darkest days of the pandemic, far more are working remotely than before the pandemic—and Gen Zers in particular want to maintain that option. As a Gen Z colleague recently commented: “If a manager says, ‘I don’t want you working from home anymore’ when I’m getting all my work done and meeting expectations, I’d think ‘Why are you doing that?!’”
Yes, why?
What are the takeaways?
1. Five years from now the American workforce will include some 50 million “Generation Z” men and women who weren’t even old enough for kindergarten when the new millennium began. Many already will be in management. Most Baby Boomers will have retired.
2. These “digital natives”—who have grown up with artificial intelligence, computers, smart phones, social media, and other digital-age advances—learned during the Covid-19 pandemic that much of the work traditionally performed in offices can done from almost any location, using any number of devices, at virtually any time of day.
3. GenZ wants the freedom to work remotely, at least some of the time. But they prefer the human contact, connections and collaboration the office provides. While it might not work for Amazon, for most companies an agreeable solution is this: Think Hybrid.