Many bosses will tell Gen Z this much: Working from home all the time just doesn’t compare to the connections you can make and the education you can glean from working side-by-side. The latest proponent of this idea comes from an unlikely source: Slack co-founder and chief technology officer Cal Henderson.
In an interview with Insider, Henderson said he understood why scores of Silicon Valley giants—including Salesforce, Slack’s parent company—are insisting Gen Z return to their cubicles, lest they hamstring their career prospects and cut off their best chance of mentorship. "You learn by watching somebody who's more experienced than you do the job," Henderson said. “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.”
Granted, he acknowledged, heading to the office is only really meaningful when others join you: “It's a very different experience if your VP isn't there in the office with you as you work overnight on something,” he said.
Odds are, especially in a traditional workplace, your VP is there—and they’re wondering why you’re not. Henderson is just the latest voice joining the chorus of leaders asserting that the home is no place for a young worker, who is better off sowing the seeds for career growth from their office desk.
Back in January, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon straight-up said that remote work “doesn’t work” for young workers. And, last year, Jefferies CEO Rich Handler said remote work is fine for a job, but that building a career requires engaging with co-workers in the office. “The reality is, if you are in the office, you get pulled into a lot of interesting ‘real time’ situations because physical presence matters,” he told Fortune.
Henderson is of a like mindset, who said that moments of formative human interaction are harder to replicate in “a hybrid way”—despite the fact that Slack’s primary offering is the ability to connect seamlessly with workers and carry out productive teamwork across continents.
These kinds of connections are crucial for people who are developing their professional lives. If nothing else, most bosses fall prey to proximity bias, in which they often unintentionally give preference and greater advancement opportunities to the workers they see in the office most often. As NYU professor Scott Galloway said in May, any time young people spend in their apartments is inversely correlated with career, social, and romantic successes. “You should never be at home,” Galloway said. “You need to be out of the house.”
More Gen Zers are on board with the office than you think
Despite billionaire investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary saying that many Gen Zers have “no intention” of working in an office—“They never have, they never will. That’s just the way it’s gonna be.”— the Gen Z is better off in the office stance may not be as unpopular as it seems. More and more, the youngest workers are proving that's not the way it’s gonna be.
Despite walkouts, union protests, and even Change.org petitions among the many workers opposed to coming back to the office, plenty of young workers agree with their bosses that in-person work is crucial to their advancement.
Gen Z is more eager to go to the office than other age groups, as they largely prefer to train and onboard in person, find they're more productive there, and are looking to hone their skills and connect with their peers. Perhaps they’re well aware that, having yet to work in an office full-time at any point, their soft skills—like conflict resolution and networking—may be lacking and in-person work may be the best way of bolstering them.
There's also the fact that most Gen Zers feel disconnected when they work from home. “People want to grow quickly, [and] mentorship—being able to connect with the manager or director on a more personal level—is extremely important,” Oliver Pour, a 2022 college graduate, told Fortune last year.
Of course, not all Gen Zers want to be in the office. Henderson noted that workers who started their careers during the pandemic—learning the ropes about office politics and executive communications through Zoom—nonetheless figured out how to do their jobs and are “just as productive as anybody else.”
But the biggest share of in-person workers at Slack are “by far” the interns, he said, which is exactly how it should be. “It's their first experience of work and many are living in small apartments or flat shares.” Those are hardly ideal settings for building lasting connections—within or beyond work.
