Miss the pandemic period of working from residence? Give it a decade or two, and it’s set to be the norm once more. That’s as a result of, though child boomer and Gen X bosses could also be successful the return-to-office warfare proper now, new information suggests it’s a short-lived victory.
In actual fact, the Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis discovered that millennial and Gen Z bosses are much more prone to let employees work remotely than their older counterparts—and that it’s solely a matter of time earlier than they take over and convey their affinity for flexibility with them.
The researchers tracked month-to-month surveys of 8,000 U.S. staff aged 20 to 64 throughout 2025 and concluded that relating to versatile working, two issues are constantly true: staff at youthful corporations, and beneath youthful CEOs, spend considerably extra time working from residence.
“First, employees work from home more often at younger firms—almost twice as often at firms founded after 2015 as compared to those founded before 1990,” the researchers wrote. “Second, employees work from home more often at firms with younger CEOs.”
In actual fact, you possibly can see of their information that as CEOs get youthful, the variety of days they demand employees work from an workplace decreases, with these working beneath a twenty-something-year-old chief working from residence probably the most.
The Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis
It’s why the researchers concluded that work at home is poised to make a comeback, regardless of the likes of Amazon and JPMorgan at the moment mandating a full-time workplace return. As older leaders retire, the times of bums on seats 5 days every week are prone to fade with them.
In different phrases, your future commute might rely much less on what HR says and extra on the delivery 12 months of the particular person within the nook workplace.
And for staff who don’t wish to wait, the examine gives a easy hack: goal youthful corporations with youthful bosses if you wish to maximize your probabilities of holding your own home workplace setup.
Gen Z bosses aren’t simply flexible-first, they’re additionally digital-first
It’s not simply that younger bosses got here of age in the course of the pandemic’s distant work increase and see workplace cubicles as an outdated relic. A lot of them constructed their companies on Slack, Zoom, and AI instruments, so flexibility and expertise are baked into how their corporations run—not bolted on as a perk.
The researchers discovered a transparent correlation between youthful CEOs and firms which can be each flexible-first and digital-first, with leaders who embrace distant work additionally extra prone to undertake new applied sciences and software-driven approaches to operating their groups.
And that echoes what future-thinking CEOs have already been warning: Leaders who cling to the outdated methods of working aren’t critical about embracing AI.
“Forget about where people are working. Most companies will go by the wayside if they don’t embrace AI,” Mark Dixon, CEO and founding father of Worldwide Office Group (IWG), completely advised Fortune. “If you look at winners and losers, the winners are the ones that embrace the technology.”
“Embracing the whole of the technology, which is flexible work, flexible location, high levels of technology, using technology to get more out of your people. Those will be the winning companies, because they focus on the people,” Dixon warns.
As different leaders have identified, corporations that target bodily presence moderately than distant, AI-driven work danger falling behind opponents.
Brian O’Kelley, the tech founder who bought AppNexus to AT&T for $1.6 billion in 2018, earlier than founding Scope3, argued that distant corporations, like his, have the highest choose of prime international expertise and function across the clock.
“The best companies are going to actually dump their offices to learn to work with non-bodied employees,” O’Kelley echoed in Fortune. “Anybody who has a back-to-office culture is actually hurting themselves.”
Being unfold throughout time zones doesn’t simply make his workforce accessible to prospects in any respect hours of the day—it forces groups to be environment friendly and lean on the newest tech in methods conventional office-based firms merely don’t must.
That’s why firms fixated on presence moderately than productiveness features that really allow an AI-first future are at a drawback.
“The thing is, if you build a culture that’s asynchronous and remote, it means you’re building a culture for AI to thrive,” O’Kelley added. “If you’re building an office culture, you are actually not building an AI-first ecosystem.”
