Gen Z employees want to be in the office—but don’t want the startup perks of yesteryear.
“Students tell us: Cool, your ping-pong table with kombucha-on-tap is really nice, super fun, but I want to know what’s going to make a difference in my life,” said Handshake cofounder Ben Christensen onstage at Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit on Monday. “They’re looking for things like learning and development opportunities. They’re saying: ‘Where’s your stipend that can help me invest in myself and my growth a few years from now?’”
Student loan repayment also is “essential to them as they think about their next job,” he said.
Christensen added that, contrary to popular belief perhaps, Gen Z overwhelmingly wants in-person engagement at work.
“We actually have seen that 81% of students are interested in having some degree of in person connection in their first role,” said Christensen. “47% of them expect to continue to want that throughout their career. And so whether you’re an in-person company, a hybrid company, or a remote company, you should think about how you foster those in-person connections—especially as they’re coming into that first job… They’re looking for people to be their mentors, to learn from, to understand how to navigate the workplace. They’re eagerly and overly seeking that.”
Gen Z’s desire to go to the office is inherently situated in a much larger discourse around office versus remote work. As that battle plays out, Marcelo Lebre, cofounder and president of Remote, told the audience that what we understand as the remote workforce has evolved entirely.
“The pandemic showed the world that working distributed and lean was possible,” said Lebre.
“That sort of created this immediate boom where everyone was hiring everywhere. And I mean anywhere. Then, people started to learn from them, right? For some companies, it does work. We’re no longer talking about the freelancer margaritas, going to Bali or something like that. We’re talking about full, massive workforces distributed across the world.”