Dive Brief:
- When it comes to remote work, baby boomers are the most likely to be on board, a study released Tuesday by Fiverr, an online freelancer marketplace, found. The study, which surveyed 9,129 employees and freelancers, including 2,008 in the U.S., reported that 40% of baby boomer respondents supported working remotely, either at home or in different locations. Comparatively, 32% of Gen X preferred remote work, along with 29% of millennials, the study found.
- Likewise, baby boomers were least likely to want to work in a private or shared office. Less than a quarter said working in an office was their preference, while 36% of the Gen X workers and 32% of millennial employees surveyed supported in-office work, the study found.
- “Research has shown that the corporate work structure often fails to accommodate the needs of diverse talent, from young workers to parents, who thrive with flexibility and control over their work lives. To recruit diverse talent, organization leaders will need to stop emphasizing working hours and instead focus on skills and output,” Michal Miller Levi, senior director of market research and insights at Fiverr, said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have struggled to figure out what the new normal is for their workplace and find balance among workers’ demands for in-office, remote and hybrid working arrangements.
But about 90% of companies will return to the office by the end of 2024, according to an August Resume Builder survey of 1,000 business decision-makers. And the number of employment ads listing “remote work” and “work from home” declined in the second quarter of 2023 compared to the same period last year, according to an August report by GlobalData.
At the same time, about half of employees said they would quit or look for another job if their company mandated a full-time return-to-office policy, per a report published last month by the Integrated Benefits Institute.
And some employees are ignoring companies’ directives to work from the office. A recent study found that even at offices that require workers to be in the office three or four days a week, employees only show up twice per week.
