It is tempting to sort the office war by generation: the young want the buzz and the mentorship, the older want to skip the commute, or the reverse, depending on which anecdote you heard last. The framing is tidy and mostly wrong. The forces that actually determine who wants the office are career stage, caregiving load, commute length, and the state of one's home workspace, and none of those maps cleanly onto a generation. A twenty-four-year-old in a cramped apartment and a fifty-year-old caring for a parent may want the same thing for entirely different reasons.
The real driver: proximity and advancement
There is one genuinely generational effect, and the evidence is specific about it. In the randomized trial at Ctrip, fully remote workers were more productive but saw their promotion rate, conditional on performance, decline. Being out of sight carried a career cost. For someone early in their career, still building visibility, relationships, and a track record, that cost is not trivial; it is the difference between advancing and stalling. A worker with an established reputation can afford invisibility in a way a newcomer cannot.
This is the honest core of the case for early-career presence. It is not that young workers are less disciplined or need supervision. It is that advancement runs partly on being known, and being known is harder from a distance when you have not yet built the relationships that survive it. The office, for someone at the start, is where reputation gets built and mentorship happens in the unplanned moments. That is a real benefit, and it belongs to a career stage, not an age cohort.
Why the blanket rule still fails
The error is to take this specific need and universalize it. The later hybrid trial at Trip.com found that the retention benefit of flexibility was concentrated among non-managers and was especially strong for women and for employees with long commutes. These are, in many organizations, overlapping populations: the people for whom the commute tax is heaviest and the pull of home strongest. A mandate justified by the mentorship needs of the newest workers imposes its full cost on these groups, who get little of the mentorship benefit and all of the commute.
So the same policy serves one population and taxes another, and a blanket rule cannot tell them apart. Forcing the parent with a long commute into the office five days a week does not improve the newcomer's mentorship; it just adds a resignation risk among the people the company most wants to keep. The needs are real but distributed unevenly, and a uniform rule is the one instrument guaranteed to match neither.
Trust is not issued by cohort
Semco resisted sorting people by the categories organizations usually trust. Semler describes factories run by engineers without degrees and a maintenance technician without a diploma leading two hundred people because everyone trusted him; the company never checked a diploma before hiring, on the principle that trust does not come with a gown. The same skepticism applies to sorting workers by generation. A birth year predicts almost nothing about whether someone works well, needs the office, or can be trusted with autonomy. It is a lazy proxy, and like all lazy proxies it substitutes an easy category for a hard, individual judgment.
The workable approach follows the shape of the actual needs. Give early-career workers real reasons and real support to be present, mentorship, shared time with senior colleagues, the visibility that advancement requires, and treat that as an investment in them rather than a rule imposed on them. Give experienced workers with heavy commutes and full households the flexibility the evidence says retains them. The generations are not fighting over the office. They have different circumstances, and the only policy that respects that is one precise enough to see them.
Sources
- Bloom, Liang, Roberts & Ying (2015). Does Working from Home Work? (QJE). RCT: fully remote workers were ~13% more productive but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell, evidence of a visibility cost most relevant early in a career. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/130/1/165/2337855
- Bloom, Han & Liang (2024). Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance (Nature). RCT: retention benefit of flexibility concentrated among non-managers, women (54%), and long-commute employees (52%). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07500-2