When major employers like Amazon, JPMorgan, and the federal government tightened their office attendance policies this year, many younger workers seemed to resist. Gallup polls showed that they were generally more resistant than older workers to returning to the office full time.
But the picture was more complex. According to Gallup, younger people were also the least interested in fully remote work.
New research sheds some light on why this is. In recent research, a team of economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Virginia and Harvard University found that younger workers struggle professionally from working from home, receiving less training and fewer opportunities for advancement. Economists have found that remote work has contributed to higher unemployment rates among younger workers.
They calculate that younger workers seem to respond accordingly, spending more time in the office than older workers in recent years.
For example, Earlis LeBlanc breathed a sigh of relief when the Nebraska software company she worked for sent its employees home at the beginning of the pandemic. Having suffered from ADHD, she found it easier to focus in the quiet of her living room.
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But within a few years, Earlis, now a 30-year-old IT business analyst, began missing the office. She was working in a more collaborative role, and had difficulty knowing when to interrupt a colleague to ask for help. She began to miss social interaction and worried that her bosses barely remembered her.
“I had the feeling that there were conversations going on at work, about work topics, and I wasn’t a part of them because I wasn’t physically there,” she said.
In 2023, I started going to the office a few days most weeks, even before the company made it mandatory.
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In 100 responses to a New York Times survey, many readers age 30 or younger who have been able to work from home for the past five years said they still prefer that arrangement. But many others said they have sought to spend more time in the office in recent years. They often cited feelings of isolation as a reason, as well as a desire to receive more guidance and feedback, and increase their chances of promotion.
“One of the things I was looking for was more in-person opportunities to learn and ask questions,” said Kenneth Sullivan, 30, a Seattle-area civil engineer who specializes in bridge design and inspection.
Sullivan spent just over two years, starting in 2021, working mostly remotely for a government agency before landing a job at a private engineering firm that required employees to spend more time on-site.
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The economic paper, first released in 2023 and recently updated with new findings, confirms these workers’ hunch that they will pay the price for working from home. The study found that software engineers at one large e-commerce company received 20% more feedback on their code when they were physically seated near their colleagues — and that this feedback disproportionately benefited younger employees and newcomers to the company.
Economists noted that engineers asked more follow-up questions when they sat closer to their colleagues. Perhaps unexpectedly, many of these follow-up questions were asked online, suggesting that physical proximity also leads to more digital connection.
Erlis LeBlanc echoed this finding, saying that she felt more comfortable communicating with her colleagues, even electronically, after working together in person.
– Go from “You guys are creepy people and I’m afraid to message them on Teams” to “This is Ryan, he loves heavy metal and Magic: The Gathering.” He is the Account Manager for our largest client. “I can go and ask him something,” she said.
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Economists recognize that working from home can increase productivity, as other studies have found, but they argue that the benefits are concentrated among experienced workers. They also found that work quality can worsen in remote arrangements, especially for younger workers.
When it comes to code quality, for example, it often takes years for young engineers in physically dispersed teams to catch up with engineers of the same age working alongside their teams.
Reduced provision of mentoring and training also appears to make young workers in dispersed teams less likely to leave their jobs for better opportunities at other companies, said Dr Emma Harrington, one of the authors of the research. This may make it difficult for them to take on new roles within their companies, she said, although the study did not directly assess this issue.
“It’s one thing to eventually learn to be an effective software engineer,” Harrington said. – But will you learn to be an effective manager if your interaction is only remotely?
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Younger workers appear to respond to these incentives. Both at the company surveyed and among managerial staff nationally, younger people spent more time in the office than older people between 2022 and 2024, the economists noted. This pattern held even when they looked only at workers without children.
Sullivan said one reason he left his job at the government agency was because he feared it would be difficult to get a promotion while working remotely:
-I didn’t know anyone outside of my bridge team. Anyone outside – in water resources, transportation, traffic – I didn’t have any relationship with them.
In their latest analysis, Harrington and his colleagues found that remote work has led to at least one other big cost: higher unemployment rates.
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According to their calculations, about two-thirds of the increase in unemployment among recent graduates in the years following the pandemic can be explained by employers being less interested in hiring young workers in remote or hybrid roles, or in teams where many employees work remotely. Companies may assume these young people won’t receive proper training and “decide to hire older people,” Harrington said.
After JPMorgan announced a new mandate to return to the office this year, CEO Jamie Dimon emphasized the point in an all-hands meeting. “The younger generation is being harmed by this,” he added. “They are falling behind.”
A recent survey by real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle found that more than half of Fortune 100 companies have asked “office workers” to work in the office five days a week, compared to 5% in 2023.
Forrest Hall, a data analyst who was recently promoted to team leader at a company in Utah, has seen the problem firsthand. Hall, 24, worked briefly in his current employer’s office — while in college in 2021 — and then moved remote or mostly remote for more than a year. He said it was easier to navigate remote work after going through the onboarding process in person.
“When I was asking questions, it was easy to ask someone to help me,” Hall said.
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However, his cousin, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his career prospects, joined the company a few years later and quit within 12 months, partly because it was difficult to keep up with remote work. Getting answers to technical questions can be a time-consuming and frustrating process, Hall’s cousin said in an interview.
However, both workers and workplace experts said offering reliable guidance and career opportunities to younger employees was not as simple as forcing them to return to the office.
Several young workers who responded to The Times’ survey said they had been called back to the office to find that people on their teams were on different floors, in different buildings or even in different time zones. They were frustrated by having to join a video conference after changing out of their work clothes and heading out for the morning commute.
“When I go to the office, I sit at my desk with headphones on, and I make Teams calls,” said Abigail Voigt, 29, a software engineer in Minneapolis. -I gain nothing from this.
Even Earlis LeBlanc, who says working in the office gave her the advantage of getting a promotion with a roughly $15,000 raise, said she was ambivalent about the company’s decision to bring all salaried employees back to the office at least three days a week.
When she first returned, she was one of the few junior employees in the office. “I felt like I had a room full of mentors,” she said. But when almost everyone in his office of hundreds of people started doing the same thing, the mood changed.
– There were people who didn’t want to be there – she said, “Who didn’t want to talk to anyone.”