At university, Farhana Ismail was drawn to design research for its human touch. She was especially looking forward to the field research and face-to-face interviews she’d conduct after graduating from her communications degree.
But months after, when Covid-19 sent her home city of Melbourne into years of rolling lockdowns, things changed. She landed her first professional job in March 2021, after the industry had mostly moved online.
“We’d only talk to people through a screen,” she says. “Our clients found that was more effective because we could talk to people in different areas and it would save money and time on travel.”
It wasn’t a welcome shift. “I feel disadvantaged as a young person,” she says. “Graduating and entering the workforce at this time – and with what’s happening with the economy – it’s all pretty difficult to navigate on top of being in your early 20s. Working from home exacerbated that feeling.”
In 2022 the US employment site Indeed surveyed 1,001 18- to 41-year-olds about changing workplace attitudes. They found 82% of gen Z respondents had “never worked in an in-person office environment full-time”; 92% said “they are missing out on traditional workplace experiences”; and 85% worried they were disadvantaged in “learning professional ‘soft skills’ due to never working in a more traditional full-time role”.
While this reporting wasn’t carried out by a government body or academic institution, its results aren’t hard to believe. The shift to hybrid and remote work has changed the way many of us experience employment.
While some large companies are calling their workers back to the office full-time, data for August 2021 from the Australian Bureau of Statistics found 40.5% of employed people regularly work from home, up from 32% in 2019, and the highest rate recorded. For people who do computer-based jobs, that number is even higher: a Swinburne University survey in March 2022 found that fewer than a quarter had returned to commuting five days a week.
Remote work is now a recruitment carrot. A 2023 report by the HR company Randstad found 74.6% of Australian workers “believe that flexibility in terms of location is important”.
The advantages are easy to argue: workers can skip their commutes, access a geographically broader range of employment opportunities and hang out their washing at 11am on a sunny Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, businesses save on office costs while reaching a wider pool of talent.
But these clear benefits are more relevant to those whose careers were established before they downloaded Zoom.
Restrictions are long gone but Ismail only works from the office once a week and all of her interviews take place online. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I [had] joined before Covid,” she says. “Would my relationships be different? Am I experiencing something different?”
When she watches how her older colleagues work, “I feel there’s a secret sauce that everyone knows about … that I just don’t get. I feel like I’ve missed out by starting my career this way.”
Covid merely accelerated a change that was already under way. Genevieve Phelan is a publicist who runs her own consultancy. She started a journalism career pre-pandemic but the media industry’s contraction meant full-time roles were rare and unstable. Her entire career has consisted of freelance, short-term or part-time jobs and she has never spent an extended period in one office.
Phelan laments her lack of a work community. “[Not having] the ability to bounce ideas off another person is difficult,” she says. “I missed being able to grab a coffee with a colleague to break up the day, or … after work drinks to celebrate the wins or work through the losses.” Although her client list is growing, she says: “When it’s just you and you’re floating, it can be isolating.”
The impact of isolation is more than just social. “The amount of information you absorb through social interactions that’s non-verbal is far more than what you absorb that’s verbal,” says a general and organisational psychologist, Dr Amanda Ferguson. “All the non-verbal cues – from body language to pheromones to gestures and intuition” aren’t picked up when someone works alone, she says.
Ismail says she struggled in her first job because “I wasn’t used to working full-time in general … Concentrating from nine to five was a huge challenge.”
The issue wasn’t that she was working too little. She has since learned that in offices “there are transitional spaces like the kitchen or couches that break up the day”.
“You’re not meant to do back-to-back meetings. The workplace isn’t meant to be that intense. But since I started remote, I didn’t know that for a really long time.”
Without snacks and water-cooler chats, she found herself working for extended, unbroken hours. “I wish someone [had] told me that this wasn’t normal. But speaking to friends my age, it’s a common experience.”
As a psychologist, Ferguson has noticed how often young remote workers overexert themselves.
“There was a recent trend where managers [to remote teams] were letting everyone know when they’re clocking off work, so others know to clock off too,” she says. Without the context clues of people packing up around them, young workers “just stayed online”.
Beyond the stress of long, lonely days, Ferguson also points to studies suggesting gen Z workers are, in aggregate, less resilient at work than their older colleagues. This mirrors her own observations. “The brain is largely developed for socialisation,” she says. “But that’s what generation Z is missing out on [working from home].”
Ferguson believes that even a lack of eavesdropping might set a worker back. “You can’t underrate the opportunities you get from just overhearing a conversation.
“You’re missing observation: other people negotiating things, information like, ‘It looks like the boss is laying people off’… The sense of where the organisation is going, or where you could find yourself better located. There’s just a lot more information if you’re physically in the office.”
That’s a gulf Phelan is aware of. She hopes to run her own team one day and worries about the cracks that might appear when it’s her time to lead. “I feel like as a teacher, maybe I won’t be as good at being hands-on and fostering learning, because I’m so used to communicating via emails … Maybe [I won’t] have as much patience with people.
“Sometimes I feel like I’d rather send an email than pick up the phone, or have a Zoom rather than meeting in the flesh.”
Phelan has found some workarounds. Solo work “forced me to be a natural networker … I have to do a lot of cold calls and cold emails”, she says. “I attend a lot of industry events. I’ve even walked up to people in public before. I do those things to compensate.”
The effort is admirable – and a valuable skill in itself – but she has to do these things on her own time, with her own money. Community-building is effectively a job on top of her job, a necessity she does long after everyone else logs off, just to keep up. Also, not everyone is as outgoing as Phelan.
Fully remote work has drawbacks but Ferguson does not think young workers should aim to be in the office every day. “Around two to three days in the office … is better for the organisation and the worker,” she says. That number has been backed up by Stanford researcher Nicholas Bloom, who suggests spending two days in the office a week as the ideal for optimising productivity while managing stress.
Even Phelan agrees: “It’s so important to have flexible working conditions and allow people to work in a way that best suits them. Even if I had my own agency, I wouldn’t be there five days a week.”
Ismail can no longer even envision a full-time return to the office. “A regular five-day office job feels impossible,” she says. “Maybe I could go into an office a couple of days a week.
“Although working from home can feel a bit boring or isolating, I’ve grown used to it.”
If Ismail had joined the workforce 10 years ago, her social life may have revolved around post-office bonding sessions with colleagues. But instead, she joined an art and design collective with other Muslim women. “It has been really healthy to have a community outside of work,” she says.
This has given her one big advantage over those who entered adulthood in the daily office grind: “Work doesn’t take up too much of my life, and make up too much of my identity.”
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