We've Been Wrong About Gen Z And The Office. The Data Proves It

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• We've Been Wrong About Gen Z And The Office. The Data Proves It

11 September 2026 | Updated 10 September 2026

Simon Barnes, Vice President Sales and Marketing, ABM UK & Ireland, highlights that contrary to assumptions, Gen Z spends the most days in the office seeking connection and growth. However, mandatory return policies and poor workplace cultures fail them.

My youngest is a teenager, she’s in the Gen Z era - people born between 1997 and 2012. In a few years, she'll be entering the workplace. Or will she?

It is often assumed that because Gen Z are digital natives, they naturally prefer a screen-only working environment. If these assumptions are true, she'll never be setting foot in an office.

Thankfully they aren’t true. And the data is unambiguous. We’ve been getting it wrong about Gen Z and the return to office.

According to a 2025 JLL survey¹ of more than 12,000 workers across 44 countries, people under 24 come into the office an average of three days a week which is more than any other generation. Millennials and Gen X average slightly fewer in-person days, with those aged 35 to 54 actually reporting the lowest satisfaction with in-office work, likely because they're navigating the heaviest family responsibilities. The irony is considerable: the generation we assumed would need the most coaxing to return is, in fact, showing up with more consistency than anyone else.

By 2030, Millennials and Gen Z are expected to make up around 60% of the global workforce and the truth is, Gen Z aren’t running from the office. They are a generation walking into it hoping to find something worth showing up for. Whether it’s mentorship, connection, visibility, belonging. But the reality is that too often, they're not finding it. That gap between what people hope the office will be and what it is, is where presence is lost. Not to laziness. Not to ideology. To disappointment.

The Policy Trap

And yet the conversation remains dominated by percentages and policies. We keep pulling the same lever and wondering why it isn't working. Compliance with full-time return-to-office requirements has fallen from 54% to 42% in just two years. Most major cities still hover around 50% of pre-pandemic occupancy. The people most likely to walk are the highest performers. The ones with options. In the UK, 77% of employees say they'd actively seek a new job if flexible work policies were reversed.

There is a phenomenon known as ‘coffee badging’, where workers show up briefly to be seen, then log off to work remotely elsewhere. It’s become a quiet form of protest against those mandates that prioritise presence over purpose.

The Culture Club

ABM's latest workplace experience research, conducted among more than 500 full-time office workers in the UK, US, and Ireland, sheds more light on what's going on.

Ninety-one percent of UK workers say a strong office culture matters to them. Yet only 49% rate their current workplace culture as positive. In the US that figure rises to 65% which is still a significant gap, but a notably different one.

This shows a significant distance between aspiration and reality. You cannot compel someone to feel connected to a culture that isn't working for them. You cannot instruct belonging.

The picture is complicated further by what employees say they need. Across both the UK and US, the most-valued amenities are not the ones that make headlines. There are no ping-pong tables or artisan coffee stations featuring prominently. What workers want is more fundamental. Think reliable parking, spaces to eat their own food, bookable meeting rooms, quiet areas to focus - the basics. These are the elements that facilities solutions firms can elevate through workplace services and innovative technology.

Digital and human experience both matter; and in roughly equal measure. Seventy-one percent of workers want to access everything digitally whether that’s room booking, service requests or wayfinding. Yet 58% to 61% say it's equally important to have a real person they can talk to.

The modern workplace must hold both of those truths simultaneously. One without the other feels incomplete.

The Sense Of Belonging Nobody's Talking About

There's one finding that deserves more attention than it typically gets. Hot-desking which remains common as organisations try to maximise space efficiency. Hotdesking correlates dramatically with lower satisfaction, weaker cultural ratings, and reduced enjoyment of office life. In the UK, workers with their own desk are nearly 16 times more likely to say they love working in the office compared to those who hot desk (16% vs 1%). In the US, that comparison runs from 27% down to 9%.

However, because dedicated desks aren't feasible in every workplace, employers must look at the findings more deeply to understand what they can do here. What the findings suggest is that employees still value a sense of ownership, familiarity and belonging within the office environment. That feeling starts, quite literally, with a seat that belongs to them.

Generational Priorities

It's worth pausing on what the generational data is telling us, because it's subtler than most workplace strategies acknowledge. Life stage, it turns out, may be a stronger predictor of workplace preference than age cohort. The people most resistant to full-time office returns aren't necessarily ideologically opposed to in-person work; they're often managing the most complex lives outside of it. Caregiving, commuting costs, the logistical weight of returning to a space that was designed for a different era.

Gen Z, by contrast, is earlier in that life arc. They have fewer competing obligations and far more to gain from in-person exposure. Mentorship, informal learning, visibility to leadership, the kind of incidental relationship-building that builds career. These are not small things. They're the entire point for someone just starting out.

What Gen Z values, research shows, is autonomy, authenticity, and a genuine sense of purpose, over perks. They'll tolerate a commute. They won't tolerate a commute to sit in a room and feel invisible.

What Good Looks Like

The companies seeing the strongest engagement are the ones who ask ‘what would make our team members want to come back?’ Thinking of the workplace experience as the part of the journey that retains engagement, will change everything about how employers design space, culture, and experience.

Ireland offers an instructive data point here. Eighty-five percent of Irish workers say they'd spend more time in the office if the right facilities were in place — subsidised meals, fast internet, mentoring programmes, gym access. The willingness is already there. The workplace just hasn't earned it yet.

The most progressive organisations are designing to make the experience of the office genuinely competitive with the experience of not being in it. That means attending to the three dimensions that employees consistently identify as mattering most. These are, people (culture, connection, trust), place (amenities, access, physical comfort), and purpose (a clear answer to the question ‘what do I get for showing up that I couldn't get at home?’).

Becoming Worthy Of The Commute

There's a simpler way to think about all of this. Workplace policies can shape attendance expectations, but long-term engagement depends on what the experience means to people when they arrive.

The conversation about where work happens has been running for five years now. It's time for it to evolve into a conversation about what work feels like and ask whether the environments we've built are genuinely worth the commute.

When my daughter walks into her first office in a few years, I'd like to think it will be somewhere that she stays because she comes away with a sense of belonging. She’ll come home and tell us all about the experience she’s had at work, because it’s the experience that matters the most. That’s what will earn her commute.

1. 2025 JLL Survey Report – see here.

Picture: Two young women sitting in an office, collaborating over a laptop while colleagues work in the background.

Article written by Simon Barnes | Published 11 September 2026

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