Younger people perceive the office very differently than previous generations. It offers an experience that was once quite banal but is now special.
What motivates Gen Z to go to the office? For young people, the office is a place to develop personally more than was perhaps the case in previous generations. The hashtags #cubiclelife and #worklife are currently booming. Essentially, it’s about personalizing the workplace and seeing it as an important place in life – and sharing your creation with others and perhaps going viral in the process.
Like the following TikTok video by Maïa Maury, a 25-year-old French woman who lives and works in America. It has now amassed more than 10 million views. She invested around 200 US dollars in equipping her workplace.
Who was Gen Z again? Also called Zoomers, all people born between 1996 and 2012 are included in this group. Before them come the Millennials (Y) from 1980 onwards. 1965 to 1979 is the birth period of Generation X. All people born after 2012 or not until 2024 are part of Generation Alpha.
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Why does Generation Z perceive the office differently? Generally speaking, there are two main reasons for this, as Business Insider also explains. Firstly, a significant proportion of young people have not yet experienced working in an office, at their own desk outside of home. The pandemic forced young professionals to stay in their home office. Anyone who is under 30 and has studied is unlikely to have spent any time in an office outside of a school internship before the pandemic.
In addition, many younger people share places or means of transport with others far more often than older people. For them, arriving and having a place just for themselves at work is an exclusive experience.
On the other hand, the importance of the so-called work/life balance has changed (via Gruender). That is why the idea of having your own, personalized desk in a room with colleagues and friends is welcomed by many young people – far more enthusiastically than by older people.
So is having your own desk a lure for jobs? Yes, experts at Business Insider also point this out. It can be worthwhile for companies to offer their own rather than shared desks, even in hybrid working models. In times when working from home is perceived as the norm, this is a real added value and not something to be taken for granted.
But that is and remains just a job, and it can also be taken away? There are warning voices under Maïa Maury’s video. The tense economic situation is causing some to warn of layoffs under the TikTok above. No one should feel so visibly comfortable in their workplace. But the influencer has a clear answer to that:
This idea that a job is just to pay the bills is a problem. If you think of a job that way, you’re unlikely to like what you do.
Meanwhile, surveys of employers in the UK paint a less than glorious picture of the time that Generation Z spends in the office. However, there are good reasons for the not entirely unfounded accusations of the older generations and factors that put the criticism into perspective: Generation Z is often late, wastes working time and is often absent due to mental problems, surveys show.