{"id":22625,"date":"2026-02-17T14:21:24","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T14:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/?p=22625"},"modified":"2026-02-17T14:21:24","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T14:21:24","slug":"as-boomer-and-gen-x-bosses-retire-working-from-home-will-make-a-comeback-new-research-predicts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/?p=22625","title":{"rendered":"As boomer and Gen X bosses retire, working from home will make a comeback, new research predicts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p>Miss the pandemic era of working from home? Give it a decade or two, and it\u2019s set to be the norm again. That\u2019s because, although baby boomer and Gen X bosses may be winning the return-to-office war right now, new data suggests it\u2019s a short-lived victory.<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>In fact, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that millennial and Gen Z bosses are far more likely to let staff work remotely than their older counterparts\u2014and that it\u2019s only a matter of time before they take over and bring their affinity for flexibility with them.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers tracked monthly surveys of 8,000 U.S. workers aged 20 to 64 across 2025 and concluded that when it comes to flexible working, two things are consistently true: employees at younger firms, and under younger CEOs, spend significantly more time working from home.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFirst, employees work from home more often at younger firms\u2014almost twice as often at firms founded after 2015 as compared to those founded before 1990,\u201d the researchers wrote. \u201cSecond, employees work from home more often at firms with younger CEOs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In fact, you can see in their data that as CEOs get younger, the number of days they demand staff work from an office decreases, with those working under a twenty-something-year-old chief working from home the most.\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\n<div class=\"block w-full\"><img data-cy=\"article-image\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"562\" decoding=\"async\" data-nimg=\"1\" class=\"transition-opacity duration-300 lazyload wp-image-4420065 not-prose w-full\" style=\"color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url(&quot;data:image\/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg' viewBox='0 0 1024 562'%3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'\/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'\/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'\/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'\/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'\/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'\/%3E%3C\/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image\/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR4nGNgYAAAAAMAASsJTYQAAAAASUVORK5CYII='\/%3E%3C\/svg%3E&quot;)\" sizes=\"(max-width: 320px) 50vw, (max-width: 768px) 85vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, (max-width: 1200px) 40vw, 33vw\" srcset=\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=128&amp;q=100 128w, https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=256&amp;q=100 256w, https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=320&amp;q=100 320w, https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=384&amp;q=100 384w, https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=480&amp;q=100 480w, https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=576&amp;q=100 576w, https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=768&amp;q=100 768w, https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=1024&amp;q=100 1024w, https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=1280&amp;q=100 1280w, https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=1440&amp;q=100 1440w\" src=\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-101343.png?format=webp&amp;w=1440&amp;q=100\"\/><\/div>\n<p>The National Bureau of Economic Research<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p>It\u2019s why the researchers concluded that work from home is poised to make a comeback, despite the likes of Amazon and JPMorgan currently mandating a full-time office return. As older leaders retire, the days of bums on seats five days a week are likely to fade with them.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, your future commute may depend less on what HR says and more on the birth year of the person in the corner office.<\/p>\n<p>And for workers who don\u2019t want to wait, the study offers a simple hack: target younger firms with younger bosses if you want to maximize your chances of keeping your home office setup.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Gen Z bosses aren\u2019t just flexible-first, they\u2019re also digital-first<\/h2>\n<p>It\u2019s not just that young bosses came of age during the pandemic\u2019s remote work boom and see office cubicles as an outdated relic. Many of them built their businesses on Slack, Zoom, and AI tools, so flexibility and technology are baked into how their firms run\u2014not bolted on as a perk.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers found a clear correlation between younger CEOs and companies that are both flexible-first and digital-first, with leaders who embrace remote work also more likely to adopt new technologies and software-driven approaches to running their teams.<\/p>\n<p>And that echoes what future-thinking CEOs have already been warning: Leaders who cling to the old ways of working aren\u2019t serious about embracing AI.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cForget about where people are working. Most companies will go by the wayside if they don\u2019t embrace AI,\u201d Mark Dixon, CEO and founder of International Workplace Group (IWG), exclusively told <em>Fortune<\/em>. \u201cIf you look at winners and losers, the winners are the ones that embrace the technology.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEmbracing the whole of the technology, which is flexible work, flexible location, high levels of technology, using technology to get more out of your people. Those will be the winning companies, because they focus on the people,\u201d Dixon warns.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>As other leaders have pointed out, firms that focus on physical presence rather than remote, AI-driven work risk falling behind competitors.<\/p>\n<p>Brian O\u2019Kelley, the tech founder who sold AppNexus to AT&amp;T for $1.6 billion in 2018, before founding Scope3, argued that remote firms, like his, have the top pick of top global talent and operate around the clock.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe best companies are going to actually dump their offices to learn to work with non-bodied employees,\u201d O\u2019Kelley echoed in <em>Fortune<\/em>. \u201cAnybody who has a back-to-office culture is actually hurting themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Being spread across time zones doesn\u2019t just make his workforce available to customers at all hours of the day\u2014it forces teams to be efficient and lean on the latest tech in ways traditional office-based companies simply don\u2019t need to.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s why companies fixated on presence rather than productivity gains that actually enable an AI-first future are at a disadvantage.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe thing is, if you build a culture that\u2019s asynchronous and remote, it means you\u2019re building a culture for AI to thrive,\u201d\u00a0 O\u2019Kelley added. \u201cIf you\u2019re building an office culture, you are actually not building an AI-first ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>#boomer #Gen #bosses #retire #working #home #comeback #research #predicts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Miss the pandemic era of worki&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[1721,1305,938,542,10759,13395,304,927,300,232,7131,224,1425,6892,195,9547,208,1596,954,13396,1364],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}