C2 The BulleTin • Sunday, June 27, 2021
Young workers fear they must return
to offices in order to save their careers
BY MARC DANIEL DAVIES
Bloomberg
M
anagers hoping to lure
employees into offices
may find their youngest
and newest staff are their stron-
gest allies.
Young white-collar staff feel
caught between a rock and a hard
place — they value quality of life
over old-fashioned 9-to-5 com-
muting, but are even more wor-
ried about seeing their careers
stall unless they head back into an
office. That’s encouraging many
to be among the first to return to
their desks.
While experienced employ-
ees often have established pro-
fessional networks and dedicated
home offices, younger staff say the
pandemic has left them under-in-
formed and cut off from their
teams. There are now growing
concerns that they are missing out
on career opportunities older col-
leagues took for granted.
Well over half of staff ages 21
to 30 stressed the importance of
being able to meet and work with
colleagues in person again, ac-
cording to a 6,000-person survey
carried out for Sharp Corp., re-
sults of which were shared with
Bloomberg. Nearly 60% said
working in a modern, collegiate
office environment has become
more important to them over the
past year.
Despite a majority under 30
saying remote work made them
more productive, over half of the
survey’s respondents across Eu-
rope — ranging in age from 18 to
45 — say they feel anxious about a
lack of training and career oppor-
tunities when thinking long-term
about the future of work.
Sophia McCully, a 28-year-old
working in public policy research,
has worked from home ever since
starting her current role. She be-
lieves the enforced isolation has
had a significant impact on her
professional development.
“I think the ability to make
those connections and network
has been more difficult,” McCully
said. Starting a new job in a virtual
setting also made it “harder to get
yourself across,” at least at first.
Still, while young workers may
crave in-person connections and
relief from pressures on their
health and well-being, they remain
skeptical of returning to the status
quo before covid-19. Instead, they
are looking for value and purpose
in office-based activities while re-
taining the right to work remotely.
McCully said working from home
Jason Alden/Bloomberg
Commuters walk along the concourse after arriving at London Waterloo railway station in London on June 7.
allowed her to spend time with
her young child while remaining
professionally productive, and
wants that to remain an option.
In fact, more than 60% of em-
ployees aged 18 to 40, who have
spent all their adult lives in a
tech-centric environment, favor
some kind of hybrid arrangement,
according to a global survey of
2,000 people by workplace tech-
nology provider Citrix.
Offices of the future are seen as
“hubs for collaboration, innova-
tion and connection” while staff
believes the option of working re-
motely — not just at home — re-
mains crucial to well-being, the
Citrix survey shows. Separately,
almost half of the millennial and
Gen-Z staff say they may even
quit their jobs without that option,
Bloomberg reported recently.
“I think the office is critical. The
key question is why and what for?”
said Michael Smets, Professor
of Management at Oxford’s Saïd
Business School.
“If we think that coming to the
office is about learning, we need
not everyone but people who
want to learn and those they want
to learn from in the office at the
same time.”
Navigating this terrain presents
major challenges for executives
puzzling over how to design the
workplace of the almost-here fu-
ture. While Wall Street banks in-
cluding Goldman Sachs Group
Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
are pushing ahead with plans to
fill offices up again, other compa-
nies across a host of sectors are ex-
perimenting with hybrid arrange-
ments they hope will offer staff the
flexibility many now expect.
Some companies are refitting
offices, while others are focusing
on upgrading digital infrastruc-
ture. Some companies, such as
Apple, are telling staff to come in
on certain days, a move that led to
criticism from the tech giant’s staff.
Few companies claim to have
fully solved the puzzle, yet early
career professionals stand to lose
out the most if disconnection and
“artificial silos” are reinforced once
offices reopen, Smets said.
“Socialization into the orga-
nizational culture, making con-
nections, understanding the soft
tissue — the unwritten rules — of
the organization, that is where
time together is also really, really
important. To build and feel the
culture of the organization, that
is particularly critical for younger
people,” he said.
Specific groups of employees —
notably those with young families
or caring responsibilities, who are
likely to aim to work from home
more often — are at greater risk
if they are excluded from organi-
zational culture, said Smets. That
could stall or reverse progress
made against gender, racial and
other inequalities.
As organizations become more
mindful of these challenges, they
may need to become more disci-
plined in ensuring information
and opportunities are available to
all staff, to avoid exacerbating old
inequalities or opening up new
ones, Smets said.
Helen Jamieson, managing di-
rector of human resources consul-
tancy Jaluch, who has focused on
hybrid solutions for over a decade,
says young workers who may
still wish to work mostly at home
“don’t understand what they may
be missing” in terms of long-term
career development.
Jamieson advocates dedicated
“collaboration days,” and suggests
that new hires and young staff
could work mostly from offices
during their first six months, be-
fore opening up work-from-home
options.
The calculus, Jamieson says, is
to set aside personal preferences
and focus on balancing business
needs with a strategy for staff en-
gagement and retention. “Because
quite frankly if companies don’t
look after young people, they’ll
lose them.”
Organizational psychologist Vi-
ola Kraus, who worked on Sharp’s
European survey, says firms
should engage with staff on how
they fared over the last year and
identify critical needs.
“I’d advise them to really take
a step back, review the learning,
then have a cross-generational
talk within your organization,” she
said.
“Companies don’t have to sat-
isfy every employee’s wish, but
they need to retain that talent, so
they need to open that line of di-
alogue.”
Many moved to less pricey housing markets in 2020
BY ALEX VEIGA
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Many
Americans who moved last
year relocated to areas where
homes were, on average, bigger
and less expensive.
On average, people who
moved to a different city in
2020 ended up in a ZIP code
where average home values
were nearly $27,000 lower than
in their previous ZIP code, ac-
cording to Zillow.
People who relocated last
year also moved to ZIP codes
where the average home sold
was 33 square feet bigger than
their previous home, the real
estate information company
said.
Zillow based its findings on
an analysis of data from tens
of thousands of moves nation-
wide handled by relocation
company North American Van
Lines.
While the data doesn’t show
how many people who moved
ended up buying a home, it
suggests many Americans
used the pandemic, and the
broader acceptance of working
remotely, as an opportunity to
flee higher-cost metropolitan
areas.
Home prices have been
steadily rising over the past
decade, but 2020 was the first
year since at least 2016 where
people, on average, weren’t
moving into areas with higher
housing costs than they faced
in their previous location, Zil-
Dreamstime
A home for sale via Redfin on November 2019, in Santa Clara, California. A recent study shows that real
estate commissions are trending lower.
low found.
“What that suggests to me
is more movement away from
the more expensive housing
markets in the country,” said
Jeff Tucker, a senior economist
at Zillow.
A survey by Redfin of peo-
ple who moved to a differ-
ent metropolitan area in the
12 months since March 2020
found similar trends. About
two-thirds of respondents now
have the same or lower hous-
ing costs, and nearly as many
said their new home is the
same size or bigger. The sur-
vey was made up of 500 people
who use the online brokerage’s
website.
Many Americans contin-
ued moving to more affordable
and less densely populated ar-
eas in the first three months
of this year, according to some
300,000 moves handled by
relocation tech company Up-
dater.
The company found that
pricey metropolitan areas like
New York, Los Angeles and
Boston, or midwestern cities
like Cleveland and Indianapo-
lis, continued to lose residents
in favor of largely Southern
and Western cities such as
Nashville, Phoenix, Dallas and
Tampa, Florida.
Still, outflows from dense
urban cities such as New York,
San Francisco and Boston
slowed in the first quarter, the
company said.
Rising prices, a dearth of
homes on the market and the
ability to work remotely moti-
vated many Americans to relo-
cate last year, especially those
eager to move out of dense ur-
ban areas in the Northeast like
New York City in favor of more
suburban areas.
In the Zillow analysis, some
of the metropolitan areas that
saw the highest net outbound
moves last year were Chi-
cago, Los Angeles, New York,
San Diego and San Francisco.
Among the cities that saw the
biggest net gain in people mov-
ing in: Phoenix, Dallas, Austin,
Texas, Charlotte, North Caro-
lina and Sarasota, Florida.
The Sunbelt cities in the
South and West have been re-
location hot spots for years
as many Americans seek rel-
atively affordable housing
and warmer weather. And, of
course, snowbirds and retir-
ees from the Northeast and
Midwest have long flocked to
Florida, Arizona and Nevada,
among other Sunbelt destina-
tions.
The pandemic in many ways
just intensified existing migra-
tion patterns and accelerated
established trends, including
that of people moving from the
Northeast and Midwest to the
Sunbelt, Tucker said.
Last year’s relocation wave,
happening during a red-hot
housing market, likely bene-
fited relocating homeowners in
particular. Competition would
have helped push up their sell-
ing price, while moving to a
less pricey area likely put them
in the position to buy a bigger
home at a lower cost.
Nationally, the average home
value in ZIP codes with a net
departure of residents was
$419,344, while the average
value of a home in ZIP codes
with net increases in move-ins
was $392,281, nearly 7% lower,
according to Zillow. That dy-
namic reflects more moves
originating in larger metropol-
itan areas where home values
tend to be higher.
For example, Los Angele-
nos who moved to another
metropolitan area last year
could expect home values to
be $591,517 lower, on average,
than they were in L.A., accord-
ing to Zillow. While the typical
home value in areas movers re-
located to in Los Angeles was
$614,793 higher, on average,
than in the areas they moved
from.
Zillow also found that the
average size of homes in ZIP
codes where people moved
to last year increased to 1,913
square feet from an average of
1,880 square feet in their previ-
ous location. That increase in
square footage is about the size
of a walk-in closet, pantry or
bathroom.
“The move toward bigger
homes is also consistent with
this hypothesis that its being
driven by home workers, be-
cause one thing they need is
a home office in most cases,”
Tucker said.