What are banks up against? Employees’ desire for flexibility could impact banks’ hiring and retention efforts.
- Employees are more committed to working from home than they were in Q3 2021, according to a June survey of more than 8,000 workers across industries by Gallup. The desire to work exclusively from home has more than doubled since October 2021.
- Among fully remote workers, 60% said they’d be “extremely likely” to look for other opportunities if their employer decided not to offer some form of remote work.
But breaking out the demographics of those work-from-home preferences offers a more complex picture. The preference for remote work is generational: Gen Z misses the office more than colleagues who’ve spent a larger portion of their lives there.
- Less than one-quarter of workers in their 20s wanted to do so full-time.
- By contrast, 29% of employees in their 30s, 33% in their 40s, and 41% in their 50s and early 60s preferred to work remotely.
- LinkedIn, which analyzed job applications on its platform, found that 20- to 24-year-olds were the least likely cohort to apply to remote roles.
Gen Z workers feel they’re missing out on networking opportunities and mentorship, and are seeking that through the community that the workplace creates. Their tendency to gravitate toward on-site jobs could, as Business Insider recently suggested, lead to workplaces divided along generational lines, with individual companies’ workforces skewed by age, depending on whether they’ve chosen remote-first or office-only policies.
Our take: Setting a policy on returning to the office doesn’t just affect a financial firm’s current employees. It also indirectly shapes its future workforce and its ability to compete in the talent wars.
We’ve advised executives to think about their workplace in four modes: practically, culturally, environmentally, and strategically. Thinking strategically means identifying what skill sets FIs need to attract and retain to 1) successfully run the business, 2) manage their cost base, and 3) innovate and grow.
Your pool of potential employees might come to you from varied age demographics, from careers in traditional finance or from tech companies—all of which have given them different expectations about the workplace.
This article originally appeared in Insider Intelligence's Banking Innovation Briefing—a daily recap of top stories reshaping the payments industry. Subscribe to have more hard-hitting takeaways delivered to your inbox daily.