Gen Alpha expects the 9-to-5 commute to disappear by 2040
IWG's Mark Dixon says Gen Alpha will find office commuting as outdated as candlelight
The average New Yorker still spends 53 minutes each way commuting to the office, a habit Mark Dixon, CEO of workspace giant IWG, believes won't survive the next 15 years.
Research from IWG and engineering consultancy Arup found that 80% of Gen Alpha, the oldest of whom are just 16, expect flexible working to be the norm by 2040.
Dixon told Fortune that today's teenagers will one day struggle to explain to their own children why people once travelled long distances "to sit down and use a computer".
Only a quarter of Gen Alpha surveyed said they'd tolerate a commute longer than 30 minutes, with most expecting to work near home or from it entirely. Dixon frames current return-to-office pushes as a temporary correction rather than a lasting reversal of remote work.
According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which involved analysing the records of 8,000 American employees, a younger CEO needs fewer working days at the office compared to an older one; the younger the CEO is, the fewer in-office days he/she requires.
In their conclusion, the researchers suggested that the concept of a five-day office week will soon become obsolete due to older CEOs retiring and younger ones succeeding them.
However, the NBER researchers also found that being a remote-friendly leader is associated with a quicker acceptance of new technology and software-enabled management.
Dixon stated this idea in an even more direct way, saying that those organisations that stick to physical presence instead of flexibility and use of AI technologies are doomed to be left behind.
Brian O'Kelley, who sold AppNexus to AT&T for $1.6 billion and founded his climate-tech company Scope3 in 2018, stated that CEOs who impose office requirements do not really care about creating AI-compliant companies.
