- Employees earning a salary over $150,000 actually prefer working from home, a McKinsey study found.
- Senior workers are more likely to have comfortable work setups at home as well as childcare duties.
Younger workers often get flak for the rise in remote work but new McKinsey research finds that high-earning mid to senior-level employees are also committed to the work-from-home culture and will do anything to keep these policies in place.
McKinsey's survey of 13,000 office workers in six countries published in July looks at how hybrid work has changed the way people work. It found that one-third of employees who earn over $150,000 said they strongly preferred working from home — only 9% of employees earning less than $50,000 felt the same way.
44% of senior workers said they would rather work from home; 50% of mid-level employees said the same, but only 6% of junior employees shared this sentiment.
These workers also said they'd be willing to take a 20% pay cut to work their desired amount of days from home, per McKinsey.
Junior employees are often called out as being one of the main groups to favor remote working since the pandemic, but McKinsey found that they're actually more likely to go into the office five days a week than mid to senior-level workers.
Younger workers might be keen to be in the office because they're more likely to be living in shared apartments and cramped spaces, while also craving mentorship and a social life.
Senior employees tend to be more confident in their skills and might have a more comfortable remote working setup. Additionally, childcare responsibilities and established social lives mean working in the office could be less enticing.
"There's a drop-off as you get more senior and you're more comfortable in what you're doing and you're more comfortable doing it remotely," Slack's co-founder and chief technology officer Cal Henderson told Insider in a recent interview.
"That is an interesting curve that we haven't really grappled with yet as a society. More junior people are interested in coming to the office but more senior people, especially once they have families, are less interested in coming to the office. Then who are those junior people learning from?" he added.