Flexibility Isn't a Gen Z Thing. It's a Human Thing.

I keep hearing that Millennials and Gen Z "want flexibility", often accompanied by amusing TikToks about the conversations managers are apparently having with younger employees.

I have two problems with this.

Firstly, I don't particularly like the demonisation of generations. I know plenty of wonderful, hardworking and intelligent Millennials and Gen Zs who are finding their way through work, just as every generation before them did.

But secondly – and perhaps more importantly – flexibility isn't something younger generations invented.

Most of us want it. And at different points in our lives, many of us need it.

Years ago, when I worked at Motorola in Scotland, we had a twilight shift. It was staffed by some amazing teams, predominantly women, who chose those hours because they fitted around their lives and families.

Nobody called it hybrid working. It was simply a sensible way of organising work that needed doing around people who were available and wanted to do it.

My husband made a similar decision when our son started school. He deliberately built a business that allowed him flexibility.

I've known people – again, predominantly women – who have actually given up jobs because they couldn't reconcile work with those first few weeks of school. Ironically, after years of managing perfectly well with nurseries that often offered considerably more flexibility.

And flexibility doesn't stop being important when the children grow up.

There are elderly parents, partners, grandchildren, medical appointments, disabilities, caring responsibilities and simply the complicated business of having a life.

The data bears this out.

The UK Family Resources Survey estimates that 5.7 million people were informal carers in 2024–25 – 3.4 million women and 2.3 million men. And the age group most likely to provide informal care wasn't Gen Z. It was 55–64-year-olds.

Even the hybrid-working statistics challenge the generational stereotype.

ONS data for early 2025 showed that 36% of workers aged 30–49 hybrid worked, compared with just 19% of 16–29-year-olds.

There are occupational reasons for that – younger people are more likely to work in jobs where homeworking simply isn't possible – but that's rather the point.

We've bundled together two different things:

Flexibility and working from home.

They're not the same.

A warehouse operative can't unload a container from their kitchen table. Someone serving customers in a shop needs to be where the customers are.

But they might value different start and finish times, shift swaps, compressed hours, predictable rotas, job sharing, term-time arrangements or simply the ability to flex occasionally when life intervenes.

Flexibility should be about asking what flexibility is possible within this work, rather than dividing the workforce into those who can work from home and those who can't.

And people value it.

CIPD's 2025 research found that 80% of employees working flexibly said it positively affected their quality of life. Around 1.1 million UK workers were estimated to have left a job in the previous year because of a lack of flexible working.

That makes this much more than a wellbeing conversation.

It's a talent conversation. A retention conversation. An inclusion conversation.

And ultimately it's a business conversation.

There will always be boundaries. Organisations have customers to serve, operations to run and outcomes to deliver. Flexibility can't mean everybody simply doing whatever they want whenever they want.

But neither should work automatically be designed around traditional patterns simply because that's how we've always done it.

Perhaps the better starting point is:

What work needs to be done, when does it need to be done, and how much flexibility can we genuinely build around the people doing it?

Because flexibility isn't a Millennial thing.

It isn't a Gen Z thing.

It's a human thing.

And that leads to another question I'll explore next: before deciding how many days someone should be in an office, shouldn't we understand what they're actually there to do?

Sources

• CIPD – Flexible and hybrid working practices in 2025
• Office for National Statistics – Who has access to hybrid work in Great Britain?
• Department for Work & Pensions – Family Resources Survey 2024 to 2025