Missed Expectations: The Generational Effort Gap in Remote Work

Among full-time professionals, almost a quarter of younger employees are pretending to work from home. ATUS data shows Gen Z and Millennials put in two fewer hours a day than older peers - they’re twice as likely to work fewer than 3.5 hours and half as likely to work a full day as Boomers.

Whether that’s a failure of management to set expectations older generations assumed were obvious, or a lack of accountability in remote environments, the result is the same: the employees most at risk of being replaced by AI are the ones making the least effort - and if it isn’t fixed, the consequences for the workforce and society will be severe.

Missed Expectations

When remote went from rare to routine five years ago, mid-career professionals didn’t need reminders that working a full day is just what you do. Early in their careers, they were the ones staying late and grinding while the veterans took longer lunches and squeezed in the occasional round of golf. So when Gen X and Boomers switched from the office to working from home, they already knew the expectations of successful professionals: show up, stay until the job’s done, and make the effort visible.

But for many younger professionals coming of age through the pandemic, that “before times” context never existed. Many of them - especially Gen Z - started their careers, and in some cases finished school and college, on Zoom. This would be bad enough, but their upbringing was shaped by standardized tests and intensive parenting, so they’d always had expectations spelled out clearly for them. When the shift to remote work happened and their managers failed to set firm expectations, it’s no surprise that many decided they could do as little as possible until someone told them otherwise.

The out-of-sight nature of remote work has made an unfortunate misalignment much worse. Older managers don’t imagine they need to tell younger employees to work the full day they’re being paid for - any more than they’d need to tell them to pay for all their groceries at self-checkout. Meanwhile, younger professionals think, “If you’re not telling me I’m falling short, why would I assume I’m doing something wrong?”

That mismatch is the heart of the crisis around remote-work performance — and if it isn’t addressed, the consequences for younger generations will be brutal.

The Data: Two Hours Missing

The American Time Use Survey tracks about 140,000 activities from roughly 7,500 people each year. In 2024, around 3,500 were full-time employees - people paid for full days, not part-timers or contractors.

Here’s what it shows for professionals:

• Gen Z (18–27): 5.5 hours a day at home vs 7.4 in the office (+1.9 h) - 23% are fake-working from home.
• Millennials (28–42): 6.0 vs 7.6 (+1.6 h) - 18% fake-working from home.
• Gen X (43–58): 7.0 vs 7.9 (+0.9 h) - 12% fake-working from home.
• Boomers (59–75): 7.4 vs 8.1 (+0.7 h) - 10% fake-working from home.

This much lower WFH effort for younger professionals is a big deal - especially when the same data shows younger professionals working almost as much as their older peers in the office.

While the difference in averages is striking, the bigger issue is the size of the “fake-work” segment: professionals logging less than 3½ hours a day while being paid for full-time jobs.

Almost a quarter of Gen Z and one in five Millennials fall into this group - roughly twice the rate of Gen X and Boomers. It’s this under-performing minority that drags down the averages, erodes trust, and gives an entire generation of professionals a bad name.

The Tragedy: No Visibility = No Communication

But the issue isn’t that almost a quarter of younger workers are lazy - it’s that most managers don’t even know this is happening. Because if they can’t see it, they can’t address it. No visibility means no communication.

If you don’t know what’s really happening with your remote team - especially your less experienced team members — then you can’t coach them. And if you can’t have honest conversations about performance, growth, and goals, you can’t connect them to the mission of the team. That’s why many younger employees are doing as little as they can get away with. And without visibility, they can get away with a lot - which creates a downward spiral across the team and company.

We’ve found with early TeamScore users that managers often have a hunch about where the problems are, but you need more than a hunch to have a hard conversation - especially when “output,” “performance,” and “doing the work” are subjective and hard to measure.

So the conversations never happen. Expectations stay fuzzy. And fake-work-from-home employees keep acting rationally inside a broken feedback loop.

With better clarity - visibility around effort and communication around expectations - behavior changes quickly. And it needs to, because the youngest professionals are the future of our workforce and our economy.

The Fix: Clarity Restores Effort

This isn’t a generational feud. It’s a management blind spot - and it’s fixable fast.

1. Make effort visible. When teams can see actual activity data, norms snap back overnight. The grinders stand out; everyone else recalibrates.
2. Set explicit expectations. Spell out what “a full day” means. It’s not micromanagement - it’s management.
3. Recognize visible effort. The standardized-test generation responds to feedback loops. When effort is noticed, it compounds.

Visibility isn’t surveillance. It’s the context remote work removed. Communication isn’t coddling. It’s leadership.

The Bottom Line

Younger professionals aren’t irredeemably lazy or broken; they just never had clear expectations set in the workplace —- or the hard-lesson consequences of failing to meet them.

Older managers need to remember that you lead from where your team is, not where you wish they were. That means having better visibility and using your experience to guide, coach, and hold people accountable - even when they’re remote.

Remote work didn’t kill work ethic - it killed visibility. And without visibility, work ethic atrophied. Bring visibility and communication back, and the gap closes fast.

That’s what TeamScore was built for: giving managers the data and clarity to make effort measurable again - and helping the next generation rise to the expectations of a full day’s work.