TikTok trend watch: Gen Z is back in the office, and not staying a minute past 5 p.m.
TikTokers returning to offices, especially those in Generation Z, are balking at the idea of staying at their desks past 5 p.m. They’re vocally rejecting this workplace social norm after starting careers remotely during the pandemic as a means to protect their work-life balance boundaries.
It comes as employers are also reconsidering what productivity actually looks like and how much physical presenteeism matters in evolving hybrid workplaces.
Traditionally, staying at your desk past 5 p.m. or until your boss and other coworkers began filing out was the norm to appear as a productive team player. More recently, Gen Zers are calling out the behavior as performative and are shameless about not adhering to it.
“Are you really leaving at 5 p.m.?” reads TikTok user chriscrosstheskies’ caption in a video of him sarcastically pointing to his car keys, saying “it looks like it!”
In another video, creator thatcorporatelawyer first acts as a CEO at 5:01 p.m. on a work call, telling his team “I’m just heading up to the golf course, I’ll be contactable on my mobile all evening.”
He then plays the middle manager, saying he made fresh coffee and will get in a couple more hours of work, then the millennial, saying he can stay on for a bit longer. The camera turns to the Gen Z worker’s empty chair, as he’s already off for the evening.
“They’re adopting and embracing lifestyles of choice, versus you fit into that traditional box,” said Joe Galvin, chief research officer for executive coaching consultancy Vistage.
Gen Z workers (who were born between 1996 and 2012) value work-life balance. Gen Z and millennials listed it as their top consideration when choosing an employer, followed by learning and development opportunities, then pay, according to a 2023 survey from Deloitte including over 20,000 respondents from those age groups.
“They expect to have a whole life and this is different than previous generations,” said Melanie Dulbecco, CEO of Torani, a syrup and sauces producer.
“In previous generations we threw ourselves into working long hours, that was the way we proved ourselves,” she said. “Now we’re at this awkward in-between phase, where really everyone would like to have a life outside of work, it’s just that we have to make it more the norm to leave around 5-ish,” she said.
Taking off promptly at 5 p.m. has long been, and will still be viewed as doing, the bare minimum to some managers, and in some cases, might even be a trait they attribute to quiet quitters. But those types of people and that kind of behavior has always existed, Galvin said.
“It’s these traditional workforce behaviors that are now amplified or muted based on the technology world that we live in,” he said.
Gen Z workers entered the workforce during a tight labor market that has continued since, enabling them to move around to new jobs more swiftly than some past generations when they started working. That’s another factor driving them to push back on how things have always been done in the workplace, he said.
For some — leaving right on time is still a form of quiet quitting — driven by feeling unheard or not valued by an employer.
Take TikToker, culturekidsgroup, who films himself shutting his laptop promptly as it turns 5 p.m., with the caption: “When your boss denies the raise request so you start taking the 9 to 5 seriously.”