How Old Is the CEO?

If Stanford researchers are right, this single number tells you more about how many days you'll work from home than anything else about the company.

Nicholas Bloom - yes, the rockstar of work-from-home research - and his team just dropped their latest paper (Younger Firms and CEOs Allow More Work from Home, NBER Working Paper, February 2026), and they found three things that'll make your morning coffee go down the wrong way. The second one too.

One: employees at firms founded after 2015 work from home almost twice as often as those at firms founded before 1990. Not 10% more. Twice.

Two: when the CEO is under 30, employees work from home an average of 1.4 days per week. When the CEO is 60 or older? 1.1 days.

Ugh, that's a 0.3-day difference per week, you say. Doesn't sound dramatic. Okay, let's do the math.

0.3 days per week is roughly 15 workdays per year. Over ten years, that's 150 workdays - more than half a year!!! that you spend in the office because your boss happens to be older. Well. When you look at it like that, it gets interesting.

(By the way, employees under a sub-30 CEO spend about 73 days a year working from home. Under a 60+ CEO? About 57. Feel the difference.)

Three: the self-employed work from home more than twice as much as salaried employees. I mean, who would have guessed, right? Yes, I've already loaded the washing machine and the dishwasher today, and I couldn't have done either if I were stuck in traffic. Actually, technically, as a self-employed person, I'm also creating the traffic, so let's take responsibility for that too!!

But why? No, it's not because startup. No, it's not because IT.

The comfortable answer would be that young firms are tech startups, of course they work remotely. Except the researchers controlled for that. It's not about the industry. It's not about the job role.

It's about the leadership mindset.

The older leader was socialized in a world where work = being physically present. If I can't see you, you can't possibly be working. They had neither the tools nor the options for anything else. This isn't ageism, this is workplace socialization. That's how much it matters. (In everything, by the way - I maintain that there is NO more important career choice than what your first real workplace is like. That's where the center of your inertia system gets set. Forever :) )

The younger leader saw significantly earlier in their career that the world didn't collapse during COVID. They started leading in an era when you immediately got a laptop. And a Blackberry - good lord, I had to check if that's actually what they were called :)) So they experienced firsthand that you can work from anywhere. They themselves worked from everywhere from minute zero of their careers.

And just add this one quietly to yourself: what do you think will happen to the home office going forward - headlines aside - IF we can already see that the younger the company, the more you can work from home?

There are enough of you stuck in traffic as it is :)