The seniors have left the building

Six years ago this March, due to COVID-19, we retreated into our homes and figured out how to make studios work from behind screens. But six years on, we’re still having the same conversation, and I think we’re having the wrong one.

The debate about hybrid working in creative studios almost always centres on juniors. Can they learn remotely? Are they missing out? Will the next generation of designers be underdeveloped because they spent their formative years on Zoom? It’s a legitimate concern. But it’s only half the picture.

The people who drifted furthest from the studio under the cover of hybrid working are seniors. A McKinsey study found that 44% of people who prefer to work from home hold senior roles. And nobody seems to be asking what it’s costing them.

The burden lands in the wrong place

Hybrid working in practice looks very different from hybrid working on paper. The people with the leverage to work from wherever are midweights and seniors, the people who’ve built enough track record and cultural capital to work from wherever without being questioned. Juniors are still proving themselves.

The result is studios are half-full with the least experienced people in the building, and empty of the most experienced. Juniors are turning up to sit on Zoom calls in an empty studio with a manager who isn’t there.

What seniors are losing

There’s an industry assumption that senior development is largely done. You’ve got the skills, the taste, the experience. What more is there to accrue?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

What juniors lose when they work remotely is easy to name – it might be an underdeveloped client manner, difficulty reading a room, or struggling to make real-time creative decisions under pressure. The skills gap is very visible, but coachable.

What seniors lose is harder to name. They start repeating the same references. They stop pushing to try new tools. They lose the habit of defending their thinking, so their instincts go untested or unchallenged. Their development suffers in how they lead, how they develop people, how they give feedback, how they read a room.

Remote working is basically neutral-to-good if you already know what you’re doing. But knowing what you’re doing and continuing to grow are different things. 30% of remote and hybrid workers say working from home lowers their chances for professional growth.

The juniors are catalysts

Juniors shouldn’t only be seen as recipients of senior wisdom. They’re supposed to be nipping at heels, bringing ideas in sideways, flicking sparks. That’s their job.

Poonam Saini Kilb, my colleague and co-founder of KISS Branding, puts it best: “The person junior to you should be nipping at your heels. By that I mean the quality of their ideas and output is so strong that it pushes you, as a senior, to raise your game. It’s a healthy tension and it only really comes to life when we’re all in the same room.”

Juniors ask foundational questions that seniors might have stopped asking themselves. Why this typeface? Why this approach? Why now? Those questions are inconvenient, but completely essential. They force articulation. A senior who can’t answer them clearly hasn’t yet thought them through.

Juniors bring a freshness of reference and energy to a studio that seniors, however experienced, would struggle to generate. They can push back without knowing the political history, they don’t know what’s settled, what’s sensitive, who you don’t challenge.

When seniors work exclusively with other seniors, or alone, studios get slower and safer. The work starts to look like itself. That’s the cost that’s hardest to name – not what seniors are failing to give juniors, but the fire that juniors have stopped being able to light in them.

I think that in 2026, after years of screens and scheduling and performative async communication, proximity is actually something a lot of us want. Only 23% of Gen Z employees prefer fully remote work, compared to 35% of every other generation. They are not the ones pushing for this. The digital fatigue is real, and is driving this craving for proper face time, being in an actual room with actual people.

Finally, watching someone develop is one of the most satisfying parts of the job. For seniors who’ve opted out of the studio, that’s not a small thing to give up. The spark of seeing someone click, get it, grow into themselves. That’s your loss, not theirs.

This isn’t a call to scrap flexibility

Seniors often have the most complex lives outside work – school runs, caring responsibilities, long commutes. Flexibility serves real needs, and has to remain part of the conversation, but the problem isn’t flexibility, it’s bad hybrid. Juniors in an empty office, seniors on Slack meets from home, and no creative hum in the air.

I’ll admit as a resident Gen Z, some juniors aren’t desperate to be in. It’s not straightforward. But maybe we’d be keener to be in if we got more out of it.

Growth doesn’t happen in formal moments. It happens in the friction of being in a room together, in the overheard conversation, in the corridor question, in the casual crit that was never scheduled in Teams. You can’t schedule osmosis.

What you can actually do

At KISS we’re in the studio every day, so this isn’t theoretical.

Show up first. Start treating presence as leadership behaviour. If you want your studio to have a culture of being in the room, you have to be in the room.

Be intentional about overlap, make sure juniors and seniors are physically in on the same days, and not just technically both hybrid. Put them next to each other. Let proximity do what proximity does.

Stop counting the days people are in and start noticing what happens when they are. Is the work getting sharper? Are people developing? Does the studio feel like somewhere worth being? Those are harder questions with better answers. It’s harder to track, yes, but it’s worth it.

If you’re a senior, ask yourself honestly, when you’re not in the room, what’s actually missing? When did you last have your thinking properly challenged? When did you last feel the friction that keeps you sharp?

The people with the most influence over what a studio feels like are the ones most able to opt out of it. Just make sure you know what you’re opting out of.

Eve Macdonald, is a strategist at KISS Branding, a Leeds-based creative consultancy.