Kevin O’Leary says the Gen Zers who shine brightest are those who can get things done — whether they’re in the office or not.
O’Leary, founder of venture capital platform O’Leary Ventures, said that young people should focus on “execution” to achieve success. this Shark Tank Starr, who has previously criticized certain habits of young people in the workplace, said those who want to succeed should focus on getting results.
“If you’re Gen Z and you can execute and you can get things done and deliver on time, you’re going to move up and make more money,” he said in a video last week.
As an example, he cited an employee who started working for him in the United Arab Emirates a year and a half ago. The unnamed employee was quickly promoted because “this kid could execute,” he added.
O’Leary, who has staff in London, Los Angeles and Canada, said the ability to “execute” has little to do with whether employees are in the office.
“If you have to be in an office, why? Is that my question? We do have people sitting in cubicles, but I’d rather hire someone who can perform a task and sit in their basement or their backyard,” he said.
His comments come as companies continue to ask workers to return to the office as the business world becomes less flexible and more workers worry about job losses due to artificial intelligence. After Amazon launched a movement in the tech sector last year to return full-time employees to the office, several companies followed suit. Starting last month, Instagram forced most employees to return to the office five days a week as part of CEO Adam Mosseri’s vision to create a “winning culture.” Microsoft also began requiring employees in the Seattle area to come to the office three days a week at the end of last month.
Since the pandemic ended, CEOs in corporate America have been pushing for a return to the office as a means of strengthening collaboration and building relationships. Still, a Harvard study last year found that workers were willing to accept a 25% pay cut when comparing fully remote or hybrid work to full-time in-office work.
O’Leary said that in the executive economy, high performers are often promoted because of their work ethic rather than their attendance.
“They’re just delivering results and getting rewarded because the entire team needs people who can execute. That’s the nature of today’s economy,” he said.
O’Leary also pushed back against the argument that remote work leads to isolation. Loneliness is not new, he said, and “that’s not really the problem.”
His latest comments build on past criticism of return-to-office mandates and support for recruiting top talent. O’Leary claimed that 55% of the 10,000 employees he works with across more than 50 portfolio companies did not return to the office in 2022. As of January, 40% had not yet returned to the office.
“When we threaten them and say, ‘If you don’t come back, you’ll lose your job,’ they say, ‘Great, I’m going to work for someone else,'” he said.
In fact, he said in a video in January that companies looking to bring workers back to the office are the ones suffering the most from the war for talent.
“If you try to say to people, ‘Oh, you have to work in an office,’ and that’s what you want to hire, you’re just going to get the bottom quartile of people who have no choice,” he said. “I don’t want those people. I want my competitors to hire those people.”
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com