The corporate world leapt into the unknown in March 2020, when COVID-19 health restrictions pushed employers to send office workers to work from home.
Businesses adjusted.
When concerns eased, many executives urged workers to come back to offices for varying amounts of time per week.
Some now expect employees at the office, five days a week.
B.C.’s largest technology-sector employer, Amazon.com Inc., on Sept. 16 told office employees in letters that starting Jan. 2, they must work at corporate workplaces five days per week unless they have special arrangements with managers.
“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice and strengthen our culture [if they are in the office],” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his memo.
The Canadian federal government similarly prefers in-office work. It started requiring employees on Sept. 9 to come into the office three days per week, up from two days per week, which was a mandate that went into effect March 31, 2023.
Is remote work dead?
Large organizations now requiring more in-office time from workers may lead some to wonder whether the societal experiment of giving workers the freedom to work remotely is dead.
So far, the answer appears to be that hybrid systems that enable some remote work are alive and well.
Image: Handol Kim expects most of his staff to come to the office two days per week and does not plan to change that arrangement
Of 15 Canadian metropolitan areas surveyed, Metro Vancouver had the sixth-highest percentage of employees who mostly work remotely: 22.4 per cent as of May, and tied with Quebec City.
Global recruitment agency Robert Walters Inc. found in April that of 2,000 Canadian white-collar professionals surveyed, 46 per cent would threaten to switch jobs if employers asked them to come into the office more frequently.
Coming into the office can be particularly challenging for parents and those who have long commutes.
BIV spoke with some technology-sector employers who require workers to be in the office five days per week but who say they are flexible on a case-by-case basis to allow some remote work.
Others tout the advantage of having a largely remote workforce, or limiting in-office mandates to two days per week.
One problem with increasing required in-office time is that many companies’ workforces include more workers with homes further from offices than was the case pre-pandemic.
Nearly one-third of workers at large firms last year did not work in the same metropolitan area as their managers, up from about 23 per cent in February 2020, according to payroll provider ADP. “If you can’t trust a person to be productive when they’re by themselves, and the only way you think they can be productive is to have them in the office, then I think you’ve got a bigger problem than workplace culture,” said Variational AI CEO Handol Kim.
“I think you’ve got a problem with the kind of people that you’re hiring.”
Some of Kim’s nine employees work remotely but most are expected to be in the office twice per week: Mondays and Thursdays.
“You want that high-resolution contact, and then you want people to go away and do the work they’re supposed to do,” he told BIV. “Then you come back and revisit towards the end of the week, and you can know what progress has been made on what was assigned on Monday.”
Vancouver-based Actenum Corp.’s vice-president of business development, Owen Plowman, told BIV that his company uses coworking or shared office space from WeWork whenever internal employee meetings are needed. Otherwise, they meet at restaurants. Client meetings tend to take place at clients’ workplaces, he said.
Plowman oversees eight employees, only one of whom is in Vancouver. The rest live in cities across North America either because that was where they were based when they were hired, or because that is where Actenum’s clients are.
The company, which develops automated-scheduling technology for energy-sector companies, has about 42 employees, Plowman said.
He added that not requiring workers to come into a Vancouver head office enables the company to hire the best recruits.
“We found somebody in Toronto who had skills that we needed,” he said. “We couldn’t find such a person in Vancouver, Calgary or Edmonton.”
He said he is considering hiring someone who lives overseas, many time zones away, and that he does not believe that will cause problems.
“If you manage people effectively and make sure that they complete their objectives, you don’t care where they are,” he said.
Some technology-sector CEOs, however, do see value in having workers coming to offices.
Augurex CEO Neil Klompas told BIV that some of his dozen employees must come into the workplace because they do lab work and need the equipment.
The biotechnology company’s employees who work on the regulatory or financial side of the business are usually also in the office five days per week, he said.
“They are here in the lab pretty much five days a week so they can work alongside their scientific and technical colleagues and build a positive environment,” he said, adding that the company is flexible, depending on individual employees’ needs.
The societal debate about whether productivity is higher in the office is not likely to be settled anytime soon.
Advocates, such as Klompas, told BIV that impromptu chats at the water cooler can generate “flash-in-the-pan insights” that help move the business forward.
The flip side to this perspective is that workers may be less productive at the office on individual work because much of the day is taken up with idle chit chat and distractions.
Every time workers are disrupted with a version of, “Oh, I haven’t seen you in a while, how was your vacation?” they can lose focus and waste time getting it back.
Loud conversations on the phone or on Zoom can also disturb workers in countless nearby cubicles.
Companies see value in reducing real estate costs
One phenomenon keeping remote and hybrid work arrangements alive is the cost savings of reducing office spaces.
Crown corporation Insurance Corp. of British Columbia (ICBC) plans to slash its head office size by about 45 per cent by selling its iconic blue 300,000-square-foot site next to Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver to the provincial government for $53.3 million.
It has signed a 15-year lease to occupy 165,000 square feet of space at an under-construction building at 2150 Keith Drive, likely starting in early 2027.
The Insurance Corp. of British Columbia is selling its headquarters in North Vancouver to the province in order to reduce its amount of office space | Rob Kruyt / BIV
ICBC told BIV in an email that its North Vancouver headquarters are only 20-per-cent to 40-per-cent occupied on a typical workday.
“In 2021, we introduced a hybrid work model that combines in-office collaboration with remote workdays for a large portion of our workforce,” ICBC said.
“ICBC employees with positions that allow for a flexible work arrangement typically spend two days a week in the office and the remainder working remotely, with a requirement for a minimum of eight days in the office per four-week period. This approach promotes work-life balance, and we plan to continue offering it to our employees.”
Other larger companies have reaped savings by completely doing away with office space. The media giant Postmedia shuttered its Vancouver newsrooms last year, telling workers to permanently work remotely.
Data mixed on who has upper hand
Employers who want employees to come into the office more frequently have more leverage in a slow economy typified by high unemployment, low wage growth and workers fearful of leaving their employment because they can be easily replaced.
Data is mixed on whether that is the case now.
B.C.’s unemployment rate edged up 0.3 percentage points to 5.8 per cent in August, from 5.5 per cent in July, but B.C. had the third-lowest employment rate in the country, according to BC Stats.
Statista data show that B.C.’s unemployment rate in the first half of 2024 averaged 5.2 per cent, which is higher than the 4.8 per cent rate in 2019 and the 4.6 per cent rate in 2018.
Other data suggests that it is now an employees’ job market in B.C.
Employers in the province are finding that they have to offer employees the highest wage hikes in in Canada just to keep them.
Actuarial consulting firm Eckler surveyed executives at more than 500 large companies across a range of sectors and industries and found that workers across Canada can expect wages to rise 3.6 per cent next year, down from 3.8 per cent this year.
In B.C., workers can expect an average 3.9-per-cent wage hike next year, Eckler said last month.
