About 1 in 5 staffers prefer to continue working from home: survey
About one in five Canadians who are currently working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic would like to continue doing so once the pandemic is over, according to a new poll from Forum Research conducted a month after most offices adopted work-fromhome policies.
The poll surveyed 1,335 Canadians on their work situations in the post-coronavirus era and found that almost a third (31 per cent) of respondents were working from home because of the pandemic, while an additional seven per cent had always worked from home.
Among the first group, 19 per cent said they plan to continue working from home after the pandemic while 62 per cent said that they do not plan to; 19 per cent were undecided.
“There’s been a huge increase in the number of people working from home, but, based on the poll results, with just 19 per cent saying they want to keep working from home, it’s not going to be an earth-shattering ‘end of the office’ kind of situation,” said Lorne Bozinoff, president of Forum Research.
Ontario and the Prairie provinces had the most number of people working from home — 36 per cent and 32 per cent, respectively — while just 18 per cent of respondents from Atlantic Canada said they were in that situation.
In terms of age, millennials appear to be more likely to work from home compared to those aged older than 45 or younger than 25. Almost 50 per cent of respondents aged 25 to 34 said they were working from home because of the pandemic.
Roughly four out of 10 respondents polled said that working from home is worse than working from the office, and another 16 per cent said it was “much worse.” About a third said that working from home was better than being in office while a further 26 per cent said it was “about the same.”
Bozinoff said the poll results show most people did not enjoy working from home six weeks into the economic lockdown.
“What a relief to the commercial real estate market that a lot of people don’t like it,” he said.
Bozinoff said he was surprised that 53 per cent of respondents said their offices were not set up to work from home prior to the pandemic. “That to me was very shocking,” he said. “Many businesses were simply not prepared.”
Angela Payne, a former human resources executive at Monster Canada who now runs her own human resources agency in Toronto called Leedhr, said it is possible more employers, regardless of employee preferences, will consider making staff work from home permanently because of the cost of maintaining a large office footprint.