National Post (National Edition)
Going ‘digital by default’: Shopify
‘We will keep our offices closed until 2021’: Lütke
The chief executive of Shopify Inc. on Thursday said the Ottawa-based e-commerce firm is now “digital by default” and that most of its workers will be permanently allowed to work from home, another sign of how the coronavirus pandemic is causing companies to rethink the brick-and-mortar office,
“COVID is challenging us all to work together in new ways,” Tobi Lütke tweeted. “We choose to jump in the driver’s seat, instead of being passengers to the changes ahead. We cannot go back to the way things were. This isn’t a choice; this is the future.”
The decision by arguably Canada’s hottest company, which earlier this month passed Royal Bank of Canada to become the country’s most valuable publicly-traded firm, to downplay the necessity of being in a physical office could be one of the strongest signs yet that working life as we once knew it is being altered by COVID-19.
“We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality,” Lütke said. “And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.”
Pre-pandemic, the need to be in an office was a given for many Canadian workers. That may no longer be the default setting, as companies have turned to videoconferencing and other digital workarounds to continue operations while enforcing physical distancing. Even if or when employees return to an office, the layouts or workplace culture could be different.
Some tech firms have shown themselves willing to shake things up, such as Waterloo, Ont.-based Open Text Corp.’s decision to close 50 per cent of its global office locations for good.
A Shopify spokesperson said they still have details to work out, but they are committed to keeping recruitment hubs in Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo, Montreal and Vancouver, as well as in other global locations. The shift toward digital will affect more than 5,000 employees.
“This is a chance for us to lean into new ways of working, tap into new talent wherever they are, and help our merchants around the globe adapt to a new reality,” said Shopify’s chief talent officer, Brittany Forsyth, in a statement. “Digital by default is the mental model we’ll use to transform our ways of working, so we can match the ingenuity and creativity we’re seeing our merchants exhibit as they adapt.”
Shopify has always had some people working remotely, but they were using the internet “as a bridge to the office,” Lütke tweeted. “This will reverse now.”
Shopify’s financial filings indicate the company has office leases with remaining terms of one to 13 years in Canada, the U.S., Singapore, Ireland and other countries in both Europe and Asia.
Some of those leases include options to terminate them within one year, but the company also said additional leases were set to start somewhere between later this year and 2027.
For example, the company is slated to become a key tenant at The Well Tower, a downtown Toronto skyscraper currently under development. Shopify’s total lease expenses for the three months ended March 31 were a bit more than US$9 million.
Investors liked the news. Shopify shares, which have more than doubled since the start of the year, were up 4.5 per cent in afternoon trading in Toronto on Thursday and closed 3.8-per-cent higher.
“Hundreds of millions” of people around the world
HIGHER ... WORK-FROMHOME, BUT AN OFFSETTING NEED FOR FLOOR SPACE PER WORKER.
have now tried working from home for the first time ever, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce economist Avery Shenfeld said in a report released Thursday.
“That’s a trend that was already in evidence before the virus hit, so it’s reasonable to expect it to end up with a higher share of jobs in the long run than it had previrus,” he said. “Occasional days working from home will also be more acceptable.”
But Shenfeld also noted that technology to work from home has been around for decades, which suggests many workers prefer to leave home and go to an office or other place of work.
“If there’s a lingering impact, it could be to have a slightly higher percentage of work-from-home, but an offsetting need for floor space per worker if we remain even slightly cautious about future pandemics,” he said.