POST-PANDEMIC RETURN TO OFFICE COULD PRODUCE ‘MENTAL STRAIN’
But staying home is also producing stress for some workers, at least in the short term
Shopify dropped a bomb in the city’s post-pandemic forecasting this week, in a tweet (how else?) that was taken, in some circles, as world-shattering.
Working from home would be the default choice for Canada’s most valuable company and its flagship on Elgin Street — looming over Ottawa City
Hall in height, in fortune-telling — would convert into some kind of giant meeting space, rec room, hangout corner for those few employees needing human contact. Where “rituals” are to be reinvented, in a spirit of “anti-fragility.”
And for the rest of 2020, maybe forever, its 5,000-plus global workforce is staying en la casa.
In response, we raced ahead of ourselves, of course; we don’t really need office towers, or even downtowns, or expensive transit systems for commuting workers, and everything from urban planning to home design needs to be done, not just differently, but in an opposing direction. Phew. Quite a tweet from CEO Tobi Lutke.
A couple of experts, however, make this initial observation: you can’t just take the Shopify model and plop it onto “Federal Ottawa,” expecting the same results in productivity and workplace harmony.
“Extrapolating from Shopify to say, Health Canada, might not be as easy as you think and certainly wouldn’t extrapolate to many workplaces at all,” said Darcy Santor, a clinical psychologist and uOttawa professor with expertise in workplace mental health.
From the outset, Shopify was a company with a nimble, agile work culture, he added, something that historically doesn’t pervade, say, the federal public service.
But he does think the pandemic experience is an opportunity to move beyond the age-old notion that productivity equates to the number of daily hours at an assigned desk, in a defined place.
“The opportunity here is to move beyond that notion of work.”
Carleton University’s Linda Duxbury, a well-known expert in work-life balance, sees another basic problem with a massive shift to suddenly labouring at the kitchen table: it’s not working for a great many people.
“What has happened is that people haven’t really been teleworking,” she said. “I would call it emergency work-at-home.”
She’s heard from a good number who are sharing home workspace and bandwidth with a spouse, trying to keep the kids and the dog occupied, typing in ergonomically disastrous positions, emailing at all hours, and dealing with myriad technical problems, like access to sensitive files. Blurring, essentially, every line between life and work.
“I think all these forecasts of ‘we’re going to be moving people home, and that’s going to be great, and we’ll all link hands and sing Kumbaya and it will be wonderful’ are not going to materialize.”
Both academics thought we may eventually end up with a kind of hybrid office, where a portion work at home full-time, with the right tech supports, but others spend two or three days a week in an actual office. Predictions, said Duxbury, are tricky.
“We can predict, pretty easily though, that telework is not going to be the miracle solution.”
She said employers, especially in the short term, need to remember that both school and summer camps are cancelled, leaving kids at home, parents overwhelmed.
“It’s a real challenge to separate work and life, anyway, but during the last two months, it’s been impossible, for many, many people.”
She said she also thinks the federal government move to “activity-based workplaces,” which involves shared spaces instead of assigned desks, is now in “deep doo-doo” because social distancing and infection control is that much more difficult.
In the short term, many experts have said that the return to a structured office setting will probably be done in phases, first with volunteers.
They may arrive to find more spaced desks and possible plastic barriers and mask-wearing, closed lunch rooms and arrows on the floor to keep travel going in one direction.
Liz Miller is a partner in the office design firm Parallel 45. She’s already getting calls from clients about how employees can return to a work station with a two-metre safety radius in all directions. (The 12-foot circle, she calls it.)
This could mean something as simple as creating adequate space between work stations, she said, or leaving some desks vacant, or adding glass-type barriers. But companies — coming out of a brutal economic cycle — may be reluctant to invest heavily in new equipment that may be temporary, she said.
Even a lunch room, she added, could be converted to a standup meeting room by using temporary spacing circles on the floor.
She does not believe the modern office is dead, only changing. She hopes that offices don’t go “backwards” in design to the 1970s, when nearly everyone had a separate space with a door, sealed off from co-workers all day.
“There’s a lot of really good things that have happened with the office in the last 10 or 15 years,” she said, some driven by technology, with space “getting lighter, brighter, more collaboration, more idea sharing. I really hope that doesn’t go away, from a creative and human point of view.”
Darren Fleming, the chief executive at the commercial real estate firm Real Strategy, says there is likely, in the short term, to be a global slump in office space demand, and predictions about where the sector is headed are difficult to make.
“I think while we’re still operating under the fear umbrella, it’s hard to make rational plans because the variables keep changing so fast.”
Santor, meanwhile, says we need to pay attention to the mental health of workers who will be asked to return to office towers, where taking transit, using elevators and being surrounded by dozens of co-workers amounts to a daily “put-in-harm’s-way” scenario. There will be, we are told, other waves.
“The mental strain on folks, to be expected to do that for the next 12 to 18 months, is going to be enormous.”
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-291-6265 or email kegan@ postmedia.com
Twitter.com/ kellyegancolumn