‘Pandemic forced people to think differently’
With 90 per cent of employees working remotely, the fast-growing technology company Miovision does not foresee a return to pre-pandemic office culture.
If employees want to continue working from home, they can. If they want to return to office, they can do that too. It’s up to the employee.
Jill Jutzi, the head of culture at Miovision, said about 10 per cent of the company’s workforce must be in the office because they make the hardware for the smart-city tech that monitors and controls traffic lights, or they manage supply chains for customers.
But the overwhelming majority — about 76 per cent — come into the office once a week, if that.
“People wanted hybrid,” said Jutzi. “So that’s how we managed it — at the end of the day we will always be a hybrid environment.”
Talent recruitment remains a challenge for tech firms, said Jutzi, and hybrid work makes that easier.
During the pandemic Miovision hired top talent that would never have moved to this region in the past — a chief revenue officer who lives in Montreal, a vice-president of corporate strategy who lives in Arizona, a vice-president of product management based in Charlotte, N.C., and a director of customer advocacy and relations living in Arizona.
While some tech companies insist their employees return to the office, Miovision believes the hybrid work model born in the first stages of the pandemic has been good for business.
“We are able to bring in some really top talent because we give people the ability to make their own decision — do they want to be at home or in the office?” said Jutzi.
Today Miovision employs 325, up 47 per cent from March 2020 when the pandemic started. Before the pandemic about 94 per cent of Miovision employees lived in Waterloo Region. Today, that is down to 67 per cent.
Miovision was founded in 2005 to help cities better manage traffic with a software platform that collects street-level data from cameras and sensors. Operators monitor traffic flows, and remotely adjust signals to ease congestion. Traffic engineers can quickly see if a newly designed intersection is working as planned, instead of waiting five years for collision data reports from municipalities.
Kurtis McBride, the chief executive officer and cofounder, opened Catalyst 137 in 2017 — billed as the world’s biggest Internet of Things maker (technology behind connected devices) campus outside of China. Located in a former tire warehouse at 137 Glasgow St. in Kitchener with 450,000 square feet of space, McBride partnered with Voisin Capital to transform the industrial building into 21st-century offices.
His company was the first tenant, taking about 130,000 square feet. Dfy Studio was hired to do the interior design, creating a stunning workplace. A few years later the pandemic struck, and Jutzi now wonders about the future of their beautiful office.
“We are looking at that, because probably at the end of the day we don’t need all of this space,” said Jutzi. “So we are right now figuring out what space we need and what space we don’t need and assessing that.”
Pre-pandemic, the office enjoyed an exalted place in tech culture. Beautifully appointed spaces for work, collaboration, napping, eating and socializing were viewed as essential for finding and keeping talent, and for innovation.
When Marissa Mayer left Google in 2012 to become chief executive officer at Yahoo, she ordered all employees to return to the office. Mayer believed in-office collaboration was key to innovation. Her edict made international headlines as some employees with young children at home wanted to continue working remotely.
Mayer left Yahoo when it was sold to Verizon in 2017, but that in-office imperative endured among tech companies until March 2020.
It took a global pandemic to turn the in-office imperative on its head, and for some tech leaders there is no going back.
“The pandemic forced people to think: we can run a business and we don’t actually have to be in the office?” said Jutzi. “We are doing it.”
That is echoed by Michael Litt, co-founder and chief executive officer at Vidyard — a scaling tech firm that builds software and video platforms for sales and marketing.
Business boomed during the pandemic, and Vidyard hired a lot to keep pace with demand. At the same time, it moved into a much smaller office in downtown Kitchener. Almost everyone at Vidyard works remotely, and that has helped in recruiting experienced people for key positions.
“Once as a business you taste the fruits of having no geographic constraints on your talent pool, you will never go back because it means you never have to compromise who you hire for the opportunity — that is huge, huge, huge,” said Litt.
During the pandemic, Vidyard hired a new head of product who lives on a sailboat in Ventura Harbour just outside Los Angeles, and a new vice-president of talent and human resources who lives in Charlotte, N.C.
“There is no way I could have worked with Brian on the sailboat pre-pandemic, but now we have the skills and the ability to do this thing hybrid-fashion,” said Litt.
Remote working will be good for the Canadian tech sector, he predicted.
“We should be able to build more world-class businesses with truly global, world-class talent,” said Litt.
Vacancy rates among commercial office buildings across the country remain high compared to pre-pandemic levels. Some office building owners in Calgary, Ottawa and Toronto have started converting vacant spaces into multi-residential buildings.
“We are certainly seeing more companies embracing a hybrid model,” said Benjamin Bach, vicepresident of commercial real estate broker Cushman-Wakefield in Waterloo Region.
Some companies, such as Shopify, went fully remote at the start of the pandemic but there was no trouble finding new tenants to take over the Shopify leases in Waterloo. But when tech companies expand the pool of potential employees to anyone with a high-speed internet connection, there are fewer economic benefits for the local economy.
“There are definitely some consequences, both positive and negative, to all of this,” said Bach.
New tenants are demanding physical changes when leasing new offices — far fewer desks, Zoom rooms for remote meetings and larger spaces for town-hall-style meetings. The changes are a physical reflection of a workforce that works mostly from home, but comes into a smaller office for occasional meetings, said Bach.
The veteran real estate executive cautions against doom-and-gloom predictions for commercial office buildings, though. When BlackBerry put nearly two million square feet of office space on the market all at once, it was quickly purchased by a single company that in turn resold the properties to investors and tech firms. All of the former BlackBerry buildings were redeveloped and reoccupied.
“There’s no shortage of companies that are drawn to this area,” said Bach. “And while tech work may change, this region will not cease being attractive.”