Working from home works — just ask parents

The COVID-19 crisis has shown employers that working from home works.

For more than two months, work has been relocated to home offices for millions of Canadians.

Just this past Friday, Statistics Canada’s latest monthly Labour Force Survey showed that about 3.3 million more Canadians were working from home in the month of April than usual.

Of course that’s only a part of the workforce. Many others have had to continue to work in locations other than home in order to do their jobs. Some of these are the celebrated frontline health workers, but many are the less celebrated and more precariously employed who deliver packages, clean windows and ring up groceries.

But those of us office dwellers who can do the bulk of our work anywhere with an internet connection have now proven through an unprecedented test case that business can get done when employees work remotely.

Parents who are newly stationed at home have got the job done in the exceedingly subpar working conditions brought about by having to manage without school or daycare. This should put an end to outdated thinking about working from home and usher in a more humane approach that helps everyone — whether they have kids or not — to free up some of the time lost to lengthy commutes.

Clare Kumar, a productivity coach who advises businesses and individuals on making working from home a success, said remote work has been held back by managers who simply don’t trust that people will work hard when they’re out of their bosses’ sights.

Others look at it with an “I needed to go into the office, therefore you need to go to the office” attitude, said Kumar.

The Toronto mom of two left the corporate world when her children were three and five. “I was in a job that was 90 per cent on the phone, 10 per cent in person. And daycare for them was the opposite direction from work, so it was pretty onerous.” When Kumar asked to work from home half of the time to subtract her three-hour daily commute from the picture on some days, “it was a hard no.”

“Her requirement was you’re in the office every day, whether she was there or whether I needed to meet with someone or not.”

Where it is allowed, working-from-home has been seen as a privilege or special circumstance, and parents who manage to arrange to do so one or two days a week often have to overcome negative perceptions about it.

Now, not everyone loves working from home. Many of us miss our colleagues and the structure that working outside of the home can bring. Working in an office means social interactions with other adults and attire that’s not yoga pants. Some find that those things get them into the right frame of mind for work, says Kumar, and they may even enjoy the way their commutes allow them to transition from work mode to family mode.

But at least one U.S. study suggests that many employees want to hang on to some level of work-from-home flexibility.

A Gallup poll found that three out of five people who have been working from home during the COVID-19 crisis would prefer to continue to work remotely as much as possible once public health restrictions are lifted.

Kumar says she wants organizations to take away from this time “the full conviction that, for the majority of their employees, this has to continue because it works not only for the business, but it works fundamentally to keep people healthy and their lives feeling full.”

“Work-life integration just doesn’t work with a five-day work week and a commute and kids,” she says. Commuting gobbles up time that could otherwise be spent on things like friendships, fitness, personal development, hobbies and volunteering. “We have a workplace myopia happening.”

Commuting is only becoming more burdensome as the high cost of real estate makes living close to city centres out of reach. Remote work can help ameliorate the challenges to our sleep, wellness and sanity that stem from the tough juggle between work and home life.

“This is an opportunity to level up the respect for humanity that needs to be in our workplaces ongoing,” says Kumar. She suggests that employers talk to their team members now about what this work-from-home experience has been like for them, and what they’d like work to look like going forward.

We already know that public health officials recommend a graduated return to workplaces in order to manage the spread of coronavirus, and that the open-concept office that’s become the norm likely isn’t ideal for doing so.

It also hasn’t been ideal for many workers who find that the noise and frequent interruptions of cubicle life make it hard to concentrate, says Kumar. Since we need to keep groups small as business opens back up, it only makes sense to give employees more choice than they’ve had before about where they’d like to work.

“We’re trying to (apply) a factory punch-card mentality to knowledge working, and it doesn’t add up. We respect people’s brains; that’s what we’re hiring them for. Then we better respect how they like to work as well.”