When workers can live anywhere, Canada can win
A year of work-from-home shows us that the hunt for talent is now going global
The war for talent is raging.
Ever since COVID-19 restrictions rapidly reshaped how we think about work, almost every employer — from the largest public service entity to the smallest startup — has had to accept that proximity to the workplace is no longer a necessity. It’s optional.
As Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke tweeted in May, the era of “office centricity” is officially over.
As a result, organizations across all sectors are now faced with the fallout of a paradigm shift in the way they work. They have to rethink how to build highperformance teams when they don’t have everyone in the room. They have to find new ways to foster team culture and manage productivity. And now that companies no longer have to look next door for the best and brightest — they can pick and choose remote workers from all over the globe — the war for talent has suddenly morphed into something more urgent.
It’s a world war.
If Canada is going to remain competitive in this new era, we need to act fast and work collaboratively to find and retain top talent to help our economy thrive post COVID-19.
While Communitech certainly wasn’t the first group of people to spend time thinking about seismic shifts in the future of work — this conversation has been evolving for decades in books like “The End of Work,” Jeremy Rifkin’s1995 examination of the impact of technology on jobs, and “Free Agent Nation,” Daniel Pink’s 2002 riff on the rise of the gig economy, not to mention countless TED talks and studies — we’d definitely start
ed planning seriously for them long before the pandemic came along.
In 2019 we convened a coalition of cross-sectoral partners — from Manulife to Deloitte, TD Bank to the Region of Waterloo, among others — to discuss the organizational challenges they faced as each considered the evolution of the future of work and learning. We started by discussing issues like digital upskilling and keeping pace with fast-approaching workplace paradigm shifts — the kinds of things that no single organization could solve on its own. The power of the coalition was driven by its collaborative nature and the ability to glean insights from Communitech’s diverse network of cross-sector experts, from government to academics, corporations to startups.
We launched pilot programs to re-skill workers, developed community score
cards to measure future readiness and drove national attention to evolving workplace discussions. We were working together to solve tomorrow’s problems today.
Then in March, COVID-19 hit and our theoretical discussions about the future of work became the new reality.
Office-happy employees suddenly found themselves living the work-fromhome life, whether they liked it or not. By June, McKinsey research found that those initial reservations about WFH had largely evaporated: 80 per cent of workers were giving it the thumbs-up. Forty-one per cent felt they were more productive while another 28 per cent felt they were at least as productive as they were in the office.
Employers adapted quickly too. According to a global survey of 800 executives, 85 per cent of companies accelerated their use of digital tools for employee and customer interactions, while 70 per cent expected to start using more temporary or contract workers to help offset budget cuts. Facebook, Twitter and Square — among many other large companies — declared remote work a permanent option for most existing and future staff.
Location and employment had been officially uncoupled.
Now, a recruiting gold rush is underway, with organizations racing to lay claim to the world’s top talent, no matter where they reside. To put it bluntly: the global talent market is up for grabs.
As a country and as employers, we need to be thinking fast about how we win. Everyone else is. (Just look at the government of Barbados, which initiated a program for gig workers to relocate to the island and work, visa-free, for one year. The creative gloves are off.) Right now we need to be figuring out what the post-COVID economy and talent market will look like and getting in gear to win it.
We’ve often talked about collaboration and barn-raising being key to the success of the Waterloo Region. At Communitech, it’s one of our superpowers: we’re really good at convening disparate partners across the public and private sectors to solve a common goal. But that’s an authentic winning strategy for the entire country, too.
Canada succeeds as a nation when we get together to take on the world because, let’s face it, we are too big a country with too few people. But if we can work together to figure out how to win in the new talent market, the opportunity here is huge.
This is our time to act.