Most downtown workers ready to return to office, survey finds
Toronto mayor stresses importance of reassuring commuters, transit users
Before the pandemic lockdown last spring, Pierre Campeau used to work in a cubicle at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
But on the rare occasions last year when made the he walked from his downtown condo to the office, the few people who were there were working in rooms with doors. They were admitted by security and had to fill out a health form before going in. Campeau was handed a kit with a mask and hand sanitizer. The mask was to stay on except when employees were in an office alone.
To him, it felt totally safe.
“I know that my employer’s top concern has been around safety. I saw safety everywhere. More importantly, people who were in the office respected that. It really becomes a collaboration to respect those guidelines we have put in place so we can move forward,” he said.
Campeau is among the 64 per cent of downtown workers who say they feel safe going to their workplace in the core, according to new research being released this week by the Toronto Region Board of Trade.
However, the Nanos survey suggests it’s going to take a lot of thought and communication to maintain that comfort and to quell the anxieties of the 15
per cent of downtown workers who said they were uncomfortable returning and the remaining 21 per cent who indicated they were neutral or unsure.
Among those with reservations, 56 per cent cited COVID-19 as their chief concern. Fifteen per cent suggested they worried about crowding and 12 per cent had fears around commuting.
The research comes out of a committee on downtown recovery headed by Toronto Mayor John Tory, the board of trade, the Urban Land Institute of Toronto and the Financial District Business Improvement Area.
The committee includes employers, building owners, health advisers and researchers who are focused on four key areas in the core: safe travel with the TTC and Metrolinx; safe buildings, including things like elevators and ventilation; safe office management, so people are congregating only in appropriate numbers in safe spaces; and safe districts, where tracing and tracking are employed to prevent outbreaks.
Board of trade CEO Jan De Silva said the group wants the public to know there are 70 people working with public health authorities trying to prepare a safe road back to work in the downtown. It is looking at practices from around the world in places like New Zealand that have had good success controlling the spread of the virus, as well as at essential services locally that have had to contend with outbreaks.
“Public health needs to deal with the health crisis but we can deal with retrofitting our urban environment to enable us, when the time is right, to put protocols in place that would be helpful as we’re going through the vaccination period to try to get back to a more normal environment,” she said.
Tory said that it is imperative that the downtown return to its pre-COVID prosperity. Toronto’s core drives 10 per cent of the country’s economy and thousands of businesses rely on the workers who go there each day. Loosened public-health restrictions last summer demonstrated the breadth of the challenge in attracting people back to the core, he said.
“Only a small part of the workforce came back, which was not helpful to consumer businesses who were counting on people coming back to downtown,” said Tory.
Once rules permit, he said, “We have to work at getting a message of confidence out, saying that it is safe and that there have been measures taken; there will be precautions taken by your building, by your employer, by the transit system to make sure you’re going to be safe.”
De Silva said the Nanos survey of 506 downtown workers, conducted online between Jan. 29 and Feb. 5, indicates a significant shift. In September, only about 15 per cent of people said they were comfortable going back to work and they tended to be people who were walking distance from their employment or those living in small condos. Now workers have hit a wall.
“It’s the fatigue of this nonstop virtual world, of not being as productive as you can be if you can just get into a meeting face to face and work things through. You really need to schedule everyone now,” said De Silva.
Campeau, a senior associate, tax, at PwC, said he can relate.
“Right now, to talk to someone you almost have to schedule a meeting in their calendar. My calendar is actually quite busy because people are slotting in these 15-minute calls just to ask one or two questions that, when we were at the office, we could just go by their desk or you would do it as you were grabbing coffee. To me, that social aspect and that routine of just grabbing a coffee — that’s what I miss the most,” he said.