■ Fourth wave throws wrench in back-to-work plans on Bay Street,
Employers’ goal of bringing workers back in September seeming more out of reach
For a year and a half, Stephen Shea has been one of very few people in his office enjoying the unobstructed views of Toronto City Hall provided by EY Canada’s gleaming new office tower on Adelaide Street West.
From his office on the 39th floor, the managing partner for talent at the professional-services giant has been among only four per cent to five per cent of the firm’s employees to frequent the 188-metre-tall skyscraper since the pandemic hit in March 2020.
And while the company was preparing to start bringing employees back to the office in September, Shea says he has serious doubts he’ll be joined by many more office mates soon.
“We’re very much a firm that follows what public health and the local jurisdictions require of us,” he says.
“We are planning for the ability to start the transition back to a more fulsome presence in our offices post Labour Day,” he says. “That is completely contingent (however) upon week to week what happens with the virus and what guidance we get from the authorities.
“We try to honour both the spirit and intent of the rules because at the end of the day we’re dealing with people’s health.”
Asked about plans to return workers to the office, most large Toronto firms contacted by the Star had equally ambiguous notions — tied just as closely to the fickle whims of the virus — with most saying they have no immediate plans to recall workers.
So, for now, Toronto’s financial district continues to sit largely empty.
“It’s been like a huge Molotov cocktail thrown into the office,” says David Zweig, chair of the department of management at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus.
“It’s made us question almost everything about the workplace (and) it’s not going to be so easy for us anymore to just accept that we’ve got to go back to what it was before,” says Zweig, who is also an organizational behaviour expert at the U of T’s Rotman School of Management.
Like many experts, Zweig believes Toronto’s downtown core will repopulate
to some extent in time. But almost none believe — as many workers and businesses had assumed — that this reverse migration will begin to any significant degree in September.
“I don’t think they’re anywhere near ready to go back,” says Michael Halinski, a human-resource management and organizational behaviour expert at Ryerson University.
According to forthcoming COVID recovery data to be released by the Toronto Region Board of Trade’s Economic Blueprint Institute, at one point in the lockdown, about 67 per cent of people employed by companies in the city’s downtown were, in fact, toiling from home.
That compares strikingly to more industrialized and distribution oriented regions where the remote working capacity sat at about 38 per cent.
It’s not just the pandemic’s Delta variant and an emerging fourth wave that is making many firms reluctant to invite office workers back, says Halinski. It’s the hybrid working conditions that untold numbers of those workers will demand even as the virus fades.
“Pre-COVID managers got really good at managing people from the office (and) during COVID managers are developing the skills to manage people from home,” he says.
“I think that employers are worried about hybrid work — having some employees at home and some in the office. Organizations don’t have the infrastructure to manage hybrid teams.”
Thus many firms will likely kick the prospect of a wideopen return down the road a bit — allowing only some of their workers back while they develop the needed hybrid herding skills, says Halinski, who teaches at Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Management. And while it was widely assumed September would see the start of a mass movement back to the office, he says, this learning curve could put that off until 2022.
CIBC spokesperson Tom Wallis said the banking giant was also planning a return in the fall of its workers to the city’s barren financial district — many to a new 49-floor tower at the foot of Bay Street.
But, Wallis says, it will be implemented in small steps and will start slowly.
“We’re planning to begin a phased return starting this fall for team members who have been working remotely, rejoining our colleagues who’ve been on-site all along,” he says in an email.
“For a small number of team members, that could start in September. For the rest of our team, including those moving to (the new) CIBC Square, we are currently planning for the returns to be staggered from October into Q1 2022.”
That said, Wallis cautioned the staged plans could change with the shifting course of COVID.
Barb Mason, the group head and chief human resources officer at Scotiabank, said that big bank’s employees would return in tune with the pandemic’s rhythms and involve a month’s notification for workers before coming back.
“When it comes to timing, our return to office timeline will reflect general society’s return to pre-pandemic activities, driven by vaccination rates and the impact of variants, instead of by a specific date,” reads a written statement from Mason.
“Since we believe that the benefits of returning to the office are truly enabled if we are able to get together in significant numbers without being physically distanced, once those measures lift we will begin, at scale, to provide employees with four weeks’ notice before asking them to return in a gradual, phased approach.”
At Sun Life, a summary of information shared with employees says the insurer has been building back its office workforce from about two per cent present to some 10 per cent during a first pilot phase.
“This fall, phase two of our office reopening pilot will expand seating capacity to 25 per cent on a voluntary basis for employees choosing to work from an office,” the summary says, adding that any employee wishing to return will need to be fully vaccinated.
At Cadillac Fairview — whose many city properties include the Toronto Dominion Centre, Canada’s largest office complex — there was anticipation of more people back behind their desks at summer’s end.
“In Toronto, we anticipate a higher proportion of clients and their staff will start to work more frequently from the office following Labour Day, complemented with a higher degree of flexibility (days of week and hours spent in office),” the firm said in a written reply to questions.
“We anticipate steadily increasing occupancy numbers throughout the fall, assuming there are no major changes in the COVID-19 environment.”
A spokesperson for CBRE Canada — part of the world’s largest commercial real estate services company, with many clients in Toronto — said the company did not want to comment on returning to work.
“Like most other companies, we can’t speak with much certainty about anything regarding back to office right now.” the spokesperson says in an email.
For the many office employees of the City of Toronto itself, a spokesperson said return plans are still being finalized and will be widely communicated in the coming weeks — seemingly making an early September rush back unlikely.
Monique Jilesen, a lawyer at Lenczner Slaght Royce Smith Griffin LLP, says a September return of the firm’s 200 employees to their four floors of offices at Adelaide Street West and York Street will depend on vaccine and testing status.
In particular, Jilesen says, employees will either need to voluntarily disclose that they’ve been fully vaccinated or participate in a twice-weekly rapid testing program to re-enter the office after Labour Day.
Even then, she says, “we have complete flexibility. We’re not asking anyone to return to the office which also means we expect to have a significantly reduced (volume of people) from the Before Times.”
This Jilesen says with regret.
“We had hoped very strongly that we’d be able to celebrate a return to the office (in September) and be able to encourage people to come in while remaining flexible,” she says. “With the Delta variant we might be less encouraging. We certainly wouldn’t want anyone to feel pressured to come in and we probably don’t want big crowds of people in.”
Matti Siemiatycki, an expert in infrastructure finance and delivery at the U of T, says the emerging Delta variant is likely to pierce many hopes for September as the start of a mass return.
“It feels like the onset of the fourth wave of the pandemic is really hitting the pause button on returning to work,” Siemiatycki says.
He says universities and colleges pegged September as a likely back-to-in-class school date, while many businesses saw the period between Labour Day and January as their rampup season.
“As with everything in this pandemic we’ve had to get pretty comfortable with uncertainty and with change and I think that’s where we’re heading at this point too,” Siemiatycki says.
James McKellar, a professor of real estate and infrastructure at York University’s Schulich School of Business, says there’s a dawning realization among businesses that the virus is likely to cause long-term disruptions to their work models.
“We’re now beginning to recognize that this isn’t kind of a one-shot deal and that it may take a few years to sort this out,” McKellar says.
“And the confusion is really I think compounded by all the different messages that are coming out of government and out of the private sector. There’s so many mixed messages.”
Certainly, McKellar says, the picture remains unclear whether Schulich’s 1,700-square-metre Brookfield Centre in Real Estate and Infrastructure at the TD Centre — where he teaches — will open in September.
And he would not be at all surprised if occupancy in the many towers surrounding the facility remained low throughout September and beyond.
“I would assume that no one is going to be rushing back to the office ... in September,” McKellar says.
In the end, the U of T’s Zweig says, the return to toiling in the office will be slower and much different than many had expected.
“It’s going to take a little longer, it’s going to be a little harder and it’s probably going to look a lot different than we anticipated,” he says.
Firms are expected to kick the prospect of a wide-open return down the road a bit while they develop the needed hybrid herding skills