Work from home to survive pandemic

Working from home will continue to be an employment trend after the pandemic ends, but to what extent will likely vary widely by sector and company, according to a report published Tuesday by a Toronto think-tank.

The post-pandemic era is “going to be a more nuanced, partial shift to remote work,” said Creig Lamb, a senior policy adviser at the Brookfield Institute and the author of the report, which was based on Statistics Canada survey data gathered this year.

The report showed that while 17 per cent of businesses reported that they are likely or very likely to offer employees the possibility to work from home after the pandemic ends, 29 per cent said they were likely to require them to come back to the office, suggesting a level of work-from-home fatigue on the side of employers.

Those sectors that have most strongly embraced work from home during the pandemic, are most likely to keep it going, such as knowledge-based industries and financial services.

The finance and insurance industry saw the most evenly weighted split, with close to 40 per cent of businesses saying there will likely be options for employees to work remotely while a third said they'd likely require employees to come back to the office.

Naturally, there will be some jobs more suitable to working from home, said David Zweig, a professor of organizational behaviour at the University of Toronto. “But, any job that requires a lot of teamwork, where the roles are heavily interdependent, where innovation and creativity are valued, it will be much more difficult to maintain the remote nature of work,” Zweig said.

The Brookfield Institute report also casts doubt on the notion of “the death of the office,” a popular topic of discussion earlier in the pandemic.

Just eight per cent of all Canadian businesses surveyed said they were likely or very likely to reduce their physical space after the pandemic.

But with some sectors such as finance and insurance (20 per cent) and information and cultural industries (16 per cent) “disproportionately located in urban centres,” cities should nevertheless watch for potential ripple effects.