What does the future of office work look like?

Jordan I hope you’re listening to this show at home with a coffee or maybe while you’re out for a leisurely stroll around your neighbourhood. But I know that every Monday, more and more of you find yourself listening on a commute from wherever you are back to the office. Maybe it’s just one day a week, maybe two or three. Some of you might already be commuting full time. And to those of you who are, I say, sucker! I mean, sorry. I say I’m sorry. Apologies. Unless, of course, you prefer to commute. You prefer to work in an office. And if you do, awesome. For two years now, we’ve been speculating about what the return to work era would look like for office workers. It’s always been something that’s right around the corner, and then it’s been pushed back, either by another wave of COVID or by a wave of concern from employees reluctant to give up their new home setups, to give up that time they got back by not commuting. So is this it? Is this the new reality we’ve been promised? A wildly varying bunch of office protocols that change depending on where you work, on who you work for, and really on how important you are to your employer. Is a consensus about where and how white collar employees work, possible today? And if it isn’t, what does that say about the future of work, the future of downtown real estate, and the future of trust between employers and employees? That’s what’s really at stake.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Vanmala Subramaniam is the Future of Work reporter at the Globe and Mail. Vanmala, how are you doing?

Vanmala Subramaniam I’m good, Jordan. How are you?

Jordan I’m good. Are you back in the office yet?

Vanmala Subramaniam Well, good question. This is my first week back, so I went in yesterday and I’m aiming to go in twice a week. So let’s see how that goes.

Jordan How did it feel?

Vanmala Subramaniam Well, you know what, Jordan? It felt very good to see people and talk, but I will say it felt very distracting because I’m absolutely not used to that much interaction in the course of an eight hour day. So I was jokingly telling my editor, my boss, that it’s 03:20 P.m. And if I hadn’t been in the office, I would have been able to do as much work by 12:20 P.m., I just feel like it really kind of delayed my day a bit. So pros and cons, I’m still getting used to it.

Jordan So this is something that offices everywhere are dealing with right now. And I guess my first question is, do we actually have any kind of data on how many office workers are being asked to go back to the office? Which companies are mandating it or moving to hybrid, or is it just anecdotal company by company?

Vanmala Subramaniam Yeah, that’s a really good question, because there is a lot of data out there from polls and surveys done either internally by companies on their own employees or by polling companies of businesses. But I will say that we don’t have reliable data in that we don’t have data from Statistics Canada or government data that kind of forced companies to respond on where the employees are working from. I don’t know whether that’s going to be a thing, but I will say, no, you don’t have reliable data. It’s quite anecdotal.

One of the most reliable data sources that I’ve kind of been tracking is office footprint. So every three months, big real estate companies come up with data on what the foot traffic is like in the downtown core and specifically around if you’re talking about Toronto, the financial district, to see how many people are actually using offices, that’s quite a reliable indicator, I would say. But yeah, some interesting trends from the anecdotal data that I’d be happy to talk about.

Jordan Sure. I mean, maybe let’s talk about that now, because actually, before we got on our call here, I was just reading a feature from The Local about the PATH. And for those who don’t live in Toronto or don’t know it, that’s the network of underground, under the business towers downtown, stores and restaurants. And it has been a ghost town, obviously, for most of the past two years. And even now, people who work in the businesses there say they’ve noticed a tiny uptick in foot traffic, but nothing like it was before. Is that what you’re seeing as well?

Vanmala Subramaniam Yeah, that corresponds with people’s kind of feelings about going into the office and whether they’re actually going in. So I’ll say what I find now is overall, there are about maybe 50% of people. Again, this is not exact data. It’s based on multiple surveys. About 50% of white collar office workers do like going into the office a number of times a week. About 50% say that they just want to work at home five times a week. So if you think about that, it would be tough to see foot traffic in the downtown core in major cities really go up. Given that one specific survey that I found quite comprehensive, it was an Amazon Canada poll of about 1600 Canadian office workers, and it was conducted in late February. And it suggested that about half of Canadian workers considered working mostly or entirely remotely as the ideal scenario, and only a quarter wanted to come back into the office. So that seems to be kind of the trend here. People are just reluctant. And the idea of going back in five times a week, I think that’s quite rare.

Jordan You guys did your own survey at the Globe and Mail, and we’re going to talk about that in a second. But first, I have to ask for all the people listening to the show right now who are not office workers and who have been working everywhere in front of people during this entire pandemic. How do you think they feel hearing conversations like this? And there’s been a lot of talk about how many times would people really like to go back or maybe they’ll like to go back just two days a week. And I can just imagine them listening, being like, oh, my God, again?

Vanmala Subramaniam I think that’s right, Jordan. Your sentiment is right. There’s a lot of fatigue around conversations about returning to the office. And you know what? That’s not surprising. We’ve had these conversations about what, four times now? Every time there’s a rise in a COVID wave and then a decline of COVID cases, this conversation around whether we should go back into the office begins, and then you see another spike in COVID cases and offices just backtrack on their policies and on and on and on. And that’s what we’ve been seeing.

I will say that what I find interesting right now is that despite the fact that we have many COVID cases right now, we did go through a 6th wave about a couple of weeks ago. It’s kind of still ongoing. There hasn’t been that kind of backtracking of return to work policies. I think certain companies are still maintaining that they want to start getting their office workers back in. So last month, April, May is the first time I’m noticing offices or businesses rather, employers rather, just say, hey, you know what? We got to get going on getting people back into the office. And you’re also starting to see ads, maybe some of the audience have noticed this, I noticed an ad on the Go Train the other day kind of premised around the idea of going back to the office and getting out of your pyjamas and getting back into your workloads and things like that. So it seems a bit more permanent right now. But yeah, there’s definitely a fatigue around this conversation because we’ve been in this situation for over two years.

Jordan And that was my question for you. As the future of work reporter, will we ever reach an equilibrium where we’re not having this conversation where there isn’t like a point we’re trying to arrive at? Will we settle on two days or three days, or will companies settle on fully remote? Probably the most overused phrase in this entire pandemic, aside from unprecedented times, is probably the new normal. And are we here now? Are we still trying to get there in terms of the return to work policies?

Vanmala Subramaniam That’s such a good question. I think that what you’re seeing right now is kind of a tension between employers and employees in the sense that employees have realized that they can work very effectively from home. I mean, my point about feeling that I’m more productive working from home because of fewer distractions, I don’t think that’s unique. I think a lot of people feel that. And so from the point of view of employees, they’re saying well, what’s the necessity of me going back into the office if the ultimate goal is delivering on time, meeting whatever my indicators are in the company.

But from the perspective of employers, some employers still want to see the office full. They have leases to pay. They haven’t addressed how the offices look. They think employees not being in the office kind of erodes office culture, and they want to maintain that. So I guess your question is about what’s going to come. I think it’s very hard to tell, and we’re going through this massive transition period that could last a few years, because if you think about it, the pandemic has been going on for about two years plus now, and people have adjusted to a new way of working. So adjusting them out of that again, that’s going to be tough. I’m curious to see what will happen in the next few years, but I don’t think the issue will be resolved in, say, the next six months.

Jordan Okay. Well, in terms of putting our pulse on where people are right now, tell me about the survey you conducted with the Globe and Mail. How did you do it? And maybe what was the top line result?

Vanmala Subramaniam Right. So it was an unscientific survey in that it was just an audience survey. So we kind of put out a question on our website asking people how they feel about returning to the office. We really wanted to get that idea of the sentiment, like are they excited, anxious, or that kind of thing? And so we got over 400 responses. And keep in mind, the responses are potentially skewed because people who want to fill in the survey tend to have stronger feelings about the issue. But I thought what was really the headline figure to me was that 37% of respondents were angry about the idea of being asked to come into the office. And the second bit of data that I found pretty telling was that over 60% of respondents said that they would change jobs if forced to come back to the office.

Jordan That’s a substantial number.

Vanmala Subramaniam That is a substantial number. Exactly. And I can get into reasons as to why, but I think it was very interesting to me that there are strong feelings about this. And people have adjusted to a certain way of working, and they are quite reluctant to give it up even when asked by their employers, which is very different to how I think the employee employer relationship was prepandemic.

Jordan For our team, since we’re all about anecdotal evidence today, I think at the beginning we were really hopeful we’d be back in the office, back in the Studios in a few weeks, and we’d really miss it and we’d really miss seeing each other. And we were worried about being able to do our jobs. Now we’re not going back because we’re actually more efficient making this podcast remotely with the tools that we have then we were back in a crowded office space. And I guess I wonder if there’s any way to capture these sort of evolving opinions of workers learning to adjust to a new lifestyle.

Vanmala Subramaniam Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s definitely hard to capture it definitively because of how much people’s attitudes have actually changed and how much these attitudes continue to fluctuate. Just based on my own conversations with my friends, we all work in white collar jobs. We’re in our 30s. And we go back and forth between wondering what is the reason for our fatigue or feeling of burnout towards work? Is it the fact that we need to be in the office? But then when we’re asked to go back into the office, we feel exhausted by the commute. So it’s quite complicated. And I don’t think any of us have really figured out where we stand on it, or maybe very few people have. But the results of the Globe survey were quite interesting.

In response to this question, 35% of respondents said that their attitudes towards the office hadn’t changed in that they were still dreading going into the office. There are a significant number of people who never really liked going into the office. They never really liked the commute. It’s tiring. It took up a lot of time. Commuting being the biggest factor here. And another 32% of people said that they had changed their attitudes about returning to the office in that they don’t want to come back anymore. So they liked going in before, but now they don’t want to do it.

So as I said earlier, I would be really curious to see what happens when employees know that more of their colleagues are back in the office, because I think that will really change how you feel about your position in the company, working remotely as a member of the minority who’s doing that. So, for example, a friend of mine was saying she works at a Crown Corporation in Ontario, and they have mandated staff to go back 20% of the time, which is one day a week. And she says when she goes to the office in that one day, she almost feels that it’s more depressing working from the office because it’s completely empty and you don’t get any of the benefits and those intangible pleasures that you had from being in the office, which is just laughs with your colleagues, interactions, office gossip, things like that, that’s just gone completely. But I think that might change when you get kind of like a healthy majority of people in the office.

Jordan Will we ever get a healthy majority of people in the office? So far, we’ve been talking about companies that are asking for one day a week, two days a week, maybe even three days a week, not many asking for five days a week. And again, anecdotal evidence. But you talk to a lot of employers and businesses. How forceful are these companies prepared to be to get these employees back in the office, even knowing the numbers you just cited? It’ll cost them a number of their employees.

Vanmala Subramaniam Yes. So a couple of things that I’ve noticed that have been quite interesting, and this is in the context of the Canadian Labor market. So first of all, we are in what you call a tight labor market in that there are lots of job vacancies. So the bargaining power is kind of on the side of employees. They have the ability to switch jobs if they can. Of course, it varies depending on sector, but the labor market is in favor of employees. They have bargaining power. That means that they are more likely to say no if asked to do something that they don’t want because they can find another job that will give them the flexibility of work that they need. The second thing I’ve noticed is that there is a distinction between older companies, legacy companies that have been around for over 100 years and newer startups and companies in the tech sector. In that tech companies, start ups are more likely to just grant remote hybrid work options very easily to employees. They have a different idea of work. They have always worked in open concept spaces. They have granted remote work to the employees way prior to the pandemic. And that’s kind of the culture of the tech space.

I think when you think about family owned businesses, old family owned businesses, that they’ve been in the same office for so long where the owner of the company loves coming in every day and that person has spent the entire pandemic commuting to his or her office anyway. Those companies are more reluctant to change and they are more inclined to get their employees back to the office.

Jordan How much of that distinction do you think has to do with the fact that the older companies, the legacy companies you just mentioned, tend to be the ones with a gigantic sunk cost of huge offices right downtown. Like these are the companies with their names on the skyscrapers, right? Like there’s billions of dollars in real estate at stake there.

Vanmala Subramaniam Absolutely. I mean, I think that’s the key factor. I think a lot of them are locked into leases or own the property they’re on. They’re incurring massive costs being in those properties and they want to see it full. I am noticing with the big banks and the big banks, they have actually made some changes, which I find pretty interesting. So for instance, HSBC, one of the smaller banks, I guess, but they’ve moved out of the old office buildings and completely revamped a new workspace that they’re at where that new office cannot accommodate 100% of employees. It’s not built to. So when I toured the office, I actually found it quite fascinating where they told me they had rented a WeWork spillover space in the rare situation where more than 80% of the employees want to come back because they simply can’t accommodate it. So they’ve kind of made a permanent change in cutting down an office space cost, but a lot of other companies haven’t.

And older companies also, culturally, unless you have very dynamic leadership, tend to be less innovative and less inclined to massive changes. And those changes take a longer time. So I’m noticing that in even my conversations with those company leaders, they still really want to see things how it was pre-pandemic.

Jordan What about the white collar workers? And I don’t know if there’s any particular numbers in your survey that speak to this, but what about those workers who took a new job during the past two plus years based on the fact that they were working from home? And I think here, obviously, the idea of taking a new job in another city is one thing and doing remote work. But even just we’ve covered the housing market on this podcast a lot, and a lot of people moved a lot further from downtown over the past couple of years because they didn’t need to be commuting every day. And what happens to those folks if they do?

Vanmala Subramaniam That’s a very fascinating dynamic that I’m kind of keeping track of. So one thing to remember is that it’s very rare that an employer will solidify in an offer letter, or contract that an employee can work remotely or work hybrid. And the reason why they are doing that is because they don’t want to be in a situation exactly like you described, where the employee has moved, can’t come back into the office five times a week, and it States in their contract that they’re a permanent hybrid worker, because then the employer doesn’t have any legal means to force the employee back into the office. So in most cases, what I’m noticing is employers keep amending their return to work policies, so they just keep adjusting it saying it’s voluntary now, it’s twice a week or whatever, but it’s negotiated on a case by case basis. So say you lived in Toronto, you bought a house in Coburg, Ontario, 2 hours away, and now the employer is asking you to come back five times a week. If it’s not stated in your contract that you are allowed to work away maybe three times a week, you kind of have to come back into the office. You don’t have any legal means to not do that. I think it’s going to be quite interesting to see how this is playing out.

And coming back to my point about the tightness of the labor market, I think employees are at an advantage right now in being able to say no. But once we get into a point where if there is an economic recession, if job vacancy rates go down, employees are not going to be able to say no to what their employers want because that will cost them their jobs. We’re not in a situation like that right now. But these things ebb and flow, and we very well could be.

Jordan You kind of answered my next question, mostly, but I’ll just ask, I guess that would also apply to employees who signed their contract before there ever was a pandemic and the possibility of remote work. They also would not have legal options if the employer said, all right, five days a week, get your butt back.

Vanmala Subramaniam They wouldn’t have legal options. You’re absolutely right. So let’s consider a situation where COVID or health and safety is a reason to say, I don’t want to come back into the office. COVID is still around. I’m immunocompromised I don’t want to do this. You’re not providing a safe office space. The only way that you legally can pursue your case against an employer is to exercise your rights under the Occupational Health and Safety Act of whatever province you’re in. And that is an arduous and long process where you have to file a complaint with the Ontario Labor Relations Board or any provincial Labor Relations Board, and then they decide on whether the employer has actually violated the Health and Safety Act. So it’s not straightforward. It takes time. But COVID as a reason to not come back into the office, that is becoming less of a thing right now because we have vaccines, because employers have vaccine mandates for their employees. So they’ve done a lot of things to ensure a safe work environment. So there’s really not a lot you can do.

Jordan How much of this entire scenario got screwed up by the trend of open concept offices over the last decade?

Vanmala Subramaniam I think that is going to be a big problem for employers. And I wrote an article about this a couple of months ago when I spoke to so many employees. One of the reasons why employees don’t want to come back into the office is because a lot of offices are embracing this hot desking concept. So you don’t get your own desk any longer if you come back, say, twice or three times into the office. And so it dissuades people from coming back even more because having your own desk is, at least for a job like mine, quite important in that you need your notes, you need two screens. The open concept office space was created by big consulting companies advising companies, employers on how to foster more teamwork and company culture with employees communicating with each other, as opposed to having this cubicle set up that we saw a lot in the 80s and 90s. But what has happened now is, as you rightly pointed out, the open space office concept is the reason why people don’t feel safe coming back to the office in light of COVID. So when I tour offices, I see that they almost are designing offices in a way where they are reintroducing this pod concept where there are bigger walls between each workspace because of health and safety reasons, so it’s going to be quite interesting to see how this pans out.

Another point to make is that quite a few employees have told me there needs to be a reason for me to come back into the office. So if I’m going back just to sit at my desk and do the same thing that I do and you’re not paying for my commute, you’re not paying for my food, why am I doing this? But if I’m coming back because there is a specific team meeting, we’re doing some sort of brainstorming session, we’ll all benefit from talking in person, then yes, I would consider it. So I think HR departments and employers are kind of picking up on that sentiment, and some of them are reacting accordingly.

Jordan I love that we’re just reinventing cubicles and calling them pods or something else now.

Vanmala Subramaniam Ventilated pods. That’s one of the concepts that I was quite fascinated by at HSBC’s office.

Jordan I want to ask, especially as you mentioned employees that don’t see themselves getting anything out of a return to the office, is there a hierarchy and potential unfairness here in which employees with clout or skills or who have things that are deemed to be irreplaceable or who are like frontline talents are allowed to say just, no, sorry, because you can’t really replace them, and then the multitude of workers who are sort of lower on the corporate rungs don’t get a choice?

Vanmala Subramaniam Yeah, you are seeing a lot of unfairness. So I have a couple of points to make on this. Even prior to the Pandemic, the corporate structure is hierarchical in nature. You’ve always seen these kinds of inequities where the CEO or the CFO, directors of companies, people at the top can spend their summers working out of their cottages while rank and file employees have to commute into the office. This is something that people have complained about. You’ve seen this, you know this hierarchy exists. I think that in the pandemic, I’m seeing more lower paid employees at the bottom of the corporate ladder push back a little bit against that. One example is an HR executive I was talking to at a major bank said that one of the reasons why they want more people to start coming back into the office is that front line bank employees feel that they were unfairly disadvantaged because they had to work in person throughout the pandemic, except for those first few months in 2020 where everything was shut down. But they’re aware of how inequity will kind of create tension in the company and affect company culture or loyalty to your employer. And they claim to be addressing it.

But it is also a thing where if you come into an office and you’re an executive who gets your own office and you’re now telling all your other employees that they have to hot desk, they don’t get their own desk, that can create a lot of frustration. I think there are a lot of things to consider right now, especially when for the most part, I’ve noticed a shift in the relationship the employee has with their employer. They’re not, I would say as loyal, people have become more frustrated with work, they are noticing that working hard doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re rewarded for it all the time. These things have taken place in the last two years in light of the pandemic. And so, yeah, I think inequity in an office, it’s going to be something to really look out for.

Jordan That’s fascinating. We could do a whole entire other episode about sort of the collapse of trust and loyalty between employer and employee, and I might bug you to do that, but now we’ve had you for a while. So I’ll ask one more question, and that’s looking to the future and recruitment, what kinds of statements are being made in job postings these days regarding this? Is this kind of language now something that employees are taking really seriously in their contracts because they now know they might be forced to go back to the office? And is it a recruitment disadvantage? I am assuming so, to put must be in the office five days a week, et cetera, on a job post.

Vanmala Subramaniam You’re absolutely right. I would be shocked to see a job posting that says come back into the office five days a week, unless, of course, you have to your job doesn’t allow you to work from home. But for the most part, I would say what we’re landing on is the word hybrid and the word flexible. So you’re seeing that in most job postings. In fact, the job site indeed.ca, they track it really well. And I get these data reports where they’ll tell you how many jobs have been posted in a given month that mentioned the words remote or flexible and hybrid. And what they’ve noticed is flexible and hybrid is almost in every job posting right now. Again, I don’t know how long that will last. And the other point is that just because a job posting says flexible hybrid, it doesn’t mean that when you actually receive your offer letter, that terminology will be in your offer letter. That is something that recruiters have said to me is a point of contention in negotiations still, between an employee and an employer. So they are quite reluctant to really codify it because of potential legal repercussions when things go back to prepandemic norms and everyone’s back into the office.

Jordan Vanmala, thank you so much for this. It’s been fascinating. And we will check with you in the future to talk about work.

Vanmala Subramaniam Thank you so much, Jordan. Great conversation.

Jordan Vanmala Subramaniam, The Future of Work Reporter, such a great title, at the Globe and Mail.

That was The Big Story. For more, you can find us at the thebigstorypodcast.ca. You will note this is not the first time we’ve covered the return to the office but it is the first time that we’ve done it while it’s mostly actually happening. You can talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. I would love to hear from you if you’re somebody who loves going back to the office. And of course you can call us now and leave us a voicemail. The phone number is 416-935-5935.

The Big Story is available wherever you get your podcasts and it’s available on every smart speaker, just ask it to “play the Big story podcast”.

Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.

Back to top of page