For more than a dozen employees of Edmonton-based technology company Punchcard Systems, the new reality means a “new model” of figuring out how to communicate in downtown offices. This means implementing systems to simplify collaboration and automate workflows, the company said.
Five years have passed, and many office workers from Victoria to St. John have returned to their busy commutes and coffee runs, at least at some point. But for Punchcard, there are now more than 50 employees across the country and they stay at home. The company has completely abandoned its centralized offices in its headquarters city.
“Obviously, in March 2020, the parameters of all of us changed, and I think that’s really a point of change for us as an organization,” said Sam Jenkins, managing partner at Punchcard. “We know that once we open the box of Pandora’s distributed team, we have to make sure we don’t turn remote employees into second-class citizens. If we include Edmonton employees in one office, I think that’s not fair to Edmonton, and to our other teams, it’s not fair to us.”
How to work from home come to Canada
With the fifth anniversary of the pandemic approach, the company and its employees continue to fight for the ideal balance of work requirements both inside and at work. Cost, productivity, and morale are one of the factors that tilt in either direction, and many workplaces settle between completely remote or face-to-face models. But there is rarely a cookie-cutter medium of joy, especially for new parents juggling jobs for parenting responsibilities, or bosses trying to build a culture of friendship beyond the screen.
“One of the silver linings of a very bad time” is that the pandemic normalizes the concept of hybrid work, which is not common until 2020,” said John Trougakos, a professor of organizational behavior and human resources management at the University of Toronto.
“The pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we work,” Trougakos said. “Now, most office jobs can incorporate hybrids into their work in some way based on the technology available and the comfort of everyone using them.”
A report released by CD Howe Institute last September said that by the end of 2023, more than a quarter of paid workers across Canada will be available for at least one-quarter of the week.
While that’s down from 42% in spring 2020, Trugkos said the percentage of Canadians who still work primarily from home today is more than twice as high as before Covid-19.
