For the dozen or so staff at Edmonton-based tech company Punchcard Systems, the new reality meant figuring out “new patterns” of how to communicate as they would have at their downtown office. That meant implementing systems to streamline collaboration and automate workflows, the company said.
Five years on, many office workers from Victoria to St. John’s are back to busy commutes and coffee runs, at least some of the time. But for Punchcard, now with more than 50 staff scattered across the country, home is where they remain. The company, which develops custom software, apps and other digital tools, has ditched the centralized office in its headquarter city entirely.
“Obviously in March 2020, the parameters for all of us changed and that was really, I think, a point of inflection for us as an organization,” said Sam Jenkins, Punchcard’s managing partner. “We knew that once we opened Pandora’s box of a distributed team that we had to make sure we didn’t turn remote employees into second-class citizens. If we pulled in our Edmonton staff into a single office, I don’t think it would be fair for Edmonton and it wouldn’t be fair for the rest of our team.”
How working from home came to be in Canada
As the five-year anniversary of the pandemic approaches, companies and their employees continue to wrestle over the ideal balance of in-office and work-from-home requirements. Costs, productivity and morale are among the factors tilting the pendulum in either direction, with many workplaces having settled somewhere in between a fully remote or in-person model. But there’s rarely a one-size-fits-all happy medium, especially for the new parent juggling work with childcare responsibilities, or the boss trying to build a culture of camaraderie that goes beyond screens.
John Trougakos, a professor of organizational behaviour and HR management at the University of Toronto, said one of the “silver linings of a very terrible time” is that the pandemic normalized the concept of hybrid work, which had been uncommon before 2020.
“The pandemic has fundamentally shifted the way we work,” said Trougakos. “The majority of office jobs now can in some way incorporate hybrid into their work based on the technologies that are available and the comfort that everyone has utilizing these technologies.”
A report released last September by the C.D. Howe Institute said just over one-quarter of paid employees across Canada spent at least part of their week working from home by the end of 2023.
While that’s down from 42% in the spring of 2020, Trougakos said the proportion of Canadians still working primarily from home today is more than double what it was before COVID-19.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings