the pandemic changed how canadians work — and how they want to work: poll
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for those canadians who were working from home, it was looking like september 2021 was going to mark the big return to the workplace, after several false starts.a solid 50 per cent had never really left their workplaces — or if they had, it was only under lockdown orders or the worst crests of the pandemic’s various waves. and some of those who were working from home temporarily had already returned.but a year on, a large portion of canadians have found that work-from-home has become their new model.maybe they don’t work every day at home, but they like doing so. in fact, according to a new poll for postmedia by leger, these employees already outnumber people who are back to the workplace for their full week.this shift to new ways of working include being exclusively at home after usually being at a workplace (13 per cent), working mostly from home and going in occasionally (eight per cent), and splitting time between home and workplace in a more or less regular way, but not like before (nine per cent).
polls show canadians are relatively pleased to be working from home.
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one canadian in five was working at home for a while but is now back in the workplace. more than twice that proportion had never stopped leaving the house for work in the mornings.there does not appear to be an appetite or expectation of going back as before. fewer than 40 per cent expect to work much more often in the workplace next year than this, and 40 per cent expect not to. fully 21 per cent simply do not know.well over half, 57 per cent, are not looking forward to spending more time in the workplace, while 40 per cent want a hybrid model. even more want to keep working at home all the time. just 18 per cent “cannot wait to get back to the workplace.”roughly half of canadians are just as satisfied with their work situation now as they were before the pandemic, and the rest are about evenly split between finding it better and worse.
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andrew enns, executive vice president of leger, which conducted the poll, said that of the “worse” cohort, some are at home and want to be back in the workplace, but most are back in the workplace and want to be at home, he said. “it’s a discussion.”he said employers are keenly aware of this shift in the average canadian’s work life, but that government is also paying concerned attention, especially in big cities. “downtowns are structured in a manner that require bodies there on a real regular basis,” enns said.a city breathes people. if suddenly that pattern is disrupted, with a new normal of 30 to 40 per cent of the workforce reluctant to return to the workplace, there are implications on the policy side, he said, for transit and government services as much as for lunch counters. he said in cities such as winnipeg, where he is based, people do not really live in the downtown core as they do in toronto or vancouver, and as a result some businesses are only open because of federal rent subsidies.a new federal program announced last week allows businesses to qualify for wage and rent subsidies if they have lost 25 per cent of their revenue in the past month against 2019 numbers. that is a lowering of the earlier threshold of 40 per cent. the program subsidizes up to 75 per cent of revenue declines.the poll was conducted online from dec. 10 to 13, with responses from 1,532 adults, weighted for age, gender and region according to the 2016 census. because they were not randomly selected, a true margin of error cannot be calculated, but a randomized poll with a similar number of respondents would have a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
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