London Inc. May/June 2021 - 31

After more than a year of remote work, the future looks hybrid.
How local ﬁrms are stepping up to the challenges and redeﬁning
what it means to work
k by KIERAN DELAMONT
REMOTE WORK IN the pandemic is making
" I could talk to you for hours about this stuff, " he says. " That's
many workers miserable. They feel tired, over- why I wrote the book - because work sucks and nobody seems
worked, spend way too much on video calls that to be paying attention to making it right. "
have grown longer and longer over the past year.
But it's also clear by now that remote work is here to stay, in
Four out of every 10 workers say they are some form or another. For every worker who has struggled with
considering leaving their jobs. People throughout remote work there is another who thrives on it. Flexibility in
the workforce complain that work from home work is now an expectation: 70 per cent of workers want to have
has come to mean living at work. Our social and remote work options, while 65 per cent want more in-person
professional networks are contracting, and burn- time.
out is on the rise. If you are young, at the start of
In Canada, the workforce is very clearly split. In a poll taken
your career, a woman or a racialized person, this last fall, 31 per cent of Canadian workers expressed a desire
picture simply gets bleaker.
to return to the office, while another 32 per cent said that if
These, at least, are the dispiriting findings remote work was taken away, they would quit.
of Microsoft's ﬁrst Work Trend Index, released
Against this backdrop, local companies have forged new
in late March, which polled 30,000 people in 31 structures that are going to guide their growth as we come out
countries, and used data col-lected through the of the pandemic. What is clear, if nothing else, is that there is
Microsoft Teams and LinkedIn (which Microsoft no single experience of remote work - and that if hybrid work
owns).
is here to stay, it will require both employers and employees to
" People are in signiﬁcantly more meetings,
develop new ways of working in order to be sustainable.
taking more ad hoc calls and managing more incoming chats than
they did before the pandemic, "
the study found. " One third of
remote workers say the lack
of separation between work
and life is negatively impacting their wellbeing. "
Terry Gillis, president
of London-based Ahria
Consulting (www.ahria.ca)
-David Ciccarelli
and the author of the book
Desuckify Work, isn't surprised
that many workplaces struggled to
adapt to remote work, since so many workMANY OF US can, by now, recall pandemic days where Zoom
places were bad at managing their workplaces to meetings dragged into dinner hour, or where meetings felt like
begin with. He sees the coming of hybrid work as unnecessary and often lengthy interruptions to the workday.
a once-in-a-generation chance to improve on the
At Voices.com, those tendencies forced them to make changes
culture of work.
early.

" Tactically speaking, the
ﬁrst thing employers can
do is encourage employees
to set work hours in their
calendar system "

MAY / JUNE 2021 | londonincmagazine.ca | 31

http://www.ahria.ca http://www.Voices.com http://www.londonincmagazine.ca

London Inc. May/June 2021

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