Out of office: COVID normalized remote work, but is it really here to stay?

A lone commuter walks a tunnel leading to the subway in Montreal, on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

When the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, companies across Canada scrambled to shift their employees to home setups.

Within days, old computer monitors were dragged up from basements and assembled into makeshift work stations. Spouses jostled for laptop space at the kitchen table, while other workers designed camera-ready backdrops of bookshelves and plants for daily Zoom meetings.

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.”

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 per cent 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.

Those still working from home tend to be more educated, employed by large organizations, and are more likely to have young children, wrote Tammy Schirle, author of the C.D. Howe report and an economics professor at Wilfrid Laurier University.

“From an employer’s point of view, offering work-from-home arrangements can help with efforts to attract and retain productive employees who may have otherwise searched for more flexible work arrangements with other employers,” she wrote.

The study also found work-from-home arrangements are more prominent in regions where industries such as finance and insurance, professional services, or public administration — occupations often characterized as “office jobs” — account for a large part of the local economy.

Contrary to some fears over employees being less productive at home, Trougakos said many companies have found their staff actually get more work done in their own surroundings.

Not only are there fewer distractions and disruptions than a shared office space, but remote and hybrid employees tend to indicate they’re less stressed, take fewer sick days and value time saved from not having to commute, said Trougakos.

“They have better work-life balance,” he said.

As an employer, Jenkins said he worried at the outset of the pandemic that Punchcard would “lose our culture” and productivity would lag when employees first began working from home.

“I didn’t realize how much I was going to have to trust that our employees were going to do the right thing, even when nobody’s watching,” he said.

“Lo and behold, we’re more productive in a remote environment because people really value the autonomy they get and the flexibility to work in the formats and patterns that work best for them.”

Still, it’s unclear how long these arrangements will stay mainstream.

South of the border, Donald Trump kicked off his presidency by ordering federal departments to end remote work and require employees to return to the office in-person full-time.

Many large U.S. companies have taken that same approach and it could trickle over to Canada too, said employment and labour lawyer Andy Pushalik.

KPMG’s 2024 CEO outlook, which surveyed large business leaders from 11 markets including Canada, found 83 per cent of chief executives expect a full return to office within three years.

“Maybe the pendulum is really swinging back,” said Pushalik, a partner at Dentons.

“You just see so much movement of these large companies — Dell, Amazon, JPMorgan and most importantly, the U.S. government — that there’s going to be other C-suite leaders looking and saying, ‘Well, we may want to make a change for our own workforce.’”

Pushalik said U.S. law generally gives employers more flexibility to make workforce changes without notice obligations. But Canadian laws around constructive dismissal mean an employer can’t change certain terms of employment overnight, such as in-office requirements, he said.

“An employer could not necessarily decide on a Friday that they want everybody working in the office five days a week on Monday,” he said.

“(An employee) could potentially launch a constructive dismissal claim saying, ‘Look, you didn’t give me the right amount of notice and this is actually akin to a termination, so pay me out.’”

That legal foundation makes it unlikely Canadian companies will fully embrace return-to-office models in the near future, said Pushalik.

“I think people have got a taste of the flexibility that can come with the benefits of our technology and our ability to be connected anywhere that it’s going to be tough to necessarily go back to fully five days a week,” he said.

“The challenge is, how can we harness the new normal to have a productive economy, with workplaces that are filled with collaboration and innovation?”

For Punchcard, the permanent shift to remote work has prompted the tech company to invest more in digital tools, said Jenkins.

Some money saved from reduced overhead has also been put back into the company for travel, so employees can come together twice a year for social and development retreats.

But with his team now spread well-beyond Edmonton, including in cities such as Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and Toronto, he said he won’t require them to go to an office, even part of the week.

“People do value the camaraderie of getting to see some of their co-workers, but they also value the flexibility of being able to do that on their own terms and their own schedule,” said Jenkins.

“I don’t think we can put that genie back in the bottle.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 10, 2025.

Sammy Hudes, The Canadian Press