Remotely speaking

Despite challenges, the numbers tell a tale — Canadians want flexibility when it comes to where they do their jobs

EVEN IF THEIR employers continue to turn the screws on RTO (the Ontario government was the most recent to do so, ordering public servants back to the office four days a week starting this fall and then full-time in January), Canadians still love remote work. Seventy-six per cent of people who work remote or have worked remote told Angus Reid recently that they would prefer it as the main way of working.

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But the survey also found that even five years on, core problems of isolation, loneliness and a lack of separation between work and personal lives remain.

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Social isolation and the bleeding of work into personal life were named as the biggest challenges, Angus Reid reported. For younger workers, social isolation is a problem experienced by a 56 per cent majority. For women, these sentiments “are particularly acute,” said Angus Reid; for young women, the rate of experiencing work-related sense of isolation hits 43 per cent.

“We were able to solve the problem of the pandemic and the need for social isolation by creating sustainable structures that got the work done,” said Dalhousie University researcher Michael Ungar. “But I wonder if we’ve discovered that there were other systems that weren’t being successfully dealt with, whether it’s the psychological, the social, the inspirational, the team building.”

If you or someone you’re close with works remote, you might see signs of this. Virtual happy hours? A thing of the past. It’s way more common to take meetings with your cameras off now. Everybody is basically perma-Zoom-fatigued these days, getting their work done (often very well) but doing so alone in a room. “We’re not seeing people connecting online like we used to,” observed Lakehead University health science professor Kara Polson. “That sense of community has sort of faded with everybody kind of going about life, business as usual.”

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What to make of the vigour with which many Canadians still fight for WFH then?

To Allison Vendetti, founder of Moms at Work, it isn’t really about working from home, but about a sense of control that many employees feel they’ve lost in recent years. “To say that work from home is comfortable and possible, and the best option for everybody is wrong,” she told Rabble. “But people are screaming that they want choice. People want choice so they don’t feel pigeonholed into the things that they’re being forced to do.” Kieran Delamont