How we work was heating up to be an important debate long before the pandemic added rocket fuel to remote working capacity. Now, millions of people have spent the past 10 months in a pandemic-imposed trial. They have set up a corner of their home as an all-in-one office, school and living area.
Some love it. Pat Suwalski does not.
Suwalski is part of a historic shift in the job market. At the peak of the pandemic lockdowns in April, more than 40 per cent of those still working at least half their usual hours were working from home, according to Statistics Canada.
That number declined to around 26 per cent in September 2020 before “increasingly slightly in the fall,” the agency said.
“In three industries — professional, scientific and technical services; finance, insurance, real estate, rental and leasing; and public administration — working from home has remained at elevated levels,” it said.
In areas such as education, which was affected by school shutdowns and the shift to remote learning early in the pandemic, only about a third of people were working from home by December compared to close to half in April.
City centres, like this one in Ottawa, are practically empty as many employees continue to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Brian Morris/CBC)
The question among experts, economists and business owners is how many of them will return to their workplaces when the crisis is over.
“I’m pretty enthusiastic to get back to the office whenever it’s possible to do so,” said Suwalski, a developer for a small software firm called Vectorface in Ottawa.
Suwalski usually shares an office with 15 co-workers. Now, he shares a room with his son Jacob who’s on a Zoom call with his kindergarten class. Meanwhile, his three-year-old daughter is at daycare.
Suwalski misses in-person meetings. He misses impromptu hangouts in the hallways. He even misses his commute.
“I’m in a car by myself,” he said. “I can either listen to the radio or focus on my thoughts.”
Suwalski thinks others will also want to return to their offices.
“I think, at best, we’re going to go back to a partial in-office presence and then work from home as well,” he said.
Software developer Pat Siwulski and his son Jacob share a work space in their home in Nepean, about 16 kilometres southwest of Ottawa. (Submitted by Pat Suwalski)
Demand for flexibility
It’s not just employees pondering a return to the office.
Margaret Szots, a talent development manager with the City of Toronto, is also trying to figure out what the future will look like.
She was working on a way to give employees more flexibility before COVID-19 hit.
“We know what many of the issues are because we’re living them,” she said.
The benefits are clear — people don’t have to commute, they’re saving money and they’re saving time, she said.
However, the long-term impact remains mired in uncertainty, she said.
“We were already on a trajectory to this new way of working,” she said. “[The pandemic] pushed us that much more quickly … We’re not going back to the way we were.”
San Diego-based Kate Lister, president of the Global Workplace Analytics consulting firm, predicted the pandemic would be “the tipping point for remote work.”
Early in the pandemic, she estimated, “25 to 30 per cent of the workforce would work from home multiple days a week when the threat was over.”
“It felt like a bold assertion. Now, nearly nine months into the world’s largest work-from-home experiment, if anything, I’m feeling my estimate might be low,” she writes in a January 2021 report on remote work.
Margaret Szots, a talent development manager with the City of Toronto, works from her home. She’s wondering what the future will hold for workplaces. (Submitted by Margaret Szots)
For employers, remote work has offered benefits such as reduced eal estate costs, less absenteeism, lower employee turnover and increased productivity, the report found.
Looking ahead
Companies big and small are looking at their workforces now and trying to figure out how things will look in six months or a year.
Facebook said as many as half of its employees will work remotely for the foreseeable future.
In a virtual town hall meeting with employees in May, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that doesn’t mean employees have permission to decamp to their hometowns or a beach somewhere.
“Your salary will be adjusted if you change location,” he said, noting that’s a long-standing policy.
But people who want to work remotely won’t be the challenge, he said.
“It’s going to be that there are more people who want to get back into the office than we can support,” he said.
Avery Shenfeld, CIBC’s chief economist in Toronto, agreed.
People have had ample opportunity to work from home for years, and Zoom has been around since 2013, he said.
“I keep hearing all these people [saying]: ‘We’re all going to work from home forever,'” he said. “No [we won’t] because it’s not effective.”
When the pandemic hit, office towers such as these in Vancouver emptied out. Filling them up again will be more complicated. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
At least it’s not effective for everyone.
But that’s not to say there will be a flood of people rushing back to their offices next spring or summer.
Even once restrictions loosen, it’s not like giant office towers can just open the doors and let everyone back in.
“I don’t think there will be a single moment when this COVID period is done,” Zuckerberg said back in the spring, and the pandemic has only worsened since then.
Some health and safety restrictions will remain in place even as other broader restrictions are lifted.
Getting everyone to stay home was relatively simple. Finding a way to get them back to the office will be a much more complicated affair.
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
