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TRANSCRIPTION WITH SPEAKERS
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[00:00] SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Canada's podcast.
[00:05] SPEAKER_01: Hey everyone, I'm Foblos and this is Canada's podcast.
[00:09] SPEAKER_01: Today we're going to do a special and take a close look at the hybrid workforce
[00:13] SPEAKER_01: and how much it is progressed in the past, I guess the past three years,
[00:19] SPEAKER_01: since sort of the beginning of the pandemic.
[00:22] SPEAKER_01: According to a recent report from Deloitte's,
[00:25] SPEAKER_01: hybrid work offers them potential for a better work life balance.
[00:29] SPEAKER_01: It could give workers and companies more flexibility in how, when and where they work.
[00:37] SPEAKER_01: And it could open the door to more inclusive work environments that accept different working styles and accommodation needs.
[00:46] SPEAKER_01: Joining me today is Stephen Harrington,
[00:48] SPEAKER_01: partner and national leader for workforce strategy and the future of workforce work advisory with Deloitte's.
[00:57] SPEAKER_01: Stephen leads transformation to work for the strategy to fundamentally get changes in work.
[01:04] SPEAKER_01: And I hope today, Stephen and his report will give us all a good sense of,
[01:10] SPEAKER_01: how we take on the future.
[01:14] SPEAKER_01: Stephen, welcome to Canada's podcast.
[01:17] SPEAKER_01: It's great to have you and glad you spent a lot of time kind of looking at the kind of the latest details and input on hybrid work,
[01:30] SPEAKER_01: which we've all kind of come to the forefront really in the last two and a half years.
[01:37] SPEAKER_01: And I really recommend everybody to read the report that you put together, which is pretty interesting.
[01:46] SPEAKER_01: But maybe you can just give us a, you know, a quick prairie of some of the high points.
[01:56] SPEAKER_01: You know, that you feel the report uncovered.
[02:04] SPEAKER_00: And I think that the idea behind the paper was to investigate whether we could talk about Canada moving towards hybrid models as an opportunity for the Canadian economy.
[02:18] SPEAKER_00: And that vision really plainly the way it would work is imagine a Canada the future where more people coast to coast to coast could make different choices about how they interact.
[02:31] Speaker UNKNOWN: And that's what I think is the way it works with the workplace.
[02:33] SPEAKER_00: In fact, in some cases, some people might remain not hybrid at all, but remote is default in work out of, you know, keep bread and a rattle op a scanner where they choose and still find some of the best job opportunities available in Canada.
[02:48] SPEAKER_00: That kind of improvement of efficiency of labor market attachment could really drive an economy.
[02:55] SPEAKER_00: But then we asked ourselves what could get in the way.
[02:58] SPEAKER_00: And of course, there are a lot of things that can get away with a big change like this at this at this at this level.
[03:05] SPEAKER_00: So for example, not every Canadian has high speed and internet access back to a lot of Canadians don't, especially those who live outside of major city centers.
[03:15] SPEAKER_00: So how can you make sure that if this is the next big opportunity for the economy that it's equal that that people will have equal access to that opportunity and and be able to participate in in the job market the way they choose.
[03:33] SPEAKER_01: But, you know, what about the change in work like, you know, we've been a gathering workforce if you like up to now where, you know, we've gone to work because, you know, even if we didn't enjoy the work, we've enjoyed the environment and the people that we work with.
[03:59] SPEAKER_01: And yeah, you know, here we are and zoom together and but I mean, it's still not the same, you know, and I think we've all read about the mental, all the mental stress that we've hit as we've been kind of immersed in the hybrid work without expecting it without planning for it, if you like.
[04:26] SPEAKER_01: What about that side of it, did you uncover any gems that, you know, our audience, which is entrepreneurs and people like that who are big employers.
[04:40] SPEAKER_01: So obviously, oh, this is really effective and anything there that you can pass on in terms of information.
[04:50] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I mean, by the statistics, it's a fascinating story, 80% of Canadians that worked from home during the pandemic would like to continue to work from home post pandemic, the majority of the time, which Philip surprises me because I'm kind of sick of working from my home office can't wait to get human interaction.
[05:13] SPEAKER_00: Right. But but at the same time, while that's true, 80% of Canadians reported suffering burnout at some point during the pandemic almost feel it's almost tempting to think it's the same 80% and then we have to ask ourselves if it's been so difficult, if work intensification has been so hard.
[05:34] SPEAKER_00: Then what is it that makes people want to maintain this way of working? If you know, for the entrepreneurs in the audience, I will say, what a massive opportunity this is.
[05:46] SPEAKER_00: We're already seeing huge growth in what we call work technology technologies that are meant to make work easier or facilitation of relationships across distances easier.
[06:00] SPEAKER_00: And there are a lot of problems left to solve.
[06:04] SPEAKER_00: You know, for an example, when I'm talking to clients, I always like to get them to think about the calendar technology we all use every day.
[06:13] SPEAKER_00: And it's always seemed great. Aren't we glad we have modern calendar technology? We've had it for decades.
[06:18] SPEAKER_00: But during the pandemic, what accidentally happened is people began to realize that their life was 30 minute increments that anybody could take digitally, almost without permission.
[06:35] SPEAKER_00: You think about that, that just so perfectly describes the experience of so many leaders in particular, who feel like they get up at eight in the morning in or on calls until eight in the evening.
[06:46] SPEAKER_00: It's those sorts of things that we need to actually redesign, we need to redesign work so that we offset some of those challenges that have become clearer over the last couple of years.
[06:59] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we were talking before we started recording about, you know, what does remote work, remote work can be very remote.
[07:09] SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, as an employer, you know, I don't have to employ someone that lives, you know, within 50 kilometers of the office.
[07:21] SPEAKER_01: I can employ somebody in Germany, in Romania, in Morocco, doesn't really matter, you know.
[07:32] SPEAKER_01: If they have the right skills and when I'm looking for what does that do in terms of, you know, where does that leave the workforce? I mean, I can imagine somebody who's getting pretty upset about that type of situation.
[07:51] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that's part of it. It's interesting. So many of the trends that we're dealing with, of course, started long before COVID.
[07:57] SPEAKER_00: Oh, sure. And, you know, the growth in the gig economy in North America has been absolutely fascinating to watch, you know, up to a third of the US workforce has participated in that economy at some stage in their careers.
[08:13] SPEAKER_00: That's massive. And that happened without, you know, a political party saying, hey, this is a good idea. It's just a sea change in employment that happened almost overnight.
[08:24] SPEAKER_00: You know, I will say that that risk also is an opportunity. I was talking to some colleagues at University of Waterloo, and they were reporting Silicon Valley companies, approaching their graduates and saying, hey, we've got a job for you.
[08:42] SPEAKER_00: Well, pay in a US dollars and you never have to move to the US.
[08:49] SPEAKER_00: By the way, your laptops in a career. So one of the ways we've been talking about this is, how do you compete for talent when the cost of switching is so low for employees that they could literally switch laptops and be working for somebody else within a week.
[09:09] SPEAKER_00: That's a, that's a, that's a new problem that organizations are really going to have to wrap their heads from.
[09:17] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I mean, you know, seeing as we're all about entrepreneurs, you know, that also feeds into the entrepreneurial line.
[09:29] SPEAKER_03: I mean, if you're not going into an office and say you're a couple, then.
[09:38] SPEAKER_01: Then that gig side of it kind of can easily nudge in to the full time side. So how do I do, how do you know both sides of the coin.
[09:53] SPEAKER_01: You know, deal with that. I mean, that's sort of what you said was employment practices is it is it just like, yeah, it's going to happen. So you just plan for it.
[10:03] SPEAKER_01: Would you try and say, don't make it, you can't do that and get into signs of kind of legal stuff or.
[10:10] SPEAKER_01: You may have the answer. I'm just curious.
[10:13] SPEAKER_00: Well, when we said work for strategies, we've been facing these questions for ages and sort of the classic is figure out what's core in your business.
[10:24] SPEAKER_00: What are the capabilities and capacities that you absolutely need to protect to win.
[10:30] SPEAKER_00: And those are generally the ones you want to own.
[10:33] SPEAKER_00: You want to own them because there's probably some trades, craft or secrets the way you do it.
[10:38] SPEAKER_00: Because owning that talent, having them be permanently part of your business protects the value of your business.
[10:46] SPEAKER_00: But then there's a lot of work to the periphery and actually even work that might be transactional and dull that you could take away from your full time workers by thinking more broadly about the people who don't want to attach to your business permanently.
[11:02] SPEAKER_00: And then they do be perfectly happy to do that work. That's sort of a, it's been an idea of talent strategy in the market for quite some time.
[11:12] SPEAKER_00: But you know what, to be honest with you felt most sort of legacy Canadian organizations.
[11:19] SPEAKER_00: They don't, they don't work that way. There's still very much dominated by full time workforce with contractors, but very traditional versions of contractors being a close second.
[11:32] SPEAKER_00: This conversation we're having about a much more distributed workforce with a lot of different types of talent available has, as remained an idea in corporate Canada, not so much practice.
[11:47] SPEAKER_00: So it'll be really interesting to see how quickly we'll entrepreneurs take these opportunities versus the large monolithic companies in Canada who have as to date not taken much advantage at all.
[12:01] SPEAKER_01: The other thing that really interests me is, you know, we've built a working and urban environment, you know, based on going to some work center downtown, whatever you want to call it.
[12:20] SPEAKER_01: And living in the burbs, you know, the especially in the North American economy, that's once in Europe, but especially in the North American economy.
[12:34] SPEAKER_01: And you know, if you walked around Toronto, you were saying Ottawa, Calgary, etc. in the last couple of years, you know, it ain't the same.
[12:46] SPEAKER_01: I was talking about the path in downtown Toronto, I was, you know, there were kids skateboarding through the path, which would have been a laughable situation.
[12:56] SPEAKER_01: And that was at 530 in the evening. That's really show. You couldn't, you know, three years ago, you couldn't move at that time of the day.
[13:05] SPEAKER_01: Which obviously means a rate in many people working in those big high rises downtown in Toronto.
[13:11] SPEAKER_01: But what is, you know, what does all that mean in terms of, you know, it all affects the economy because all of a sudden, as you had, you had some numbers in the report on, you know, I thought they were very conservative numbers, but that's fine.
[13:30] SPEAKER_01: But you know, about how, you know, home prices have gone basically through the roof and, you know, try losing opposite space and things like that.
[13:45] SPEAKER_01: And you'll, you know, you'll find that that is as low as it has been since I can remember certain in Toronto, around about Ottawa and Calgary, in those places so much.
[13:59] SPEAKER_01: But, you know, what is there some kind of long term kind of strategies of all fingers is still, is it still a free for all on that side?
[14:14] SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we're about to find out. I mean, hopefully I'm going to knock on what is I'm saying this over the next few months.
[14:21] SPEAKER_00: We're going to reopen in earnest for the first time since since the pandemic began.
[14:27] SPEAKER_00: And then organizations at scale, we're going to start trying these hybrid strategies they've been talking about.
[14:33] SPEAKER_00: And we'll see what the commuting pattern looks like then.
[14:37] SPEAKER_00: But I will say, you know, in a way, this is an opportunity for us to rethink something that maybe didn't make a lot of sense in the first place.
[14:46] SPEAKER_00: If you, if you were to design a city from scratch, I doubt you would say, and then let's have everybody go to basically the same place at the same time twice per day as an efficient means of organizing a society.
[14:59] SPEAKER_00: So, on the opportunity side, we can think about it quite differently.
[15:04] SPEAKER_00: And I also think, I think that we're going to find that new new leaseholders and renters are going to move into downtown course.
[15:15] SPEAKER_00: And there actually could be opportunity in that you think about a city like Toronto.
[15:20] SPEAKER_00: And you were, if you were a mid-sized fast growing company, you probably found the downtown core out of reach and its advantage is out of reach.
[15:29] SPEAKER_00: And maybe now they won't be.
[15:31] SPEAKER_00: And if you think about the suburbs in the rural areas, talk about opportunities for entrepreneurs, there's going to be a whole new consumer class that spends way more time in the suburbs and rural areas than they used to.
[15:45] SPEAKER_00: Which is a, which has to be an opportunity for business to think very differently about their footprint or even the services they offer.
[15:57] SPEAKER_03: So, you know,
[16:01] SPEAKER_03: I'm going to hang with it because it's key to live work.
[16:05] SPEAKER_01: I mean, do we really go into work two days a week? Is that the real future? Or does it, you know, one, one day a month, the real few?
[16:17] SPEAKER_00: I think it's going to be a mix. We, we keep talking about sort of, and by the way, we've done a lot of really dry and exciting workforce segmentation for some of these strategies where you actually take the strategies in an executive set and you start to think about, well,
[16:33] SPEAKER_00: what employees will be able to work in different ways.
[16:36] SPEAKER_00: I have to remember that 60% ish of Canadians will go back to work. In some cases, they never stopped because they're frontline workers in one way, shape, form, they work on a plant or retail outlet or what have you.
[16:50] SPEAKER_00: And for the other 40%, I do think there's going to be a mix.
[16:57] SPEAKER_00: I'll talk about three strategies that we're seeing. One is hybrid and structured.
[17:03] SPEAKER_00: So, what that means is the organization is thinking we still want to optimize that real estate. And we want people to be consistent.
[17:10] SPEAKER_00: So, we're going to tell them what days of the week to come in.
[17:13] SPEAKER_00: You know, they'd say, Philip, you're going to be in three days a week Monday Wednesday Friday. Stephen, you're going to be in two days a week, two days and Thursdays. And that's how we're going to balance our portfolio in our office.
[17:25] SPEAKER_00: There's another version of hybrid, but like Deloitte's version, where we're saying the offices are open, come in when you need them.
[17:36] SPEAKER_00: And that's more of an autonomous sort of hybrid approach, but we're not going to dictate what our people use our office space.
[17:45] SPEAKER_00: But we are going to really make our office space hard to resist. The best of technology, the best of social, all kind of trade, create the workplaces and magnet.
[17:57] Speaker UNKNOWN:
[17:58] SPEAKER_01: I know I've got a lot of friends like that, but they need someone fairly senior and they all seem to be saying, yeah, we're going to keep hybrid is it.
[18:08] SPEAKER_01: And we're going to keep the office, but we've just given up 40% of the floor space we're only going to be on the 60% of the floor space.
[18:20] SPEAKER_01: So, you know, that's a lot of floor space to give up.
[18:24] SPEAKER_01: So I'm just curious, you know, because I mean, it still means less people in the core.
[18:33] SPEAKER_01: Okay, we were talking earlier, you know, Toronto's pretty useful in the sense that it transformed itself over the last quarter century from, you know, emptying out at seven o'clock at night to actually having
[18:48] SPEAKER_01: a ton of people that actually live and work downtown.
[18:53] SPEAKER_01: But it's not really the rule in most North American cities.
[18:59] SPEAKER_01: It they're still fall into the, you know, the suburban kind of that that that broke down the downtown, if you like.
[19:10] SPEAKER_01: So it tends to be only a workspace, not a live space.
[19:13] SPEAKER_01: And so what does that do? I mean, so there's two things. I mean, the economies there, what does it do for that kind of the retail economies that rely on those day tripers, if you like, every day tripers to, you know, to buy goods and services.
[19:34] SPEAKER_01: And on one level and on a city level, how do you keep the city going when you lose that that space basically, you know, yeah, I am, I'm on the optimistic side of this.
[19:49] SPEAKER_00: I think every city is going to be different.
[19:51] SPEAKER_00: But I think we will find people to lease those spaces. I think there are a lot of businesses that would have loved to have been in downtown Calgary, downtown Edmonton, downtown Vancouver that have been unable to now the value proposition might change, it might change what those leases are worth over the short term.
[20:11] SPEAKER_00: But over the longer term that should go a long way to revitalizing those downtowns, I think there'll actually be more dynamic because there are more companies per square foot, if you will, occupying the least space.
[20:28] SPEAKER_00: And we'll have growth outside of the core. That's the part that's exciting. That's the part where, you know, we may see more shared office spaces and around those shared office spaces, all new retail operations opening up to serve those customers.
[20:44] SPEAKER_00: You know what, I'll put it this way, Philip, if there's a country that needed to distribute itself better.
[20:52] SPEAKER_00: Geographically, Canada is probably a prime example.
[20:57] SPEAKER_00: You know, we wanted to live outside of those major urban cores, cover our country in a lot of ways, but it's been difficult historically.
[21:05] SPEAKER_00: This really could be the change that instigates something different when it comes to distribution.
[21:12] SPEAKER_01: Opportunity side, you know, and that, you know, what I was saying, that sort of crawl, walk, run type of strategy, is there, you know, two or three jams that you could give us that we should be paying a lot of attention to.
[21:33] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well employers, of course, have to figure out how they're going to play this whole opportunity.
[21:38] SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
[21:39] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, one piece of advice that I've settled on as I've gotten smarter over the last couple of years is start with your business strategy.
[21:47] SPEAKER_00: Think about how your work force strategy can follow that because what I worry about is that some employers are going to set up hybrid work arrangements or let people work remote as default.
[22:00] SPEAKER_00: And find within a short period of time that it's not working for them.
[22:04] SPEAKER_00: And because it's not core to the way they do business, it'll be really easy to slip on that value proposition or not really differentiate yourself from a competitive that's taking it very, very seriously.
[22:18] SPEAKER_00: I'll give you an example and not start a rumor because this is absolutely not happened, but imagine that indigenous affairs Canada decided we don't meet in office in Ottawa.
[22:29] SPEAKER_00: What we need over time is to locate our business in the communities we serve.
[22:35] SPEAKER_00: And over time also to employ people out of the communities we serve.
[22:39] SPEAKER_00: Now, that would be an incredibly just advantageous distributed model for them because of the business that they're in.
[22:48] SPEAKER_00: I hope that makes sense.
[22:50] SPEAKER_01: That makes a lot of sense.
[22:53] SPEAKER_01: People don't know why I'm very, very strong indigenous network.
[22:56] SPEAKER_01: So it makes a heck of a lot of sense to me.
[23:02] SPEAKER_01: But I think that's really good that that sure that shows you what can happen.
[23:08] SPEAKER_01: Okay, and what you're saying is we've probably gone through decades of centralization.
[23:14] SPEAKER_01: And maybe this is sort of the green light to say that was happening a little bit prior to the pandemic, but now that the.
[23:23] SPEAKER_01: The tools have improved themselves in the last three years.
[23:28] SPEAKER_01: Now's the time.
[23:29] SPEAKER_00: The biggest thing this changed is what we think of as possible.
[23:36] SPEAKER_00: I work a lot in the public sector and before COVID people would have said.
[23:42] SPEAKER_00: Public sector workers can't work from home. It's impossible.
[23:46] SPEAKER_00: What would they achieve? They wouldn't be able to get work done.
[23:50] SPEAKER_00: And yet if you look at the track record of the public sector over the last couple of years, they've done more in a short, a period of time than ever before.
[23:59] SPEAKER_00: So there really is there's this inflection point where we've started to think differently about how we can organize work.
[24:07] SPEAKER_00: But my main point is.
[24:09] SPEAKER_00: That's nice.
[24:11] SPEAKER_00: But now how can it improve our business? That's truly powerful.
[24:15] SPEAKER_00: And it's that kind of thinking that's going to reshape the Canadian economies.
[24:19] SPEAKER_00: Is that kind of thinking that will take up the office space that's abandoned in downtown course and.
[24:25] SPEAKER_00: And really solve a lot of the problems that you and I've been talking about.
[24:29] SPEAKER_01: Like I like that.
[24:31] SPEAKER_01: Steven's been great having you on the show.
[24:33] SPEAKER_01: Now I was at a rather report.
[24:36] SPEAKER_01: How can people get a hold of the report is a.
[24:40] SPEAKER_01: Space they can go to the download it or what's what.
[24:43] SPEAKER_00: Yes, there is.
[24:44] SPEAKER_00: And I wish I had the answer immediately.
[24:48] SPEAKER_00: Okay, I do not have.
[24:52] SPEAKER_00: I'm.
[24:53] SPEAKER_00: I don't know. I Google it when I'm looking for my marketing team will kill me for not being able to answer that question.
[25:02] SPEAKER_01: Don't worry about it.
[25:03] SPEAKER_01: We'll put something on.
[25:04] SPEAKER_01: So that's great.
[25:05] SPEAKER_01: But it really has been great.
[25:06] SPEAKER_01: Great to meet you, Steven.
[25:08] SPEAKER_01: And I did read the report as you could tell.
[25:10] SPEAKER_01: And I really enjoyed it.
[25:13] SPEAKER_00: So well, thanks for having me.
[25:14] SPEAKER_00: I think this is a really important discussion.
