TORONTO – Employees like Matt Fairbanks are one of the reasons the hospitality and catering industry is struggling to find workers even as the pandemic subsides.
The 34-year-old former bartender has gone from brewing in Toronto to selling software to restaurants for a Saskatchewan company, which he does remotely.
“I was always a bit out of the hospitality industry and the pandemic really showed me how vulnerable work and the instability of it all was,” he said in an interview.
Exhausting travel has been left behind, while additional flexibility has improved their work and family balance. The Fairbanks company allows employees to work from abroad for up to 90 days, take unlimited vacations and travel or work from anywhere in Canada.
“In fact, I have encouraged many of my friends in the restaurant industry to look at other options and also to change the way they do their lives.”
Remote work flourished during the pandemic, as companies temporarily closed their offices, but it has created a schism among Canadian workers. While 40 per cent of work in Canada can be done remotely, experts say, this means that 60 per cent of workers cannot access this benefit because they are required to be on site.
And this can create resentment and a reaction from workers considered essential, such as nurses, ambulance workers and retail employees, who were applauded during the pandemic but who may not realize the benefits of working remotely, he said. say change management expert Linda Duxbury. a senior management professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University, who has studied distance work for decades.
“The problem we will have here is that we will create two kinds of workers: those who have and those who do not,” he said in an interview.
Those who can work remotely, especially professionals such as accountants, lawyers, and technology workers, prospered economically during confinement, while those who were forced to work on-site were often overworked or lost their jobs altogether. in the midst of reduced capacity and companies that closed permanently.
This second group was told they were valued and important “and now they don’t feel important,” Duxbury said.
The ability to work remotely has been a key moment in the history of work, although its application is generally limited to knowledge workers, said Erica Pimentel, an assistant professor of accounting at Queen’s Smith School of Business. University.
“So when 60 per cent of the workforce is excluded from this massive change, obviously this will have some implications for society,” he said, because it is very inconsistent in how it affects the general population.
Duxbury warns that the jury is not yet working remotely, or what she calls “forced labor from home.” Constantly listen to companies looking for good practices and examples of what others are doing. But he said it’s too early to assess the style of work, as everyone is experimenting with different models.
“Remote work during the pandemic was a big giant experiment. Now let’s move on to the second experiment, tracking, which is hybrid work,” he said.
The adequacy of distance work depends a lot on the work. It is not conducive to brainstorming, socializing, training, mentoring, incorporation, team building, and customer satisfaction.
And while people working from home invest many more hours, estimated at an additional four to ten hours a week, the data suggests that productivity has not increased, Duxbury said.
“Just because we’ve worked 100 percent remotely over the last two years doesn’t mean it’s a sustainable model for a lot of people and a lot of jobs that will move forward.”
Despite the drawbacks, remote work is increasingly favored, especially by Generation Z, digital natives who have always had access to the internet and social media, Pimentel said.
This cohort is coming of age and joins the workforce with new attitudes about employers ’duty to them and how different parts of their lives fit in, which is different from millennials, Generation X and the baby boomers, who in many cases are now the bosses.
“And so there’s this generational mismatch between bosses and their employees and everyone is unhappy.”
Many companies would prefer employees to return to the office full-time, but face stiff opposition from workers who like to work from home, Duxbury said. Faced with record job offers amid decades of low unemployment rates and threats of resignations, employers have been forced to be flexible.
This means that employees with the required skill can negotiate better working conditions than someone without those skills.
Technology workers, who accounted for the majority of three per cent of Canadians working remotely before the pandemic, are now among those in the driver’s seat.
The demands of working remotely have gone from being the exception to the rule because it is very difficult to compete for talent, said Kristina McDougall, founder and president of technology research firm Artemis.
“Unless there’s an absolute reason you need to be physically present, like you’re working on a robot or you need to be in the building, most organizations need to be flexible,” he said.
The growth of distance work has also transformed where companies get their workforce because people can work anywhere and not have to be close to the company headquarters. This expands the jobs that an individual may consider, but also offers companies a wider group of candidates, as well as greater competition with other potential contenders.
McDougall believes the move to remote work is permanent for sectors such as technology because the pandemic has shown that organizations can build things with people working remotely.
“You can’t put genius back in the bottle. People now find it trivial that they have to go to an office every day.”