More than two years after the COVID-19 pandemic, most Canadians have returned to their pre-pandemic working conditions, but for one in ten employees, the work-from-home lifestyle remains.
that’s the last of a new Ipsos surveywhich found that three quarters of Canadian workers have returned to their original workplace.
“Most of us are back to our pre-COVID routines,” Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos, said in an interview with Global News.
“So it’s not completely back to normal, but it’s pretty close to what it was before the pandemic.”
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More than half of those surveyed, 58 percent, told Ipsos that they couldn’t do their jobs remotely. Another 23 percent said they were not given the option to continue working from home.
However, some respondents wanted to return to the office. According to the survey, 15 percent of workers felt they were actually more productive in the workplace and said they preferred to work in person.
Only 12 percent wanted to see their colleagues, while 7 percent wanted to separate work and family life; another four percent wanted to escape from their families.
“There are other people we interviewed who basically said, ‘Look, I missed the office. I miss my colleagues. I don’t feel like I’m as productive working from home. I feel like I’m missing out on that workplace vibe as I understood it before. So I’m going back,’” Bricker said.
But 12 percent of those surveyed continue to work entirely from home, despite working in an office before the pandemic. Another eight percent spend some days in the office and others at home, opting for a hybrid model, they told Ipsos. This was not their norm before the pandemic, they said.
Time, money and work-life balance are some of the deciding factors for those who continue to work, at least partially, from home. More than 50 percent cited those reasons as being integral to their continued work-from-home lifestyle.
Just 50 per cent of Canadians who work from home said travel time is also an important factor, while a third of those surveyed said working from home is happier, less stressful and more productive.
Other reasons Canadians chose to work from home included feeling unsafe returning to the office, finding it easier to care for pets or children, or because their employer closed the physical office.
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While they are a minority, the fact that one in 10 Canadians continues to work from home could spell trouble for downtown infrastructure, Bricker said.
“That’s like taking a day off of all the economic activity that used to take place downtown as a result of this workplace adjustment,” he explained.
“And if that happens, it’s going to raise some serious questions … (for) those services that we’ve built in our inner cities to be able to deal with the level of workforce that we used to have.”
However, only time will tell if the entrenched work-from-home contingent will really make its mark in inner-city cores across the country, Bricker added.
“We’ll have to wait a little while to see where this goes.”
Global News Ipsos exclusive surveys are protected by copyright. Information and/or data may only be rebroadcast or republished with full and proper credit and attribution to “Global News Ipsos”. This survey was conducted between June 9 and 13, 2022, with a sample of 1,001 Canadians over the age of 18 interviewed online. The accuracy of Ipsos online surveys is measured by a credibility interval. This survey is accurate to within ±3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, if all Canadians over the age of 18 had been surveyed.
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.