An independent survey of 20,000 Canadian Public Servants has confirmed what most of them have been saying since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — they want to continue working from home if their duties allow it.
Co-founder of Agile Work Solutions, Meredith Thatcher said the majority of Public Servants believed their home environment was ideal for what she calls “heads-down focus work, the deep concentration needed for writing, thinking and analysing”.
“Only 20 per cent prefer the office for that kind of work,” Ms Thatcher said.
“The rest want to use the office to see people — meetings, mentoring, training, collaborating or socialising.”
She said the pandemic had created a new workplace strategy, barriers were dropping, city centre headquarters were morphing into central hubs with a network of satellite offices.
Senior bureaucrat, Stéphan Déry said the pandemic, which he called the “world’s largest telework pilot project”, accelerated the shift.
He said it handed the Government an unheard-of opportunity to rethink the boundaries and physical work space for Public Servants, which could drastically change the make-up of real estate holdings.
Mr Déry (pictured), who has spent much of a 30-year career managing Federal real estate, is the Government’s point person for determining how much and what kind of office space the 103 Departments need for the 267,000 Federal employees across Canada.
He said that as Canada’s largest employer and landlord, the Government had a real estate portfolio of 6.9 million square metres, some leased and the rest Crown-owned.
“Before the pandemic, all that office space was occupied 60 per cent of the time,” Mr Déry said.
“That means, on any given day, 40 per cent of desks sat empty with workers off sick, on vacation, at meetings or working remotely.
“Those occupancy rates offer plenty of opportunity to reconfigure and reduce office space, and a shift to a hybrid workforce could shrink demand even more,” he said.
Ms Thatcher said the pandemic was forcing the biggest transformation in allocating the physical space of the office in 75 years.
She said the Government was now wrestling with how to determine the right mix of remote and in-office work, including walled-in spaces, cubicles and open offices.
“We’ve completely upended how we think about allocating space and how much space we need.
“It’s not as easy as it used to be because we’re re-imagining and recreating how we think about, imagine, create, size and fit up space,” Ms Thatcher said.
Ottawa, 24 November 2021
