Fewer Londoners working from home as employers change tune

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After peaking during the pandemic years, remote work is becoming a rarer reality for Canadians, Londoners included, with the number of people working from home locally now accounting for less than one in five workers.

According to Statistics Canada, in May of this year, 19 per cent of all working-age Londoners worked mostly from home or had a job that offered a hybrid model, a drop from the 24.5 per cent of people who did so in May 2021.

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That’s still considerably higher than before the pandemic, when only about six per cent of Londoners did remote work, but only enough to place London 11th among 15 metropolitan areas analyzed by the federal agency. That list was topped by Ottawa–Gatineau (34.2 per cent), Oshawa (25.6 per cent), and Toronto (24.7 per cent).

Several factors are contributing to the overall decline in remote work, a phenomenon largely spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns and social distancing measures aimed at reducing the spread of the virus.

Key among those factors is employers’ desire to bring workers back to the office, said Geraint Harvey, a professor at Western University’s Dan department of management and organizational studies.

“There is this, I think, flawed belief that employees are more productive when they’re in the office, and certainly management feel they have greater control over workers when they can see what they do,” he said.

“So, there is now this kind of organizational pressure to get people back in.”

In 2022, a survey by the Elgin Middlesex Oxford Workforce Planning and Development Board already showed discrepancies between what workers and employers wanted in terms of remote work.

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While 94 per cent of employees said they would prefer to work entirely or partially from home, only 57 per cent of area companies were considering making that transition.

“Not all but some employees actually want to return to work,” Harvey said. “For some, there is this idea that the line between your personal life, social activities and work and your family become blurred as work starts to leak into your home life.”

London’s economic composition may also help explain the difference in remote work locally compared to other Canadian centres, said Vincent Hardy, a senior analyst with Statistics Canada.

He said three sectors lead the way with the higher proportion of workers doing remote work: professional scientific and technical services; finance, insurance and real estate; and public administration.

While those types of jobs are also in London, they represent a smaller proportion of the region’s workforce, where health care, manufacturing and retail also play an important role.

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“Not all workers in those industries necessarily work from home, but areas where there’s a strong concentration of those industries typically have higher rates of work from home,” Hardy said.

“So, kind of the composition of jobs in the area plays a role in that regard, to kind of explain some of the differences.”

Harvey, the Western University professor, said it is hard to predict where remote work will trend in the coming years, but noted the perception about this type of arrangement is now different after the pandemic.

“There is an expectation, especially with younger workers, that this is possible. And there is sort of a baked-in expectation that there will be some element of hybrid work,” he said.

“There are some jobs that simply can’t accommodate that, like if you work in manufacturing or health care . . . but will we go back down to where we were before the pandemic? I’m not entirely sure. I suspect we probably will level off a little bit higher than that.”

jjuha@postmedia.com

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