Steve McGuinness
Special to Niagara Now/The Lake Report

Another Labour Day has passed us by. Students are back to school and their teachers have returned to working in classrooms.

But a whole host of other Ontario workers will also be heading back into workplaces this fall, for reasons other than the changing seasons.

By now, the pandemic is just a distant speck in our rearview mirrors. At its outset, while essential (mainly blue-collar) workers were required to remain on the job, those in non-essential (mainly white-collar) jobs retreated back home.

That new flexibility to work remotely has persisted long after vaccines brought the virus under control.

Earlier this year, a number of larger employers — including those in the telecommunications, financial services and government sectors — advised employees they would be calling more workers back to their offices more frequently.

We now stand poised to witness an imminent and growing stampede of hundreds of thousands of workers returning to Ontario workplaces very soon.

What are the motives for this policy change from the employers’ perspective?

We might presume that they are performance management-related. Perhaps supervisory managers detect or perceive a drop-off in productivity with their reports’ slacking off at home?

But if you check the external and employee announcements outlining the changes, this concern is not being officially communicated. Supervisors have networked technology tools to monitor employee work output and measure work task completion.

Instead, the reasons cited focus on improving teamwork.

The driving presumption is that more frequent in-person interaction between team members will lead to better coordination and cohesion. But it could just as easily lead to more downtime spent socializing with distracted co-workers around the water cooler.

A myriad of collaborative software tools exist to connect teams working remotely. If more in-person meetings wind up getting scheduled, separating employees from their desks more often, personal productivity drop-offs may actually ensue.

What cost impacts will employers and employees confront? Increases for both seem likely.

Even employers who resisted reductions in their office footprint (for example, by deleasing excess space) will now have to reactivate workspaces that have been sitting dormant.

Employees working from home absorb their own costs of lighting, heating or cooling their workplaces and powering their equipment.

Although government unions sometimes negotiate compensation for these incremental costs, they were mainly unreimbursed to private sector workers. Home office expenses may have been tax-deductible to others, depending on their employment terms.

One of the resurgent winners will be lunch spots located close to workplaces, as workers replace midday meals they freshly prepared at home, without brown-bagging it.

Another winner will be landlords seeking commercial tenants, also benefiting investors in real estate investment trusts.

Losers will be residential property owners further distanced from the larger job centres, as employees resist spending more time and money physically commuting, which will place more strain on congested roadways and public transportation, also increasing carbon emissions and air pollution.

On the whole, identifying benefits to justify these added costs is difficult. But the change is happening nevertheless.

In his Bay Street career, Steve McGuinness was a senior advisor to large financial institutions and is now retired in NOTL. Send your personal financial planning questions to him at smcgfinplan@gmail.com.