Back to business

How ready is Canada for a return to the workplace?

Recovery in the post-COVID world requires an understanding of the new expectations for physical, emotional, financial, and digital safety in the workplace. We asked Canadian organizations how they felt about reopening their doors in the face of these unique challenges.

Assessing Canada’s readiness to reopen

As governments throughout the country begin loosening measures and reopening economies, organizations are starting to plan the safest way to return to their physical workplaces. But key questions remain, not just around how ready organization are for this transition, but also about what the future of work looks likes in the wake of COVID-19. Will a return to the workplace be a return to normality, or does the future of work need a rethinking?

Our five key 'Back to business' pillars have helped organizations assess their recommencement strategy:

Protecting employee health and well-being

Providing a safe physical workplace and ecosystem

Effectively managing their workforce

Aligning to government guidelines

Creating a cross-functional command centre

We asked over 300 business leaders, in various industries across Canada, to perform a self-assessment around their readiness to try and understand how prepared Canadian organizations are to reopen their physical workplace. The respondents included organizations that ranged from small organizations, to large-scale enterprises.

Organizations across all industries ranked themselves as having a high level of comfort in aligning to government guidelines and protecting employee health and well-being. In general, those surveyed prioritized each area as follows:

	Area	Green	Amber	Red
	Aligning to government guidelines
	Protecting employee health and well-being
	Effectively managing their workforce
	Providing a safe physical workplace and ecosystem
	Creating a cross-functional command centre

Green indicates a strong feeling of readiness. Amber indicates readiness, but with more work left to be done, and red indicates considerable preparation is still required.

We asked organizations how aware they were of the legislative requirements of reopening, as well as their confidence in being able to effectively measuring and monitoring compliance with these government guidelines and regulations. The combination of these two areas—classed as aligning to government guidelines—averaged the highest readiness level (88 percent) across all organizations. Among the industries surveyed, consumer business and transportation, manufacturing, and government and public services all felt they were well prepared to aligning with government guidelines when reopening their workplace.

Organizations that operate in multiple jurisdictions are likely to face more complexity with varying government guidelines, meaning organizations will need to balance total compliance with providing a consistent experience for employees. Employees returning to physical workplaces will expect it to be safe, and that employers are taking the appropriate steps to protect them. It’s also important to note that some industries may be less attuned to remote work, for example, remote work may require changes in worker education, performance management, organizational structures, and cultural beliefs or stigmas around not being in the office.

In contrast to the strong levels of readiness in aligning to government guidelines, organizations didn’t demonstrate as much readiness in effectively managing their workforce. When asked if they had adequately explored training options for new skills and requirements, as well as other strategies to ensure their workforce thrives in the future, respondents only felt 63 percent prepared. During the initial phase of crisis response, some organizations began to review where digital technologies, automation, and AI could make work safer, faster, better, and more innovative. The drop off in readiness to explore training options for new skills and strategies could indicate organizations are not necessarily considering continued investment in new technology, instead focusing their recommencement strategies on the immediate challenges of reopening. We can see in general, readiness to effectively manage the workforce (Figure 1) fluctuates a lot more from industry-to-industry.

COVID-19 has highlighted the necessity for organizations to cultivate a more symbiotic relationship between their workforce and new technologies. For many, these tools have kept teams connected and facilitated, to some extent, continued operations during this crisis. In the future, organizations should continue to cultivate an increasingly tech-savvy workforce and will need to re-engage and rethink their work, workforce, and workplace priorities and opportunities. As their workforce becomes more driven by technology, organizations will also need to ensure data privacy and cybersecurity measures also evolve.

During the recovery phase, organizations now have a unique opportunity to rapidly assess and evaluate their earlier workforce strategies and response priorities. Organizations must find a way to review their way of working, accelerating towards future work models that both address short-term operational requirements, as well as longer term strategic vision. While many may be tempted to dismiss the need for change or imagine recovery as a return to the recent past, organizations that return to their old ways of working may find their competitors have used this period to re-imagine their workforce, positioning themselves to thrive in the future.

Almost all the industries we survey demonstrated low levels of readiness to create a cross-functional command centre (Figure 2), only life science and health care organizations felt strongly prepared. A command centre can equip an organization with data, metrics, and key performance indicators that can ensure the appropriate level of monitoring and compliance during this time of recovery. It can also help ensure preparedness and responsiveness in the case of future waves of the virus.