First, they forced office workers to stay home, and we became acquainted with Google Teams, comfortably, in athleisure wear.
Then they told some of us to come back, but only sometimes, and we had to remember how to wear pants just to have Teams meetings in half-empty offices.
Now, some employers in both the private and public sector are mandating that many workers have to come back full time.
As a growing number of Canadians once again find themselves cramming public transit and clogging highways to get to their workplaces, you might be wondering: is remote work gone for good?
“It’s very hard to see employees winning this particular battle, because the leverage really belongs to the employer,” said Opeyemi Akanbi, an assistant professor in communications at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative School who studies work culture.
She said that while it was considered an employee’s market during the pandemic — where workers were in demand and had more power — it has recently swung the other way. In July, for instance, the Canadian economy lost more than 40,000 jobs, according to Statistics Canada.
“Employees are going to have to be policy-takers instead of policy-makers,” Akanbi said.
A recent Angus Reid survey suggests the majority of workers would prefer a fully remote or hybrid workplace, but many employers are opting to have employees in the office more often.
More Canadians commuting
A new Statistics Canada report last week suggests that might indeed be the case, as the number of employed Canadians commuting to work rose for the fourth year in a row, reaching 82.6 per cent in May 2025, up 1.3 percentage points from May 2024.
Conversely, the proportion of employed people mostly working from home went down, and hybrid workers are increasingly spending more time in the workplace than at home, the agency said.
Meanwhile, July survey data from the Angus Reid Institute suggests three in five Canadians would prefer to work mostly from home, the majority would prefer a schedule that allows for some remote work and half of those who were ordered back to the office more days a week weren’t happy about it.
It’s important to remember that for most people, remote work was a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and not widespread policy changes driven by the companies themselves, said Akanbi. So in that sense, what we’re seeing now is more of a return to the baseline, she added.
- Cross Country Checkup is asking: Should employers be able to force workers back into the office? What is lost when we work from home? Leave your comment here and we may read it or call you back for Sunday’s show
But Allison Venditti, a Toronto-based human resources expert and founder of Moms at Work, an advocacy group for working mothers, says she thinks we’ll continue to see a push and pull between bigger workplaces and employees — especially as a lot of mid-sized and smaller businesses continue to embrace remote work.
“I don’t think it’s gone. I don’t think it’s dead,” Venditti said. “I think people are going to demand it.”
Productivity and well-being
With the spread of COVID-19 in 2020, the way many Canadians worked suddenly changed as many organizations had to pivot employees to work from home. Between April 2020 and June 2021, 30 per cent of employees surveyed by Statistics Canada said they performed most of their duties from home, compared to four per cent in 2016.
But as the Conference Board of Canada noted in a 2021 report, while this transition may have seemed sudden, remote work was already being accelerated in some workplaces, especially in the technology sector.
Between 2019 and 2021, labour productivity across all industries increased by 3.7 per cent, according to Statistics Canada labour force survey data.
At the same time, Statscan’s Time Use Survey found no difference in the amount of time spent on paid work between those who worked in an office and those who teleworked from home. But those who teleworked from home did find themselves on average with about an extra hour per day to spend on other activities.
Telework was associated with better work-life balance, less time pressure and more time spent eating and sleeping.
But the decision to bring workers back into the office isn’t driven by data, Akanbi said.
“It’s more about employers being able to maintain control of how work is done.”
Companies have cited a number of benefits to in-office work, including mentorship opportunities and better collaboration.
Having staff in the office gives a level of comfort to management, explained Henry Goldbeck, the president of Goldbeck Recruiting Inc. in Vancouver. It prevents them from imagining that their staff might not be fully engaged, motivated and productively working on clearly defined tasks and objectives, Goldbeck said.
But, he added, “having employees back in the office will not automatically fix those things.”
“Remote work is not dead, but the trend is still slowly swinging from the COVID era,” he said.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is ordering the province’s 60,000 public servants back to the office full time starting in January. CBC’s Mike Crawley has the details.
Improving workplace culture?
A number of private sector companies have recently announced returns to an in-person work model, including several Canadian banks, as well as Rogers and Starbucks.
In a July statement, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol wrote that working in-person allows employees to “share ideas more effectively, creatively solve hard problems, and move much faster.”
In August, the Ontario government announced that its public servants will be required to work in the office five days a week starting in January. Premier Doug Ford said he believes government employees are more productive in the office.
“How do you mentor someone over a phone? You can’t. You’ve got to look at them eye-to-eye,” Ford said.
In Ottawa, all municipal employees will be required to work five days a week in the office starting in the new year, with improving workplace culture cited as the main driver.
Federal government employees currently have to work at least three in-office days per week, and new data from the Angus Reid Institute suggests they’re not eager to add more. Fifty-three per cent of public sector workers surveyed said they fully opposed a full-time return to in-office work.
“Productivity was so much better,” a worker commented on the Canada Public Servants subreddit on Tuesday, recalling the days before they were called back to the office. “I was doing more than I have ever been able to do, the work was needed, and I was picking up slack from others. Almost no sick days needed, too.”
Venditti calls the broader return to offices “bad HR,” noting that remote work is especially beneficial for workers with disabilities and for anyone with a family or in any kind of caregiving role.
“I don’t want to hear anything else about promoting work-life balance, if companies aren’t willing to work for this,” she said.
She also thinks we’re going to see a rise in unionization over the next few years as workers become more angry. Already, several unions are fighting the Ontario government’s mandate, including the Ontario Nurses Association, the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
Akanbi says at the end of the day, the average worker doesn’t have much power in the situation.
“Maybe we’re going to see people start their own business because they’re so upset,” she said. “Or maybe they’re going to discover that they have to suck it up and go back to work.”
