More than a few years ago, my first taste of corporate life unfolded in the polished confines of a high-rise office tower. An eager co-op student, I was ushered to a cubicle with stacks of binders and an hour or so later, worryingly found myself nodding off…
The doldrums of introductory materials aside, the experience proved enormously beneficial in terms of learning and growth, with much of the benefit stemming from professional and social interactions rooted in a common workspace. Today, by contrast, many students – the fortunate ones with jobs, have begun summer internships virtually, necessitated by COVID-19.
For governments, workspace redesign is long overdue. In 2012, an employee survey by the Government of British Columbia found that fewer than one-half of public servants identified the office (or cubicle) as their most productive work setting. Yet the inertia of bureaucratic culture has remained, reinforcing what Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg has termed the ‘busy bastard culture’ where being seen matters as much, if not more than work being done.
Of course, even before the Coronavirus, governments had begun to experiment with alternative arrangements such as remote working. Yet for most managers, there has come a point when career advancement becomes intertwined with sixty-hour work weeks mainly confined to offices typically located in Ottawa or a Provincial Capital. Sandberg’s quip aside (which captures the control penchant of many traditional senior leaders), the organizational value of human interaction and conversation also merits recognition.
There is also tremendous value in mentoring. Without a common office setting, students and new hires at any level are missing out on tacit knowledge of informal and social interactions, as well as the professional insights gathered from a structured workday. It is simply much easier to foster virtual teams from groups of people already known to one another – rather than creating them anew. This challenge is especially acute in government where remote working and virtual interactions have not been viewed as part of the mainstream culture.
The flip side is that younger workers are often more tech-savvy and seamless in balancing of online and in-person functionality, and such strengths can and must be leveraged in the quest for a ‘new normal.’ The strategic and human resource imperative for the public sector going forward will be to completely refashion the notion of a workspace in a manner that both encompasses and aligns virtual and real-time mechanisms (within a context of public and employee safety). Inter-disciplinary teams of digital, human resource and architectural skills are called for – as is Ministerial openness and support for such integrative efforts.
With virtual tendencies already engrained, technology companies are leading the way, with Twitter announcing that much of their workforce will permanently work from home. By the same token, Waterloo-based Open Text has indicated that much of their traditional office space is now obsolete. Yet even in the private realm challenges remain, as companies have invested millions into innovation labs and collaborative workspaces to encourage real-time interactions.
Accordingly, along with demographic dynamics, significant geographic and spatial quandaries will emerge for industry and government. As Katherine May addresses in her insightful commentary in Policy Options: ‘Long before the pandemic struck, questions had been raised as to why nearly 42 percent of federal workers are clustered in office towers in the National Capital Region…. Many predict it won’t be long before politicians will be asking why these home offices are in the nation’s capital. Why can’t those jobs be across the country?’
May and others suggest that now may be a critical inflection point for such questions and likeminded opportunities to innovate and adapt in confronting and in looking beyond COVID-19 (a phenomenon that Prime Minister Trudeau has already declared to be a permanent alteration to the world). As it does so, the Government of Canada will be setting the tone for the entire country.
In doing so, the rural dimension to workspace design is also crucially important, giving rise to matters of digital infrastructure and employment opportunities. The Government of Canada has rightfully recognized that its own dubious pledge of 2030 for ubiquitous high-speed broadband across rural dwellings is now even more unacceptable than when announced in 2019.
Once the worst impacts of COVID-19 have been contained and seizing upon the flexibility already displayed, a re-imagined public sector workplace awaits. Not many will miss the office cubicle that personifies an antiquated era of the past.
