The prevalence of telework under Covid-19 in Canada

Abstract

PurposeThis study investigates the determinants of teleworking before and during COVID-19 in Canada. It explores the extent of telework adoption across industrial sectors, as well as the long-term impacts of large-scale adoption of teleworking on urban travel demand and the dwindling demand for commercial real estate in downtowns.Design/methodology/approachUsing data from a survey of business establishments, this study employs data visualization techniques to illustrate how telework adoption evolved during the early stages of the COVID-19 lockdown. The study also estimates Logit models to explore the determinants of telework before and during the pandemic using a subsample from the Canadian labor force survey.FindingsThe study found that telework adoption reached a peak in March and April of 2020 when almost 40% of the workers in Canada were teleworking. Only 12% of employees reported teleworking before the pandemic. The adoption of teleworking was far more pronounced amongst firms that use information and communication technologies (ICTs) extensively. Teleworking appears to be far more frequent among university-educated (knowledge economy) workers.Practical implicationsKnowledge economy and highly educated workers, who switched to teleworking during the pandemic at higher rates than workers with less education, are more frequently employed in offices located in the urban core or downtowns. The drastic decline in commuting to the urban core via public transit and record low occupancy levels in downtown office towers suggests that, even if telework prevailed at levels much lower than those observed during March and April of 2020, landlords holding large portfolios of commercial real estate must prepare to cope with the lower demand for commercial real estate. This is especially significant when commercial leases come up for renewal in the next few years. In addition, governments struggling to address traffic congestion by spending hundreds of billions of dollars on transport and transit infrastructure might want to promote teleworking as a means of reducing travel demands and costly infrastructure expenditures.Social implicationsTeleworking has partially eroded the boundaries between work and home by enabling millions to continue being productive while working from home. However, teleworking would require new norms and rules to maintain a work-life balance. This change requires workers and employers to cooperate.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that explores the extent of telework adoption during COVID-19 in Canada and the determinants of telework adoption, presenting both employee and firm-level perspectives using Canada-wide representative data.