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Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | |
REMOTE WORK
Call of the wild
Mandates, shmandates. It appears more people are returning to the office because of a new work-related form of FOMO
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IT’S BEEN ESPECIALLY tricky to keep track of what’s happening in the return-to-office (RTO) file this year. On the one hand, unless you’re a Canadian public servant, the fight over RTO mandates was a last year thing, and management seems to have softened the hardline stance on getting back in the office.
Yet on the other hand, offices are now more full than they’ve been since 2019, so fewer and fewer companies are thinking of cutting office space. Could it be that, despite all the groaning, people really did miss their offices, at least a little bit?
Dubbing it “RTO FOMO”, there’s some evidence to suggest that part of what’s driving people back into offices is a desire to stay connected ― or at least not miss out on all the things going on there.
“RTO FOMO…is now a thing, especially among younger workers,” wrote Hailey Mensik, who spoke to career coaches who reported a large number of younger clients who felt that remote work meant “missing opportunities, being overlooked and feeling sort of unintentionally disadvantaged.”
Totally contrary to the prevailing narrative about flexibility, about half of Gen Z workers in one survey said they get the best quality of life when they work in an office. Some, added career coach Leah Farmer, are starting to spend more days in-office than they’re required to, and are seeing career benefits from it.
“Just being around people, not being in my house alone ― it really feels better at the end of the day,” one 22-year-old office worker told NPR. And yes, the bosses have noticed. “In the context of returning to the office, FOMO can be a powerful motivator,” wrote Shreeya Thakur. “Getting FOMO is a powerful psychological phenomenon that can be leveraged to encourage employees to return to the office.”
“Sometimes, a crucial or important discussion is had in the office that isn’t relayed to employees working remotely,” observed Sophie O’Brien, founder of Pollen Careers. “It can stall productivity or leave people feeling out of the loop, which can reinforce that fear of missing out.”
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ENTREPRENEURSHIP
A slim but temporary edge
Thousands of Canadian startups have gone through business accelerator or incubator programs. But do they really work?
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IF YOU PAY attention to the small business or startup world, you’ve seen accelerator programs and incubators bandied about. Regarded by many as springboards to prosperity, companies often line up to compete for slots, and the programs can attract big money from sponsors and public institutions.
But do they work?
A new report by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) looked at that question by putting forth an effort to quantify the accelerator/incubator advantage.
The answer, it appears, is yes… sort of. According to ISED, its analysis reveals a positive correlation between business accelerator and incubator (BAI) support and business performance. “During the year a company receives assistance from BAI, its employment tends to be 14 per cent higher than that of a similar non-BAI company, while its revenue is higher by 13 per cent.”
The big qualifier to that, however, is the advantage is short lived. In the year after being in an accelerator, the revenue advantage falls away, while the employment advantage remains.
“Given the potential for these outsized benefits to the economy, governments are keen to sustain the growth of high-potential Canadian startups,” the report said. “Policy makers are interested in building out a strong and competitive pipeline of scalable companies and, in service of this objective, have provided significant public support to Canadian BAIs.”
But not everyone’s buying it. Entrepreneur and philanthropist Jim Balsillie, a noted critic of the BAI model, told The Logic that, “Beside the obvious fact that ISED should not be evaluating the effectiveness of their own programs, this report conflates correlation with causality,” and suggested the findings might simply be “a justification for ISED to keep funding for the incubators.”
Others, however, believed the report validated the service that accelerators and incubators are offering, with a senior vice president at Communitech, Angela Larraguibel, stating the report showed that BAIs were “critical to helping founders start, grow and succeed.”
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Terry Talks: We’re all hungry for better answers. But first, we must learn to ask the right questions
| In his groundbreaking 2014 book, now updated and expanded for 2024’s 10th Anniversary Edition, journalist and innovation expert Warren Berger shows that one of the most powerful forces for igniting change in business and in our daily lives is a simple, under-appreciated tool — questioning. So why are we often reluctant to ask, “Why?” | | | |
ECONOMY
Working harder, feeling poorer
Despite best efforts, three-quarters of workers feel that inflation has cancelled out all their hard work
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THERE’S NO QUESTION about it: the last few years have been tough for most people. Work has undergone far-reaching, transformative changes, and many would agree that they’ve had to work harder as firms try to squeeze as much efficiency and productivity as they can out of their teams.
At the same time, the cost of everything has gone up, and even if inflation seems to be under control (for the moment at least) ― that experience is leaving a lasting sting on workers who feel like all that hard work has been for nothing.
Seventy-four per cent of workers surveyed by WalletHub said they feel like inflation has wiped out their hard work over the last three years, even if two-thirds of them report that their financial situation is better this year than last. In simple terms, people feel like they’re working harder for the same dough (Air Canada pilots now excluded).
And they’re not happy about it. It helps explain the bad economic vibes ― everyone feels that they’ve knuckled down for three years, nose to the grindstone, only to look up and see that you can’t buy lunch for less than twenty bucks.
If nothing else, it’s been a good lesson in the psychological reflections of economic metrics. No matter what the numbers say, when people feel ripped off, they feel ripped off.
Inflation does tend to work this way, leaving long-term scars. Older folks in Canada talk about the nasty mortgage rates of the 1980s like the Battle of Stalingrad. 2020s inflation has seemed to have the biggest psychological impact on people at the start of their careers, who have the least cushion to lean on, giving them battle wounds of their own.
“It’s different this time around. Not that older people are immune to this by any means,” analyst Ted Rossman told Reckon, “but it’s become so difficult for young people.”
Do you deserve a big raise to remedy all this? Maybe or maybe not. Maybe it’s all in your head.
“One of the big problems with inflation is that it messes with people’s minds,” commented Temple University’s Michael A. Leeds. “People have an inflated sense of their own worth. ‘Inflation is evil because it erodes my hard-earned gains’ ― unfortunately, that is often not the case. The raise we get is often simply part and parcel of broader inflation.”
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WORKSPACE
All’s not quiet on the office front
The world is getting louder. Much louder. And our workplaces are not immune
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A FEW WEEKS ago, someone wrote into the Toronto Star’s advice column with a complaint. “I can’t get any work done in my office and I’m extremely frustrated,” they said, noting that the place was just noisy. “I can’t focus or concentrate! What do I do?”
In the latest London Inc. magazine issue, we spoke with Rodney Lover of atWork Office Furniture and design consultant Paula Burns, who understand the writer’s plight. Thanks to a penchant for sleek, open office design and the plethora of hard surfaces it brings along, the modern office, they said, is indeed a noisy place. And people now want to quiet it down. “Joe’s a loud talker, Mary’s a loud typer,” joked Lover. It’s enough to drive you crazy ― or at least make you start searching for solutions.
It’s becoming increasingly commonplace to bring in acoustic consultants when designing offices, and interior designers like Burns are now incorporating sound suppression devices and techniques into the process. “I do a lot of art-as-acoustics,” Burns explained.
Look around the next time you enter a new office, and you might see large felt-looking panels on the walls or overhead. They’re partly there for design, partly there because they help absorb sound in spaces that are echoey and loud. “It really does make a difference,” Burns said, noting that she sees things like this being installed in “the majority of offices now.”
What else is it doing to the modern office? Lover noted that you can thank rising noise levels for the futuristic-looking “quiet pods” that are popping up in new offices; he said they’re even selling pods big enough for full meetings and which are often “much less expensive than building a room.”
Of course, another solution is to just go back to good ol’ cubicle farm of the 1980s. But don’t look for that to happen anytime soon. As Burns noted, with some planning the right devices, it’s a manageable problem ― and the price of the sleek office look. “Everybody loves the look,” she observed, “without realizing what it does to the sound.”
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