Latest news with #returnToOffice
Globe and Mail
10 hours ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Bank staff play musical chairs with desks as return-to-office orders squeeze space
Bank employees are battling for desks and grappling with limited space in corporate towers, a situation that is likely to become even more heated as three of Canada's largest lenders barrel ahead with stricter return-to-office requirements. As employees at Royal Bank of Canada RY-T, Bank of Montreal BMO-T and Bank of Nova Scotia BNS-T will soon need to spend four days a week working in person with their teams, the banks could be forced to expand their real-estate footprints. Already, the scramble for space in Toronto has spurred a game of musical chairs at the big banks' corporate offices. Some employees say they are arriving at the office before 7 a.m. to secure a desk. Those that make it into the office at 9 a.m. either find they are unable to book a desk, or that the spot they secured has been taken over by a colleague, according to sources who work in the financial core. Those who arrive later are punted into meeting rooms or the cafeteria. In some cases, they are forced to seek out desk space in the bank's other office buildings or floors, separated from their teams. The Globe and Mail spoke with eight sources who are not being identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. John Turley-Ewart: Banks, if you want staff back in offices, give them proper offices to go back to In recent months, RBC, BMO and Scotiabank informed staff of the four-day mandate effective Sept. 15 – with Scotiabank levying the requirement on employees specifically in the Greater Toronto Area. The three banks are among Canada's largest employers, and set the tone for expectations around corporate culture and in-office attendance. Other lenders and major companies will likely follow their lead – driving more competition for corporate office buildings. 'The challenge is, if you're the fifth or the sixth bank to announce a return to the office four days a week, most of the best quality space for your employees will be spoken for at that point,' Colliers Canada senior vice president Nicholas Kendrew said in an interview. 'Then it's a case of working with what's left over.' The problem, though, is that high-quality towers are already nearing capacity of the newer towers with the best amenities, said Carl Gomez, head of market analytics at CoStar, a commercial real-estate information provider. 'The brand-new buildings are fully leased, and there is very little availability,' he said. Until more space is leased, staff are warning the space shortages will impede their ability to work efficiently from the office. Some employees are working at desks that do not have monitors, computer mice or keyboards, according to three sources. In some cases, two different teams share a floor of a building, alternating days in the office each week, according to two sources. Once four-day mandates take effect, one of those teams will need to be moved to a different space. With the stricter office mandates taking effect on Sept. 15, leaders at RBC and Scotiabank have told staff that they are searching for more office space to help address the lack of workspace, according to three of the sources. RBC said it has used a desk booking system since before the pandemic to provide employees with flexibility and choose a workspace that best suits their needs, depending on the day. 'As we prepare for in-office expectations in September, we're working closely with teams that may have real estate capacity issues to understand their needs and determine potential solutions,' RBC spokesperson Gillian McArdle said in a statement. Canadian employers take an increasingly harder line on returning to the office Shortly after Scotiabank notified staff of the new rules, it sent out an additional memo to certain teams informing them that the requirement would not apply to them until the bank secured more office space, according to one of the sources. 'In September, some of our teams who have the space to do so will increase the number of days they work onsite to four days, and others who are currently constrained by real estate availability will evolve to work onsite more as space allows it, with the goal of reaching four days onsite overtime across the bank,' Scotiabank spokesperson Katie Raskina said in a statement. BMO spokesperson Jeff Roman said in a statement that employees will work from the office four days a week 'where existing real estate capacity permits.' The banks are not the only companies dealing with the lack of space. A major non-bank financial institution that is bringing employees back to the office three days a week recently discovered that it has one desk for every two employees, Mr. Kendrew said. Canada's federal housing agency is also trying to accommodate a requirement to return to the office three days a week at its downtown Toronto office. Staff at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. are struggling to find a desk in Toronto, according to one source. 'We are currently reviewing our office space options in Toronto in order to accommodate our return to office directive,' CMHC spokesperson Brie Martin said in a statement. For the banks, the challenge is accessing the highest quality office space: newly built office towers that are close to the city's major transit hub and offer state-of-the-art infrastructure and amenities. That includes the first CIBC Square skyscraper, which serves as Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce's headquarters, Scotiabank's new office tower in the Bay Adelaide Centre and Toronto-Dominion Bank's TD Terrace. Data from commercial real-estate firms such as Colliers, CBRE and CoStar show tenants are shunning older office towers, even if they are close to Toronto's main train station. The availability rate – or the amount of space that is being marketed and available for lease – in CIBC's old headquarters at Commerce Court was 28.3 per cent as of mid-July. The older TD Centre office complex had an availability rate of 15.1 per cent, and Royal Bank Plaza office complex had an availability rate of 14.7 per cent, according to CoStar data. Scotiabank's previous main office at the red granite Scotia Plaza had an availability rate of 6.3 per cent. In contrast, the availability rate in the glitzy new buildings at CIBC Square and Scotiabank's new office tower was 0.5 per cent, according to CoStar data. TD Terrace had an availability rate of 4.9 per cent. The office vacancy crisis: Can older buildings compete? Overall, the availability rate for downtown Toronto offices was 14.9 per cent, which is about three times higher than prior to the start of the pandemic. Banks are now also competing with other large tenants looking for space. Fidelity Investments Canada ULC recently signed a large lease in TD Centre to accommodate a larger workforce for the investment fund manager, according to its spokesperson, Chris Pepper. Fidelity will vacate its current space near a major shopping mall and move into seven floors amounting to about 150,000 square feet next year. Technology has also become an important variable. Tenants now may need more closed-door office space now that video calls have become the norm. As well, office footprints have been shrinking with tech companies and other employers embracing open-concept offices. By 2019, the space asked for could be as small as 75 square feet per person at a co-working office or open concept office compared with 200 square feet per person in previous years. 'To get people back into the office after having been working from home for so long, it's going to be very tricky to get people to come back from their own workspace, to come in and sit on top of the employee or colleague next to them,' Mr. Kendrew said. As for new builds, there is little appetite to build more office skyscrapers in downtown Toronto. The cost of construction has increased since the pandemic, and investors are less interested in providing capital for a new tower with space still available to lease. A slew of new office space has also already flooded the market. Over the past few years, at least 11 downtown office towers have opened including the 49-storey CIBC Square and the 47-storey TD Terrace. TD and CIBC, which do not have a four-day mandate, did not comment on whether they plan to move to one. TD said its focus is to 'meet the needs of our colleagues and enable them to do their best work,' spokesperson Meghan Thomas said in a statement. In 2021, employees moved into the first of two towers at CIBC Square near Toronto's Union Station. CIBC said it plans to start moving into the second tower in 2026 and that it has sufficient space. 'We continue to have the space needed for our team and our model is working as evidenced by our business momentum and strong employee feedback,' CIBC spokesperson Tom Wallis said in a statement.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
More men are returning to the office. Here's why that matters for women.
The return to office is in full swing, but you might notice more men around the water cooler. According to the Department of Labor, men are returning to the office in greater numbers than women. In 2024, 29% of employed men reported working from home, down from 34% the previous year. Approximately 36% of women worked from home last year, unchanged from 2023. What's behind these numbers? It's likely a result of return-to-office initiatives in male-dominated industries like tech, Cory Stahle, senior economist at Indeed, told Yahoo Finance. Women accounted for only about a quarter of computer and mathematical jobs in 2024, according to the data. For some roles, like computer programmers and computer hardware engineers, the share is even lower — 17.8% and 14.3% — respectively. 'Many of these return-to-office efforts are coming at a time when demand for workers in male-dominated industries has weakened, giving employers the upper hand,' Stahle said. As for the unbudging number of women working remotely over that two-year period, there could be an explanation for that finding as well, according to Stahle. Female-dominated fields such as private education and health services, leisure and hospitality, and state and local government have been less affected by return-to-work mandates, he said. 'Many of the jobs in these industries are already in-person roles.' Obstacle for gender equity Whether women are trying to move up or break into fields where office time is required, the trend away from remote arrangements could have far-reaching repercussions for gender equity. Here's why: Nearly 9 in 10 CEOs said in a 2024 survey that they 'will reward employees who make an effort to come into the office with favorable assignments, raises, or promotions.' That could also play out in the gender wage gap that has persisted across industries for decades. Last year, women earned an average of 85% of what men earned, according to Pew Research Center. Will the pay gap get worse if in-office attendance is a prerequisite for pay bumps? "In theory, remote work can be viewed as either a positive or negative amenity: It may offer greater scheduling flexibility, enhancing work-life balance, but it may also limit access to face-to-face mentoring and raise concerns about potential career growth penalties,' said Zoë Cullen, a lead researcher for a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study on remote work. We do know that roughly 8 in 10 CEOs envision a full return to the office in the next three years, and many of those making it mandatory have threatened employees with termination if they fail to follow the company's return-to-office mandate. So far, the types of jobs being hit by these mandates have been well-paying, white-collar roles, Stahle said. 'If a worker can't or chooses not to return to the office and loses their higher-paying job as a result, that will have clear implications for the pay gap and the economy,' he said. The arc of remote work Remote work has been facing into the wind all year. Organizations that describe their workplace environment as remote shrank dramatically between 2024 and 2025, according to a study by Payscale. Despite the pressure, plenty of workers, not just women, are standing their ground on full-blown return-to-office attendance and are willing to take a pay cut to hold on to some flexibility. A majority of job candidates would accept a pay cut to work remotely, according to a new survey by Criteria Corp. On average, employees are willing to accept a 25% pay cut for partly or fully remote roles, according to the NBER study. All that said, the balance of power has shifted. In 2023, when workers had the upper hand in a tight labor market, the odds of being penalized for not coming into the office were low, or in many cases, not realistic for employers, who were well aware that workplace flexibility was one way that they could hang on to and lure skilled workers. Return-to-office demands by many tech-oriented employers, including Amazon, Google, and Meta, hit a fever pitch earlier this year. 'In a softening labor market, employers have more leverage to demand in-office work,' Marc Cenedella, founder of Ladders Inc., a career site for jobs that pay $100,000 or more, told Yahoo Finance. 'The great resignation is over. The great return is upon us.' Sign up for the Mind Your Money weekly newsletter By subscribing, you are agreeing to Yahoo's Terms and Privacy Policy Hybrid to the rescue Compromise, however, has inched in. And that playbook can work for many women, who still shoulder a disproportionate share of caregiving responsibilities for children and aging parents, and need and value flexibility more than men. Flexible work benefits have stabilized enough to suggest a permanent place in employers' benefits, according to a new SHRM Employee Benefits Survey. Overall, hybrid office environments — where attendance is generally three days a week for so-called knowledge workers (not front-line ones) — are the norm now at more than half of companies, followed by traditional office environments at 27%, with remote-first environments making up only 16% of office types, per Payscale data. In fact, while 4 in 10 organizations deployed a return-to-office mandate in recent years, an increasing number have done a bit of soft shoe around the specific requirements and have loosened the rules depending on job type and for those who are top aging population factor Long-term trends in the workforce could ultimately help women gain ground. 'As the baby boomer generation ages and companies grapple with fewer younger workers and our labor market tightens, companies can't afford to overlook any segment of the workforce, especially women,' said Gwenn Rosener, co-founder of recruiting firm FlexProfessionals. Because fewer people are born each year, our workforce is going to start to shrink, and we need workers to make products, provide services, and pay taxes, Bradley Schurman, a demographic strategist, told Yahoo Finance. 'So, as we enter this period of the Super Age, with more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 18, this is going to create market conditions that are going to increase the demand for workers of all ages because the supply is so low,' he said. 'Women will be able to negotiate for greater benefits and for greater salaries and more flexibility. And it's not just women, disabled and other marginalized groups will likely benefit too." Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist and the author of 14 books, including the forthcoming "Retirement Bites: A Gen X Guide to Securing Your Financial Future," "In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in the New World of Work," and "Never Too Old to Get Rich." Follow her on Bluesky. Sign up for the Mind Your Money newsletter
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Aussie workers furious as employer forces them back into the office three days a week
Australian employees of a global corporation have been told they will be required in the office multiple days a week. TheAussieCorporate page claimed Deloitte will issue a mandate for employees to return to the office three days a week. Employees in Australia were told during Thursday afternoon briefings that they would be required back in the office, or on client sites. 'Deloitte return to office mandate has been rumoured for a little while with some more senior staff mentioning that it's coming,' the anonymous user said. ' Brisbane office doesn't have enough seating and hot desking is usually a nightmare.' People leapt into the comments section to slam the alleged mandate, claiming a lack of space in Deloitte offices. 'Apparently we told them we wanted better collaboration, communication and engagement in staff surveys,' one apparent employee said. 'Solution? Come back to an office with insufficient desks to accommodate the policy - go figure? Not sure that is what I meant…' Users who said they were employees questioned how everyone would fit into the offices Another said the Sydney office 'didn't have enough seating with the full-time, work from home, 18 months ago'. 'Not sure how they're going to fit more people in with mandatory office days.' A third succinctly said the proposal was ' ridiculous and unmonitorable with so many people at client sites'. 'Stop de loittering and get back to work. I mean the office.' Daily Mail Australia has contacted Deloitte's Australian branch for comment. In May, specialist recruiter and career coach Tammie Ballis warned that work-from-home options and flexible or hybrid arrangements are becoming 'less and less' in the years after the Covid pandemic. National Australia Bank, Amazon, Dell, Tabcorp and Flight Centre are among the recent corporations to introduce a return-to-office mandates. 'You might think you've got a work-from-home job, but you might not have that next week,' Ms Ballis said. 'Employers can decide to change it, and people shouldn't just trust that the workplace is going to give them what they want. 'As long as they are within the legal rights and within the law, businesses can change their terms and conditions when it comes to your employment.'
Yahoo
07-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Is remote work only for the rich? Double standard ignites workplace tension
When ride-sharing company Uber increased the number of days employees had to show up in person from two to three, the return-to-office mandate set off a fiery backlash. In an all-hands meeting and then in online forums, the rank-and-file groused they were being summoned back to work while many corner offices sat empty. Soon, another brouhaha erupted at JPMorgan Chase. After thousands of employees at the world's largest bank were ordered back to the office five days a week, word leaked that Filippo Gori would now run business affairs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa from New York, not from Dubai, Johannesburg or London. JPMorgan Chase did not comment. With employers cracking down on how many days a week people can work from home, office workers are calling out what they say is a double standard: executives who enforce in-person work for their teams but reserve the right to work wherever they please. Salesforce's Marc Benioff is one of those CEOs who self-identifies as a remote worker. "I've always been a remote worker my whole life," Benioff told MSNBC in 2023. "I don't work well in an office. It just doesn't work with my personality. I can't tell you why." His employees often don't have that luxury. In September, they were told to return to the office at least three days a week. Benioff said the message is to 'mix in-person and remote together.' Salesforce did not respond to a request for comment. 'Regardless of how you feel about remote work, you have to laugh at the nerve of these types of people who are being compensated millions of dollars per year to implement 'rules for thee and not for me,'' one Uber employee commented on Blind, an anonymous app for professionals. Many office workers got hooked on remote work as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down offices across America. With only 'essential' frontline workers required to show up in person, the white-collar workforce skipped rush hour and cocooned at home. Prioritizing once elusive goals such as quality of life, they relocated in droves to more affordable places such as Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho. Their new schedules made life much easier to balance, especially for parents of young children and workers with disabilities, while research frequently showed the pandemic-induced work arrangements had other benefits. Employees who worked from home were happier and as – if not more – productive. Five years later, a growing number of companies from Amazon to Ford are winding back the clock on remote work – but not for everyone. Flexibility is fast becoming an elite perk, with some top executives running their businesses hundreds or thousands of miles from the home office from the comfort of their own home office. Last year, Starbucks lured Brian Niccol from Chipotle Mexican Grill with a $10 million cash signing bonus, a $75 million stock award and a $1.6 million annual salary, making him one of the highest-paid CEOs in America. But none of his eye-popping perks got as much attention as the work-from-home deal he cut. Even as other corporate workers in the coffee chain's Seattle headquarters were told to work in the office three days a week, Niccol didn't pull up stakes. Instead, he commutes 1,600 miles from his Newport Beach, California, home on the company's private jet and on its dime. Starbucks said its CEO, who engineered the 'Back to Starbucks' turnaround plan to rebound from a prolonged sales slump, maintains an office and home in Seattle but prioritizes an active schedule visiting coffeehouses, roasting plants, support centers and business partners around the globe. Still, that special treatment irks employees. A 2023 Wall Street Journal report that Boeing Chief Financial Officer Brian West, at the time the second-highest-ranking executive at the company, worked from a small office about five minutes from his home in New Canaan, Connecticut, and hundreds of miles from the company's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, caused a stir. West, who June 30 was replaced by former Lockheed Martin executive Jesus 'Jay' Malave, maintained that arrangement even after many staffers were told to return to the office. According to securities filings, Boeing provided $42,271 worth of flights on company aircraft last year for West, whose total compensation was nearly $6.2 million. Boeing declined to comment. Management experts say it matters far less where key executives log into work each day. After all, they often live out of suitcases while jetting to far-flung offices and calling on customers. But permitting executives to live and work remotely conflicts with the messaging that businesses benefit the most when employees show up in person. Like most sought-after workplace perks, flexibility is largely a function of power and pay, according to Stanford University economics professor Nick Bloom, who studies remote work. Higher-income workers are more likely to have remote work arrangements than those at the lower end of the pay scale, his research shows. Just 5% of workers making $10,000 to $50,000 a year live 50 or more miles from their office, compared with 14% of those earning over $250,000. 'Before the pandemic, working from home was a predictor of low pay. We used to joke about it. Is he working from home or shirking from home?' Bloom said. 'Now it's like the key to the executive toilet. Being able to work from home is something that people are flexing about.' A similar phenomenon is playing out in the public sector. President Donald Trump made splashy headlines when he ordered federal workers back to the office full-time. But, said Bloom, Trump often prefers his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to the Oval Office. The president is far from alone. A 2023 McKinsey survey found the largest share of employees who strongly prefer working from home earn more than $150,000 a year. They were also the group most likely to quit their jobs if called back to the office every day. The rank-and-file feels strongly about it, too. Three-quarters of employed adults who have a job that can be done from home are working remotely at least some of the time, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. If their employer no longer allowed them that flexibility, nearly half said they would be unlikely to stay on. Pavi Theva was stationed in Texas as a product manager when Amazon began enforcing a new three-day-a-week in-person policy. With none of her teammates located in the Austin office, she'd make the 45-minute commute to sit by herself. She regularly scrambled to find an empty conference room so she could attend virtual meetings uninterrupted. Time spent in the office was pointless, she said. 'It wasn't adding any value from a productivity standpoint or a collaboration standpoint.' After getting flagged a couple of times for not badging into the office often enough, Theva quit in February 2024 to turn a side hustle in career coaching into a full-time gig. She never looked back. 'I have zero commute,' she said. 'Just 20 seconds from my bedroom to my study in my PJs.' A report from the Census Bureau that surveyed 150,000 companies from November 2024 to January 2025 concluded remote workers like Theva are here to stay. Employees work from home at least one day a week on average and businesses expect that to continue through 2029. And some business leaders are leaning into that trend. In 2022, Airbnb instituted a 'Live and Work Anywhere' remote work policy which allows employees to work from home as long as they regularly meet up in person. Before the pandemic, some 95% of Airbnb's employees lived within 50 miles of an office, according to the online marketplace for short-term vacation rentals. Today, that figure stands at about 70%. 'If you want a team to work harder, don't make them come to the office, give them a crazy deadline and check on their progress every week,' CEO Brian Chesky said on the Masters of Scale Rapid Response podcast. 'That's how you get them to work harder, not by being in the office. I don't care where you are.' Dropbox has also doubled down on flexibility with its 'Virtual First' remote work policy. CEO Drew Houston says it doesn't make sense to force employees to show up in the office to do the same work they would do remotely. Over the last five years, about 70% of job applicants have cited remote work as the reason they are interested in working at the file-storage company, Dropbox said. Dropbox has also seen its lowest attrition rates and highest offer acceptance rates since going fully remote, internal company data shows. "We can be a lot less dumb than forcing people back into a car three days a week or whatever to literally be back on the same Zoom meeting they would have been at home,' Houston told Fortune's Leadership Next podcast. 'There's a better way to do this." (This story was updated to add new information.) This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Who gets to work from home? Double standard fuels workplace tension
CTV News
06-07-2025
- Business
- CTV News
Amid a renewed return-to-office push, experts outline what your options are
Bank towers are pictured in the financial district in Toronto, Friday, Sept. 8, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Lahodynskyj As the number of in-office days is set to increase for many of Canada's hybrid workers, return-to-office mandates are setting the stage for tension between employees and employers. Remote and hybrid work spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic is giving way to arrangements more closely aligned with traditional office norms now that labour market conditions have swung in companies' favour. Some of Canada's largest financial services firms, including several of the big banks, have said they will shift to four in-office days a week beginning in the fall. Employment lawyers say they are hearing from clients who don't want to lose one or more of their at-home days, but that companies are taking a harder line compared with a few years ago when a lower unemployment rate meant the market favoured job-seekers rather than their bosses. 'Now, it seems with economic uncertainty, employers have bigger leverage to basically impose unilaterally that kind of stuff and tell people, 'If you don't like it, you might as well go,'' Philippe de Villers, the chair of Chartered Professionals in Human Resources Canada, said in an interview. If you're in that situation, it may feel like you must choose between getting with the program or getting a new job. Though that may be true in many cases, experts say there are some other options. The basic choice One option for employees who don't want to return to the office is to look for another job, said Sunira Chaudhri, founder and partner at Workly Law, in an interview. 'Employees are considering career changes en masse, and as you can expect, those that are facing a stricter return to work protocol that do not align with that are, more likely than not, looking to jump ship and find a more flexible arrangement if they're simply not on board.' Return to office trends are more common with enterprise-level companies like banks and accounting firms compared with small businesses or ones in industries more concerned about retaining talent, Jon Pinkus, employment lawyer and partner at Samfiru Tumarkin, said in an interview. BMO, RBC and Scotiabank have all stated that more workers will be required to be in the office four days a week beginning in the fall, citing operational improvements and opportunities for collaboration. If an employee doesn't wish to leave their current position, and doesn't require an accommodation based on their family status or medical needs, they may need to comply with return-to-office mandates set by their employer. Family status Exceptions may need to be made based on family circumstances. Family status is an issue that may require accommodation, and one where employers must be 'pretty careful,' Chaudhri said, as many employees with young children have framed their days around childcare responsibilities. She said childcare responsibilities may need to be accommodated if they cannot be met by going back into the office on a full-time basis. For example, she said it may be difficult for someone to pick up a child from daycare if they are required to be in downtown Toronto until 5 p.m. 'If it's just impossible or unreasonable for an employee to make those types of changes, an employee can seek an accommodation with respect to family status, and say, 'I actually have to be in my neighbourhood at 4:30 p.m.,' as an example,' Chaudhri said. Medical accommodations If a person's medical needs have changed since they were in the office on a more full-time basis before 2020, Chaudhri said employers may need to consider medical accommodations. 'Employers need to be pretty aware and cognizant of the fact that accommodations might need to be a real part of the conversation of moving people back to work most of the time,' she said. Pinkus said medical accommodations are one of the most common issues he is seeing among clients regarding return-to-office mandates. He said employees may need accommodations for issues that may make it difficult for an employee to drive or sit for long periods. Other issues could include things like access to medication that may not be practical to bring into an office or needing to be close to a hospital or doctor. 'You do have an obligation as an employer to accommodate someone up to the point of what's called undue hardship,' Pinkus said. Undue hardship refers to a significant difficulty or expense related to accommodating an employee's needs or requests, according to Toronto-based law firm Achkar Law. Legal action Pinkus said if an employee started working from home full time during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their employer didn't communicate whether the arrangement was temporary or permanent, but is now trying to get them back into the office four days a week, it could be considered a breach of contract. However, he said that if there was clear communication by the employer that remote working wouldn't last forever, it would be more difficult for an employee to launch any legal action. Pinkus said employees considering refusing to return to the office should be 'very careful' because if their employer did have the right to compel a return to the office, it could be considered abandonment of employment — meaning the worker is not entitled to severance pay. 'If you're wrong about it, the consequences are quite serious.' Under certain circumstances, Pinkus and Chaudhri say a constructive dismissal may factor in. According to Pinkus, constructive dismissal can occur if an employer changes the fundamental term of their employment without sufficient notice and without the employee's consent. 'There is precedent for the notion that an employer can't simply take someone from a telecommuting role and put them in a non-telecommuting role without their permission,' he said. If an employer has stuck with a remote or hybrid working arrangement for a long time, then Chaudhri said some employees might say 'this is my new normal,' and the return to office constitutes a 'meaningful change to my employment.' 'In some cases, employees may allege that their contract of employment has been breached and seek wrongful dismissal damages,' she said. Chaudhri added that companies have been very systematic about slowly increasing in office days over time, which she thinks is in large part to avoid 'the likelihood of success of a constructive dismissal claim.' She said it is up to the employee to prove they have been constructively dismissed, which can be difficult. This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 6, 2025. Daniel Johnson, The Canadian Press
