Montreal City Weblog

Kate 10:05 on 2021-05-01 Permalink Reply  

• Uatu 10:36 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  He doesn’t really have a choice but to be optimistic since the province is all in and it’s full speed ahead so everyone aboard on this runaway train fuelled by burning cash 😛

• Kevin 11:33 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  This is someehat of a rehash of what was reported earlier in the week.
  I think it’s a little bonkers to work off the assumption that only 40% of trips are work related, and that only 20% of people will be working from home full time.

  People are not going to spend 10 hours a week commuting, and companies are not going to keep renting large spaces when it’s significantly cheaper to outfit employees with home computers and insist they have high speed internet.

  But, if bus routes get changed to feed the REM, I can see ridership for this being high (even if a combined pass ends up being more expensive).

• DeWolf 11:45 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  There have been a lot of HR surveys done about remote working in recent months and they’ve pretty much all concluded that we’ll be seeing a hybrid model going forward. Which means commuting traffic may be less consistent and more unpredictable. We may end up with higher levels of transit ridership in the mididle of the day but no traditional rush hour.

  Also, it’s worth considering that office workers do not represent the majority of transit users. There are students, shift workers, tourists, remote workers who need to go out for meetings, people going out shopping, going out for a night on the town, etc. I think it’s lost on some people that the REM is not a commuter train, it’s rapid transit. All day service, trains running every 5 minutes or less on the main branch… people will use it for the same reasons they use the metro.

• CE 12:07 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  I’ve been finding that office workers who are currently working from home assume that they make up a large majority of the workforce (I’ve heard “everyone is working from home now” many times) when they’re actually a minority. Kate posted a link to a news story not long ago saying it was something like 40%.

  Some people enjoy working from home and might even be doing a better job but there are lots of workers who are still not benefiting from this arrangement and will be going back to the office as soon as they can.

  Also, we’re still running on the social capital accumulated before the pandemic. Eventually, workers may have a hard time working in an “office” where they’ve never met a single colleague. My girlfriend is working from home and is now at the point where she only knows about half her colleagues personally and those are the ones she seems to talk to (and likely trust) more.

• Blork 12:37 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  Last summer and fall there was a bit of euphoria among many office workers who really came to enjoy working from home. Lots of talk about “never going back” and all that. But I think that novelty has worn off in many cases. While few people enjoy the commute itself, a lot of people are finding they miss the F2F interaction with coworkers and whatnot. In my case I mostly miss the downtown lunches (not many take-out options near where I live). I also miss the downtown walkabouts, at least during fair weather.

  In the before times I generally went into the office two or three times a week. I’m looking forward to getting back to that at some point.

• JP 13:05 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  I made the decision to change jobs last fall during the pandemic after 6 years at my old company. I had a great work-life balance before and new most of my colleagues fairly well.

  Based on my experience, it can be tough to work from home when you’ve never met your colleagues. My workload at the new place has been unmanageable but getting my supervisor to see (or admit) that has been a challenge. (Yes, this could have happened in an-person setting too) but in WFH, it’s so much easier for a supervisor to just pretend that the workload is fine and you’re the problem. A colleague of mine has also been snarky in her comments over Teams at times when things are not done her way. I think there’s something about not being face to face that makes people lose their politeness. The onboarding was tough too. I’m at the point where I’m afraid of what might happen elsewhere but have no choice but to try to move on.

  Working from home was great at a company where I was established…but it’s been a nightmare for me at this new company. Of course, this is just my own experience. I have had a couple of other friends change jobs during this time, and their experiences seem to be going ok.

  Also, I’ve made lots of work friends over the years through different jobs. Seeing each other every day face to face, spontaneous interactions, lunch, it added to my “social biome” in a way that my remote colleagues will never. I look forward to flexible work arrangements in the future, going in 2-3 times a week and working from home 2-3 times a week or some variation of that.

• Blork 14:10 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  @JP, yes, company culture can really affect the experience for both on-site and WFH. I’m really lucky that my current employer get really high marks for this; everyone’s really friendly, respectful, and open (and even fun!), which makes a huge difference. We’ve had a dozen or more new people join in the last 6-8 months, from all over (Australia, France, even Toronto) and the on-boarding seems to have gone very well for them all.

  Related: one of the nice things about information work in this day and age is that thing about “can work from anywhere” doesn’t just mean you can be hired from anywhere, but you can up and move to anywhere and not lose your job. Pre-pandemic we had one guy decide he wanted to move to the country (plus his spouse had just taken a job in Sherbrooke) so off he went to the Eastern Townships, showing up at the office only once per week. Another guy decided he wanted to live in LA, so he just moved there. Did not affect his job at all. Another guy went home to Paris to tend to his ailing parents and decided to stay there permanently. No problem!

  I’m well established in my company, and all winter long I was looking out the window thinking “for the first time in my career I can just up and move to a warmer climate and I won’t have to quit my job.”

  Now if only Canada had a place with a warmer climate (besides Vancouver).

• Joey 14:11 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  To be fair to the czar, you’re damned if you do if damned if you don’t. How should the head of the REM know whether the pandemic-induced work-from-home shift will be permanent?

• DisgruntledGoat 14:14 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  One way or another I feel like that transit capacity will be used eventually. There is a finite amount of land on the island available for development, we are in a housing crisis, and I hope sufficient steps are taken by the city to zone more affordable housing with access to the REM.

  I agree with the sentiment that we white collar workers are over estimating how much of society will actually have WFH benefits after the pandemic.

• Raymond Lutz 15:05 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  Being able to work from home is a privilege, we must confess, of the petite bourgeoisie CPIS (cadres et professions intellectuelles supérieures) introduced by the French historian and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd. Here he stresses the atomisation WFH will even more induce in our society: « La collectivité disparaît au profit du banc de poissons »

• Kevin 15:52 on 2021-05-01 Permalink

  Pre-pandemic about 350,000 people commuted daily from the burbs to the core. I don’t think we are ever going back to that.

  Especially with the REM. I am still dubious about its peak capacity, and so having significant numbers of people WFH several days per week may be its saving grace.

• steph 11:00 on 2021-05-02 Permalink

  I do administrative work as a provincial government employee. We have offices downtown and I used to commute 5 days a week. My colleagues and I have been asking for WFH for 10+ years always to be told “impossible”. Everything has been digitized for years – there’s been zero F2F necessity for years. WIth the pandemic, it took 10 days for use to become 100% operational working from home, all it took was the proper network server. We were so eeger to proove that we could do WFH that at first we were willing to do it from our own personal equipment. 1 year later and the employer refuses to engage in any constructive discussions with our union considering WFH, constantly citing “it’s still under the umbrella of the pandemic, so temporary, and at any moment everyone might be called back to work 100% from the office”. It’s frustrating. It sucks that my boss won’t let me take my good ergonomic office chair home and I had to buy my own. I could complaing that they’re cheapskates, but I haven’t bought a bus pass in a year either. I love working from home. I hope it lasts forever.

• Uatu 11:04 on 2021-05-02 Permalink

  I’ve been commuting straight through the pandemic. The number of people I see on my bus commute is approximately 5. The metro during rush hour is equivalent to the levels during the day. I don’t know if it’s going to be back to where people were crammed elbow to elbow, but if it’s cheaper for businesses to not have to pay overhead then that’s going to be the case since everything is dictated by$$$$.

• david288 22:23 on 2021-05-02 Permalink

  I lined in another thread on here a report out of the US that was giving us what I consider to be a well-reasoned worst case, and they predicted 20% at most work from home, which would be a titanic shift, but also really in line with the 10% drop in transit use in the medium term projected by REM. Some people project their own wishes/experiences onto what they believe will take place (as I maybe said in the post described above, our firm is everyone back into the office as soon as possible, so that’s my sense) – but I think it’s just wrong. People working in software or people like Kevin who have always had semi-remote jobs (and who also are absolutely certain that every opinion they have is The Way It Is) will probably be a larger share of the WFH cohort, and people who do almost anything else will be maybe getting a day/week at home for a while.

  Plus, what Steph says is just the way it works in Quebec – businesses want you onsite.

• Bert 09:22 on 2021-05-03 Permalink

  This morning the Ceeb, on Daybreak had a interview with a labour lawyer. The questions revolved around : can an employer force a vaccination; can an employer leak your status / stance of vaccination; and can an employee refuse to return to the office. Perhaps it will get posted to the CBC site: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-15-daybreak-montreal