With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1296256
classroom, which is at home, who are using it to connect with parents and students. It's turned from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have service." The Kelowna-based company, which employs 17, has had to upgrade its server four times since April, and was scheduled to launch a new platform this summer to meet exploding demand from school boards across the province. Still, for all the recent suc- cess of FreshGrade, Merrifield worries about any tool that requires kids to be online for any length of time. "One of our core mandates—even pre- COVID—was that we don't believe in devices being in front of kids' faces all day long," he says. "A lot of our work went into figuring out: How do we make it as fast as possible—to capture the learning, grab a photo, take a quick video, and then put the device away so that you can be present in the classroom? Now that kids are at home, same thing: We certainly don't want to have them sitting there and staring at a screen all day, every day." It's not just kids at home staring at those screens all day. During the pandemic, many of us have found our- selves camped out in home offices—or, if we're more space challenged, working off the kitchen table, couch or bed. Whether 16 or 61 years of age, every one of us is struggling with how to find that elu- sive work-life balance—and institutions, be they schools or employers, are having to rethink traditional working relationships to avoid burnout, depression or worse. "ON" ALL THE TIME Last fall, before COVID had a name and number, SFU professor Leyland Pitt, along with two colleagues, Pierre Berthon and Colin Campbell, wrote a paper titled "Addic- tive De-Vices: A Public Policy Analysis of Sources and Solu- tions to Digital Addiction" for the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. In it, they noted that Internet addiction was first proposed as a disorder in 1996, so the issue is nothing new. But the rising popular- ity of mobile devices, and all the apps that come along with them, has made it a topic of intense research interest. The negative effects of what the authors call "digital experience addiction" (which encompasses a variety of platforms and usages, both work- and non-work-related) are many: from the psycho- logical (low self-esteem, poor concentration, anxiety and depression); to the physical (sleep disturbance; sedentary lifestyle outcomes, including diabetes and obesity); to the societal (relationship prob- lems, impaired socialization); as well as critical economic harms (especially hits to productivity). A variety of policy rem- edies were proposed, includ- ing things like mandatory labelling (similar to cigarettes SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 BCBUSINESS 35 BCBUSINESS.CA OFF THE CLOCK Getting workers to buy into a remote culture means giving them freedom, says entrepre- neur Lane Merrifield A S K A L E A D E R FOR B.C. BUSINESSES THAT HAVE SURVIVED COVID-19, WHAT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THEY CAN DO RIGHT NOW TO MAKE THEMSELVES MORE RESILIENT TO FUTURE DISRUPTIONS? We are witnessing a reset. There are certainly things that are not going to be the same after COVID-19, but we advise our clients to be careful about deciding on long-term solutions today for what will likely end up being a shorter-term problem. We have to be very cautious here. – BOB RENNIE , founder and executive director, Rennie