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
ISTOCK SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 BCBUSINESS 41 How Telus mastered working from home–long before the pandemic b y M I C H A E L M C C U L L O U G H ike a lot of British Columbians these past few months, Alessia Yaworsky has been working from home—in her case, an apartment she shares with her partner in Vancouver's Gastown neighbourhood. But whereas for most this was a recent and jarring shift, for Yaworsky it's no big deal. She's been doing it for nine years, virtually her whole career. "The difference is I'm now working from home 100 percent of the time," says Yaworsky, 30, senior project manager, corporate citizen- ship and communications, at Telus Corp. She's just one of the 73 percent of the telecom's 25,000 employees deemed mobile workers, meaning they don't have a permanent workstation in a corporate office, but rather spend most of their work week at home or in a service vehicle. On the one to three days a week that Yaworsky chose to come into the company's head office—pre- COVID—she would book a desk using an app, set up there for the day, attend meetings, get face time with her colleagues, maybe go for lunch with them and take a 15-minute walk home. But in a pinch, she can fulfill all her duties from home. The pandemic has prompted many employers to consider permanently decentralizing their work- forces, causing office landlords and leasing agents to shudder. In May, the CEO of Ottawa- based Shopify, which had earlier announced plans for a 1,000-person, 70,000-square- foot office in Vancouver's Four Bentall Centre, declared that "office centricity is over"—the e-commerce software provid- er's employees would continue to work from home even after the pandemic wanes. Before employers make that leap, though, they'd do well to learn from Telus's experience. It was back in 2006 when the firm first piloted what it calls Work Styles. The arrival of broadband Internet, cloud stor- age and other technologies was making it possible for teams to collaborate online. At the same time, employees were asking for more flexibility around where and when they worked; a work-from-home option, the HR team realized, could dif- ferentiate Telus in the competi- tion for talent. For its own part, the Vancouver-headquartered company saw an opportunity to reduce its cost of leasing and owning office space. To begin with, participation in Work Styles was deemed