COVID-19’s radical office culture makeover will not be economically sustainable for employers if it leads down a one-way street weighted too heavily in favour of employees.
And that trend in the long term will not be economically beneficial for employees either, because the Great Resignation will not be so great if too many companies in too many business sectors sink deeper in red ink from downward-bound economics and upwardly spiralling business costs.
Staff wages and benefits, major costs of doing business in any economy, have increased significantly for many sectors in B.C. with the addition of more statutory leaves and other payroll premiums. More employee leverage in pushing for job flexibility in a lot of cases will improve staff retention and job satisfaction. But in other cases, it will complicate company operations and erode employee efficiency and training dynamics.
That is not a recipe for sustainable corporate recovery.
As the Canadian Federation of Independent Business has pointed out, only 35 per cent of small businesses in B.C. have returned to pre-pandemic sales two years into the COVID crisis.
Meanwhile, the cost of fuel, food, insurance and other basics continues to rise. Pandemic-sparked supply chain disruptions are a long way from being resolved, and Russia’s Ukraine invasion will derail progress in eliminating them.
B.C.’s 2022 budget will do little to reduce costs or sharpen competitive edges for businesses.
The main beneficiaries of the BC NDP’s “Stronger Together” budget include motherhood issues like health care, child care and climate change. Its stronger togetherness air hug did not include B.C.’s small-business backbone, even though it and the rest of the province’s private sector enterprises will be relied upon to deal with the economic fallout from B.C.’s rising debt load.
However, the NDP’s budget did get its branding theme right in one respect: the economic well-being of employers and employees will depend on being stronger together rather than separately pursuing purely self-serving game plans.
