As many companies are looking to bring employees back into the office, one tech executive said the balance of power has shifted more toward employees than ever before and companies should adapt in order to attract and retain top talent.

Dan Burgar, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Frontier Collective, a Vancouver-based organization representing the interest of the technology industry, said employees are now shaping what the return to the office will look.

“Right now we're seeing this landscape where employees actually have more power than they have ever had before,” Burgar said while speaking at the Collision tech conference in Toronto on Thursday.

According to Burgar, employees are dictating what the working arrangement will look like and the benefits they can get. He said his organization has spoken with a couple of startups that tried to implement four or five days in the office but received pushback.

Bill Smith, founder and chief executive officer at Landing, said during the conference Thursday that determining who has leverage in return-to-office discussions depends on the role and ethos of the company.

“It depends on the role and there's going to be opportunities created on both sides, there is going to be lots of remote first opportunities for entry-level roles all the way up to the highest level of engineering roles,” he said.

However, widespread remote work policies could have broader implications for the labour market, according to Smith.

“If you’re an entry-level role, one of the concerns we have in the U.S. is, if you can work from anywhere are we going to start hiring people in lower cost countries,” he said.

Burgar said that the current shift in working arrangements has a number of people working in the office for about two days a week in a hybrid situation and are finding “they’re able to get a lot more heads-down work done.”

He said a lot of large tech companies are asking employees to come into the office about two to three days a week, and he believes companies will need to continue in order to attract the “best and brightest.”

However, with employees out of the office for large parts of the week, Burgar said those employees are missing out on “watercooler conversations,” where problems could be solved “on the fly.”

As many companies adopt hybrid arrangements with their workforce, Smith said that in some cases it is the “worst of both” because “you can’t live somewhere else.” He said you have to live in one location and go into the office a few days a week and miss out on “those water cooler conversations” during the other days.

Smith said that the “pendulum is kind of swinging back” and that people are looking to connect with one another, which is difficult to do over a screen. He said this is bringing some people back into the office.

COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

As hybrid and remote working arrangements continue, Burgar said this will drastically change the landscape of commercial real estate.

“Commercial real estate, I think as we know it, is dead,” he said.


However, Smith says that despite the sentiment to “bash on commercial real estate,” people are not being called back into work to save the sector. He said developers are “extremely creative” and will be able to find new sources of demand.

“And so all of these people that own these large office buildings that are currently empty or 50 per cent utilized, they're going to find new ways to utilize those buildings and it's probably going to look like a mix of residential and third places and maybe hotel and office and all together,” he said.

“So I think the next decade we're going to see a lot of exciting things in commercial real estate that's been forced by the change of the way that we all work.”