Sunday, February 09, 2003

TORONTO (CP) - Not that anyone expected that by now they'd be getting sucked into the office through a pneumatic tube, but surely work in the 21st century was supposed to be more Jetsonesque than this.

The bold predictions of the last decade - work at home in your pyjamas! Share your job with a co-worker! Send the kids to a top-notch, publicly-funded daycare! - have, well, fizzled.

"Certain lines of business are still very old-school," said Roxanne Bryant, a 32-year-old single mother of two who lost her job with a downtown Toronto bank late last year.

PalmPilots and Powerpoint still haven't convinced some employers to toss out old 9-to-5 traditions, said Bryant, who now runs her own home-based business designing corporate training programs.

"Even though all of the technology was there, and I was working for a place that presumably had the money to use it . . .  they still preferred people coming in every day," she said.

"They preferred that face time."

Make no mistake, a lot has changed, experts expect Statistics Canada to report Tuesday when it releases 2001 census data on work in the 1990s: more women, more immigrants and more office-bound commuters than ever.

But the futuristic vision of the modern workplace is giving way to stark realities about work at the turn of the century: labour shortages, a dearth of full-time jobs and crushing pressure on the family as parents struggle to beef up their bottom lines.

Traditional work culture is so ingrained, it seems, the laws of the office are about as hard to change as the laws of physics.

"You're not going to build a career working from home all the time," said Bryant, who finds it easier to keep tabs on Elijah, 5, and Naomee, 3, when working from home.

"If you want to advance in a corporation, you have to get into the politics. When you're working for yourself, that's not an issue; it's not about advancement anymore."

Telework - using high-tech gadgets like videoconferencing, conference calling and the Internet to work from home - is alive and well, said Bob Fortier, a work-at-home management consultant and head of the 1,300-member Canadian Telework Association.

It's just not generating the sort of wired workforce that many were predicting as the age of the Internet dawned during the 1990s, he explained.

"It's not happening the way the more sensational headlines foretold," Fortier said.

"(Telework) is being embraced, however it's being embraced in a way such that many of the predictions of the last decade basically told it wrong."

An estimated 1.5 million Canadians can be considered "teleworkers," although most practice it only occasionally, said Fortier.

And while a nation of wired workers logging on from their living rooms is a mythical vision that will never likely come to pass, Fortier is urging telework's proponents to be patient.

"We're experiencing a bit of a downturn in the IT business and . . . in the related economies, but that doesn't mean that the information revolution is going to stop," Fortier said.

"In fact, we're still at the beginning of it."

Indeed, companies often pay lip service to "flexwork" policies but don't commit enough resources or train employees adequately to make it work long-term, said Nora Spinks, president of Toronto-based consulting firm Work-Life Harmony Enterprises.

That fosters the fear that one's career will suffer without regular appearances at the office - another workplace myth, Spinks said.

"A lot of people felt that if they took advantage of telework, they would be out of sight, out of mind, and they would have career limitations," she said.

"The data shows that's not true."

Spinks said she expects the census to further demonstrate how work is taking its toll on the Canadian family: everything from more single mothers in the workforce to more families without a stay-at-home parent.

"Families are under increasing stress, based on the fact that the adults in the household are under a great deal of stress," she said. "There's a level of tension related to fear: fear of loss of job, fear of loss of control."

There are those Canadian companies that have welcomed the chance to shape their human resources policies around their employees instead of the other way around.

At consulting giant KPMG, staff enjoy everything from "flexwork" - job-sharing, telecommuting and part-time work - to compassionate leaves, education and training subsidies, assistance with adoption and even extra money for physical fitness endeavours.

Such practices fit well with KPMG, a company whose employees don't spend a lot of time behind the desk as it is, said Mary Lou Maher, the company's chief human resources officer.

"It's a business decision for us to attract and retain the best people we can," said Maher, whose three-year-old People Matters program helped earn KPMG a spot in a recent Maclean's magazine survey of top employers.

"We wanted to . . .help our people have a work-life balance," Maher said. "The biggest thing that we can offer is flexibility."

On Tuesday, experts expect Statistics Canada to show that immigrants and women have joined the workforce in droves, and the average age of workers has climbed as baby boomers close in on retirement day.

Labour-intensive professions like skilled trades work - drywallers, plumbers, electricians, even piano tuners - are dominated by older workers with an average age of between 57 and 63, Spinks said.

"They're all retiring, and there's not a lot of people apprenticing to be piano tuners."

Even truck drivers - traditionally the most common job in Canada - are going to become scarce, she added.

With a growing propensity towards part-time, piecemeal work, the modern workforce was supposed to grow more nimble; young people have been told for years to look forward to having several careers in a lifetime.

But as far as making it a lifestyle choice, that "alleged trend" hasn't come to pass, said Anil Berma, a professor of industrial relations at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Studies have shown that people who work full-time aren't all that anxious to jump ship and abandon the comforts of a regular paycheque and a benefits plan, Berma said.

"The average amount of time a person spends with one employer, economy-wide, is not showing major declines as would be the case if these allegations were true," Berma said.

"My take is that a lot of job transfers are involuntary, and if people have a good job and a good employer and they're learning stuff, why would they want to change?"

Then there are those who know all too well about multiple careers and job-sharing: the ones with no other choice, those now and increasingly known as the working poor.

"I think we're not seeing the kinds of benefits that were anticipated as accruing to workers around the turn of the century," said Belinda Leach, a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Guelph.

It's called "occupational skidding," the other side of the work-at-home coin: jobs that aren't part-time or contract work and offer traditional benefits packages just aren't as common as they used to be.

"It would be nice if it were a career where you could say, 'Well, I've done enough of that for a few years, and it would be nice to make a change,' " Leach said.

"This is desperate measures, really, to find a second job among part-time ones. It's very unstable, and very, very difficult for family life."

The benefits of the skidding phenomenon accrue to the employer, of course, who's getting the job done without having to commit a wealth of resources to a full-time worker.

The bottom line, said Spinks, is that as Canadians search for new and innovative answers to the challenges of the daily grind, the trends get harder and harder to spot.

"It used to be that if you followed the prescription, you could pretty well be guaranteed you would have your job for life," she said. Annual raises and regular promotions were part of that prescription, she added.

"Now, nothing's predictable. You follow the prescription, the company gets sold, and you're no longer required. Boom, you're out."