Meetings, Resorts and Retreats

www.businessincalgary.com | BUSINESS IN CALGARY August 2013 59

T
hanks to the mind-boggling brilliance, the limitless
possibilities and the warp speed of emerging technolo-
gies in the workplace, the corny and clichd small
world is getting even smaller by the nanosecond.
What used to be exciting but fantastic sci- has become
Wi-Fi reality.
Technology trends like mobility and social networking are
already impacting corporate strategies, rationale and proto-
cols and the monsoon of emerging technologies is already
changing the ways and the places where Calgarians work.
IT experts and ashes of IT forecasting and guesswork
thrill about the exciting and hot emerging technologies
like speech recognition, HTML5 (an exciting new standard
for mobile applications) cloudbursting, automated storage
and metadata servers.
But one of the most practical, functional, personal and
life-altering emerging technologies has already emerged:
workplace mobility an increasingly popular and common
work feature, a valuable job perk and a big deal in Calgary
and contemporary workplaces around the world.
Whether its working on laptops, tablets and oversized-
screen 5G smartphones at small, wobbly round tables at
Starbucks, propped up on the SUV passenger seat, balanced
on laps while gliding along on the C-Train or the 47-inch
IPS direct LED full-HD monitor sprawling on the home ofce
desk set-up of an 800-square-foot downtown-core condo or
in the roomy, spare bedroom/den of a modern two-storey
home in Chestermere, Cranston or McKenzie Towne.
With more and more IT computing getting outsourced to
the Cloud, the lines between fantasy and reality the lines
Alberta: Canadas Telecommuting leader Emerging Technologies
Alberta:
Canadas Telecommuting Leader
With more and more IT computing options, the lines between business and
personal technology are already being blurred and telecommuting is becoming
a normal fact of work life.
BY PARKER GRANT
60 August 2013 BUSINESS IN CALGARY | www.businessincalgary.com
between business and personal technology are already
being blurred.
In Calgary, throughout Canada, the rest of North Amer-
ica and around the world, mobility is a major, dynamic and
limitless factor for employers and employees.
From Okotoks to Oslo and Oshkosh, todays employees
are constantly on the go, jumping from client sites, eld
and branch ofces or huddling with business contacts
across town or in distant corners of the world. In this fast-
paced and ferociously service-oriented and client-based
economy, mobility is becoming critical to workforces of all
sorts and sizes.
According to a recent BMO (Bank of Montreal) survey
of Canadian business owners, Alberta companies are on
the Canadian cutting edge and are documented as the
most likely to offer their workers the opportunity to tele-
commute. The survey found that 34 per cent (and quickly
growing) of Alberta-based companies offer telecommuting
the ability to work remotely from outside the ofce to
their employees.
The Alberta trend is much higher than the national aver-
age of 23 per cent.
In an evolving workforce, Canadian businesses are
ghting to be exible, innovative and enticing by offering
incentives that will benet not only the organization, but
also their employees, explains Steve Murphy, senior vice-
president of commercial banking for BMO. Flexible work
arrangements help employees achieve greater work-life
balance, improve workplace productivity and strengthen
employee morale.
Among Canadian businesses that offer telecommuting
to employees, 65 per cent say it has a positive impact on
employee productivity and 58 per cent report it improved
the quality of work produced by those employees who tele-
commute.
As Calgary-based Sheldon Dyck, president of ATB
Investor Services, a chartered nancial analyst (CFA) and
Harvard Business School graduate, cautions with an admit-
ted positive bias and passion about workplace mobility and
telecommuting, It may be a bit of a hard sell at rst in
some companies and company cultures. It takes a mind
shift before people start to understand the benets and the
advantages of telecommuting and the exible work envi-
ronment it creates.
Especially the nancial industry is usually seen with
the clich of banker hours/10-2 and stereotyped as being
very conservative and bureaucratic with top-down think-
ing, he admits.
So it was not only forward-thinking but a bit coura-
geous when the Investor Services division of ATB Financial
made a leap of faith and embraced a exible work envi-
ronment that included the technology of telecommuting
and workplace mobility. When we rst tried it, we had
some early commercial grade installs in the homes of a
few executives. We quickly realized that the opportuni-
ties and advantages were huge and telecommuting could
fundamentally change the way we work across the whole
company.
Dyck was instantly hooked and admits to not only
pushing for it but piloting ATBs telecommuting and staff
mobility for more than ve years. The tipping point was
the easy availability of HD videoconferencing.
Its tremendously effective for our clients as well as our
staff, he says. About 350 of ATBs wealth management
group have now worked with telecommuting for more than
a year.
Today, some of our biggest staff and client advocates
are the ones who resisted the change in the beginning. But
embracing it requires a very strong and innovative leader-
ship and management culture. We measure success with
things that matter and the ofce we sit in is not part of the
measurement. Someone can be completely unproductive
sitting in a fancy corner ofce playing Angry Birds. We
manage based on results, not optics or ofce hours. Hold
me accountable for what needs to be done not by how
long I sit at my desk. Ultimately, we look at an employees
productivity and output, not what time their car gets into
the parking space.
Executives like Dyck, management consultants and
other corporate boosters of telecommuting underscore and
Sheldon Dyck, president of ATB Investor Services
In Calgary, throughout Canada, the
rest of North America and around
the world, mobility is a major,
dynamic and limitless factor for
employers and employees.
Alberta: Canadas Telecommuting leader Emerging Technologies
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62 August 2013 BUSINESS IN CALGARY | www.businessincalgary.com
preach workplace mobility as not
only a potent, state-of-the-art way to
do business but a bonus for the com-
pany and the employee.
For the company, not needing as
much dedicated, often premium-
priced, downtown ofce space means
enormous cost savings and shriv-
elled overhead for traditionally key
expenses like brick and mortar real
estate, utilities and more.
For the employee? Not only more
exibility and control over work
schedules, managing workloads and
productivity but signicant cost sav-
ings on traditional expenses like the
commute, going out for lunch, park-
ing, daycare and more.
To illustrate, Dyck makes the point
about a single mom in our opera-
tions group used to take two buses
and a C-Train for 1.5 hours each way,
about three extra hours of childcare
and she constantly lived with the
guilt about quality time with her fam-
ily. She converted to telecommuting,
works perfectly well from home and,
with all the eliminated expenses of
going to and from the ofce, it works
out to almost doubling her salary.
Although theres increasing busi-
ness world agreement about the
benets of telecommuting, theres
also recognition that its not for
everybody and every business.
Traditionally we have seen work-
place mobility or working from home
in some industries (like nancial, busi-
ness-to-business and IT, of course) but
other than that, its not rampant, says
Norman Althouse, senior instructor of
strategy and general management at
Calgarys Haskayne School of Busi-
ness and lead author of The Future of
Business, a studied text at 22 Cana-
dian universities.
Many organizations are more
focused on whatever it takes for bet-
ter customer service, like going to
the customer, not contacting them by
remote. Other than traditional com-
panies that currently use mobility, the
change may be slow. Its very difcult
to change an organizational culture,
both from the corporate and from the
employee perspective.
As the millennials or generation Y
becomes more entrenched in organi-
zations theres bound to be a greater
acceptance of mobility. They are
technically savvy and will demand a
better balance between work and per-
sonal life than the generations before
them, he predicts.
Theres widespread agreement
about the common pros and cons of
telecommuting.
Some people need the structure
and the social environment that a
traditional ofce provides, Althouse
says. That could be seen as quite a
telecommuting negative in some situ-
ations. Were social beings, we want
to be included. Working indepen-
dently from home prevents the ability
to socialize.
Although ATBs Sheldon Dyck
agrees about the social aspects of
workplaces, he suggests that tele-
commuting doesnt have to be all or
nothing. We still get together regu-
larly for face-to-face work and staff
events. We just dont turn into ava-
tars. Its just that 70 per cent of the
time, we choose not to commute and
waste two to three hours of our day
in trafc.
Tracking the acceptance
of telecommuting
throughout Alberta,
Canada and North America,
the recent BMO poll and
other management
surveys show:
41 per cent said telecommuting and
exible workplace options are pop-
ular perks offered to attract good
talent;
65 per cent say telecommuting has
a positive impact on employee pro-
ductivity;
62 per cent of companies already
have remote meetings through
desktop videoconferencing;
88 per cent of companies offer
employees personal devices such as
smartphones, PDAs and tablets;
54 per cent of companies routinely
use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and
other tools to engage employees,
customers and other stakeholders;
companies are increasing space uti-
lization: (77 per cent) by providing
open workspaces and (46 per cent)
by increasing the number of tele-
commuting employees; and
companies with telecommuting
employees generate as much as
30% bottom line occupancy savings
per year.
BiC
Norman Althouse, senior instructor of strategy & general management
at Calgarys Haskayne School of Business
Alberta: Canadas Telecommuting leader Emerging Technologies
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