Eighty-five percent of Canada’s white-collar workers want to work from home at least some of the time, a survey by recruiting firm Robert Half has found.

A quarter of respondents said they would be willing to see their pay cut if they could work from home. The average maximum tolerable pay reduction was 16 percent.

Creative workers, working parents, and employees 25 and younger were most likely to be willing to take a reduction in pay.

Problem: only 22.9 percent of January job postings in Canada offered remote or hybrid work, barely an increase from a little more than 20 percent in 2019.

“We continue to be on a bit of a collision course between what employers are looking for and what employees are expecting,” Robert Half senior regional director Mike Shekhtman told Yahoo Finance Canada. “It’s a little bit of a tug of war.”

Remote workers cherish the flexibility, he added.

“It gives them the autonomy not only to create where they work, but when they work as well,” he said. “Where someone is a working parent, they have the flexibility to do a drop-off instead of commuting an hour to the office.”

Remote workers also report greater job satisfaction, even though 75 percent told the surveyors that they were booking longer work days.

They also report more meaningful relationships with people they encounter in the office than colleagues seen online, and 40 percent worry that they could be passed over for promotions or choice assignments because they seem less visible to managers.

The survey was taken in mid-October through early November and recorded responses from 1,100 employees and 1,449 hiring managers.

TREND FORECAST: As in the U.S., Canadian workers and employers are likely to reach a compromise that will leave neither group entirely happy: workers will be in the office some workdays and elsewhere the rest, as we describe in “Study: One Billion Square Feet of U.S. Office Space Will Be Empty by 2030” in this issue.

Again, while it is just making the business news now, The Trends Journal was the first to forecast the work-at-home trend would be a major factor that would lead to an Office Building Bust nearly three years ago. And, as economies go down, businesses renting office space will do what they can to cut costs by cutting office space. 

We have also noted, but barely a peep about it in the business media, was the hard fact that before the COVID War was launched in January 2020 on Chinese Lunar New Year, the Year of the Rat, there was an oversupply of office space… particularly in the United States.