The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - So You Think Your Employer Wants You To Work From Home -- Think Again

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Are tech firms changing their minds about employees working from home?  And, how many complaints do you think the BBC has had about Prince Phillip coverage?  Plus, a feature discussion about the business of hockey -- some things may surprise you.

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of The Bridge. You're just moments away from this discussion, so you think you want to work from Mansbridge once again. Remember about this time last year. In fact, it may have been this very week last year when we were discussing the changes in the way we all work as a result of the pandemic. And a lot of us had chosen either personally or being basically instructed to do so by our employers, to work from home. That that was going to be the way of the pandemic.

And within a few weeks, like right about now, a year ago, a lot of us had decided, and so had our employers, hey, this is pretty good. This works all right. As an employer, we can think about, you know, maybe cutting back on office space. As an employee, we thought, wow, this is great. You know, I can work from home. I can do home stuff and work stuff. Look after the kids if I have to. There's all kinds of benefits to working at home

on both sides of that equation. That was a year ago. We started to hear, you know, last summer, some reservations about that. But overall, there was still this kind of feeling that things were going to change a lot when the pandemic ended. Because we'd learned, all of us had learned new ways of doing our work and handling the responsibilities we had to not only home, but to office.

Some of us were inspired by the words of some of the big tech giants, their leaders. You know, Jack Dorsey, in May of last year, Jack Dorsey's the head of Twitter. Young, dynamic guy, billionaire. billionaire, led the way in so many areas in terms of the Twitterverse, but tech generally. And so tech was kind of leading the charge on this whole work from home thing. And last May, Jack Dorsey made headlines, as I said, around the world.

When he said this, Twitter employees can now work from home forever. Forever. Well, a lot of people sat up when they heard that. And not just Twitter employees, but other areas of tech. Thinking, you know what? Dorsey's always got his finger on the pulse. He knows what's happening and what's changing

and what may happen in the future. And so a lot of them started to say the same kind of things. Now, there was only one problem with that Dorsey quote. In fact, he did say those exact words, but he followed it up with another sentence. So it read like this. Twitter employees can now work from home forever if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home. Now, that was a pretty important if, right?

Well, between that ability to kind of get himself out of the original part of the quote, there's been a lot of changing in the thinking of both employers and employees. Some employees tired relatively quickly from this whole idea of let's work from home. Because they saw disadvantages on a personal level and on a professional level from working from home. But employers too, not just in productivity, although there was some indication

that productivity slipped somewhat in some areas, but also in their concerns about how the natural progression for employees may take place in terms of them working themselves up the ladder. So in that year, a number of things have happened. Twitter has now clarified that it expects a majority of its staff to spend some time working from home and some time in the office pretty much every silicon valley tech firm and i'm reading this from a piece that i saw on the bbc

pretty much every silicon valley tech firm has said that it is now committed to flexible or hybrid working. Amazon issued a statement to employees just last week saying our plan is to return to an office-centric culture as our baseline. We believe it enables us

to invent, collaborate, and learn together most effectively. Facebook said none of us have this all figured out. We are making this up on the fly. Here's some of the reasons that there's a lot of reconsidering going on on both sides, the employee front and the employer front. Working from home while there is no office open is one thing, but remote working's biggest test is going to be when the office starts opening up.

Let's say at 50% capacity. So starting, you know, relatively small. What happens when half the office is open and half is working from home? When meetings are being held partially in person and partially on Zoom, is the dynamic going to work quite so well as it seems to have in the past year? And when some team members develop face-to-face in-person relationships with managers, will remote workers feel disadvantaged? You betcha they will. When people are remote, I worry about what their career trajectory is going to be, said IBM's chief executive, Arvind Krishna. If they want to become a people manager, if they want to get increasing responsibilities, or if they want to build a culture within their teams, how are they going to do that remotely?

These are some of the questions being asked in firms and not just tech firms all over the place, all over the world. Uncertainly in Canada, I see them being asked in some of the firms that I'm associated with either as a board member or working directly with and for. So there's a lot of maneuvering and a lot of sort of post-pandemic structuring to work out here. Things are going to be different than they were before,

but how different? And to whose advantage? These are all good questions. Okay. While I'm on the BBC, yesterday, if you listened to the program yesterday, you heard me talk about the backlash that the BBC was getting on its coverage of the death of Prince Philip.

Basically, it came down to too much coverage and why is it on every BBC network there is, and there are four or five different BBC networks, and why is the same coverage on everything. And as I mentioned yesterday, that's a kind of a reminder of the way things used to be because when these rules or policies or guidelines were initially made up, there was only one BBC channel. Just like in Canada, there was only one CBC channel. But the landscapes changed a lot.

And in Britain, as I said, four or five different BBC channels, they were all taking the same stream of coverage. And as a result, other programs like football were blown off the air. And the one that apparently was the real center of discussion and center of dispute was the MasterChef final, the cook-off, whatever they do on MasterChef. I've never watched it, sorry, but I know it's very popular. And every, you know, not every country, but many countries have their own versions of MasterChef.

I think it was a MasterChef Canada, MasterChef USA, MasterChef Britain. Anyway, their final was scheduled for last Friday night, the big MasterChef final show of the year. And Friday was the day Prince Philip passed on and all the channels, not just the BBC, but all four or five of the BBC channels were covering that story with special coverage.

And so MasterChef final was put off, delayed, cancelled, postponed. Pick your term. Whatever your term is, it wasn't on the air Friday night and people were upset. And the BBC had to put out, had to set up a special complaints page on their website. And the past record holder for complaints at the CBC on a particular programming decision was a number of years ago when they ran a Jerry Springer musical.

I've never heard of that one, but apparently it existed, and it was a point of concern for many of BBC's viewers who were very upset. And on the complaints page, there were over 40,000 complaints. That's a lot of complaints. If you go to the trouble of writing in a complaint about something, you know that person's upset. Well, 40,000 is nothing compared with bouncing MasterChef final for coverage of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip's,

passing on Friday. More than 100,000 people complained. They're going to make all those complaints public later this week. That should make interesting reading. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk, wait for it,

hockey. All right. Some of you know that I'm a kind of a hockey nut, I guess, if you want to call it that. I love hockey. I love the Maple Leafs. Sorry. Love the Winnipeg Jets.

But mostly, I love the Maple Leafs. Anyway, we're not going to talk about teams. We're not going to talk about players. We are going to use the opportunity of yesterday was a big day in the hockey calendar. If you follow hockey, and for the discussion we're about to have, you don't need to have followed hockey. But if you follow hockey, yesterday was a big day. It was called the trade deadline. It's when teams, their last opportunity of the year, the season, to move players around, trade players.

And you always witness at that time, teams that think they're going to make the playoffs and have a chance to win the Stanley Cup will try to upgrade their team. Teams that know they have no chance are called sellers. They move their players for future, for the future, either in getting young players or young draft picks for even younger players. But that's kind of the basis of what the trade deadline day has been all about.

And, you know, crazy people like me tend to get up and watch the whole day on television or listen on radio to what the teams are doing and so i was there yesterday doing exactly that but it became clear to me that even a day like yesterday, the trade deadline day, has really changed in its nature. It's not really anymore about the players. It's about the business of hockey. And so I thought I would like to have this conversation that would be inclusive in the sense that anybody

interested in business would find this conversation interesting. So it's not about, you know, which player went to which team or any of that. It is about what did yesterday say about where we are in the state of hockey? Because there are a number of things going on that are pretty significant and worthy of discussion. So I thought, who can I talk to about this? Well, one of my old friends and old colleagues is a fellow by the name of Bruce Dobigan. He's a sportscaster, an award-winning sportscaster, an author.

He's got, I don't know, a dozen or more books, almost all of them on hockey that relate in some fashion to the business of hockey. They're not about sort of the glorification of certain players. They're about the business of hockey because it is a multi-billion dollar business that has expanded greatly. I mean, I grew up in the six-team era, right? There were just six teams. There were 120 players playing in the NHL. You knew, as a kid, you knew every one of them. You knew their stats.

You knew everything. Well, now there are more than 30 teams, many hundreds of players, and it's a big business across the U.S. and across Canada. So what did yesterday say about all this? And so I wanted to track Bruce down. He lives in Alberta, he's in Calgary. So I tracked him down and here's the conversation that we had all right bruce i want to talk about uh you know obviously about hockey but i don't want to get into the uh you know the ups and downs of the

different players who got moved around uh yesterday in the trade deadline but what i want to talk about is the business of hockey which is what you're one of the best at talking about and i want to know what yesterday said for starters about the state of hockey right now well the state of hockey it's always been a business it's always been about you know profit loss etc but but the whole nature of the nhL and how it does its business changed in 2005. If you people remember, we had no hockey for a year and the owners wanted a hard salary cap, which means there's a level that you can go to

to pay your players each year. That's the salary cap. If you go over it, you get penalized. They finally got the salary capped after taking a whole year off. And we've been at it now since, as I say, 2005. And it's evolved to, in the old days when I first started covering sports, general managers would trade players.

And now what happens is they trade contracts. And that's what we saw a lot of yesterday in this particular trade deadline. There weren't a lot of deals, not a lot of dramatic deals either. They're trading contracts so that they can keep themselves underneath the salary cap. And it's a tricky business of what have you got and what can I afford? And as I say, when you look at the trades now, they're less about, oh, we needed a left winger who can score or we needed a backup goalie than it is we have a problem going into next year and and matching the salary cap or staying underneath the salary cap so a lot of the deals uh had something to do with with salary caps and that that is a huge uh thing that has changed

in the in the league and it's it's something the fans some of them have never wrapped their arms around it frankly and i guess it's even more difficult this year uh given the sort of post pandemic or the pandemic issues that surround all businesses and hockey's no different uh the assumption is that the cap which has always gone up every year since it started a couple of million here a couple of million there um won't be going up this time around so so that's making it even more difficult for managers trying to handle contracts that are expected one assumes to go up for certain players uh managing the situation where you're not you can't keep everything yeah in fact most people didn't even notice because we're consumed with all the COVID stuff, but the NHL and the players association reached an agreement during the,

the pandemic that the players and the owners understood there would be fewer dollars involved. As you said, the salary cap will come down and they basically reached a formula for how much each salary would come down, how much a player would not get of the money that he was contracted for, because everybody has to take a haircut now as a result of this and so yes there's going to be a problem getting under the salary cap but they've managed to avoid an enormous problem which would be every player suing the league hey i'm not getting what what i signed up for the other thing that's about salary caps that has

changed and has changed hockey irrevocably now, Peter, is that if you're going to win the Stanley Cup, you basically have to do it with younger players and you have to do it with players before they get to their second and third contracts and make a huge amount of money. A great example would be Sidney Crosby coming into the league with the Pittsburgh Penguins in the middle of the 2000s. And in his first sort of go around in the nhl contract wise the penguins were able to win a stanley cup they were also in the final uh another time and why was that because they weren't paying sydney crosby what he was worth and thus they were able to pay people around him a lot more money so they could surround them with good players and what's happening now with

all of these teams is that they are trying to basically bone up on all of these young players so they can stay under the salary cap and they have a shot at winning. The analogy would be you're making a movie or, you know, in Stratford, for instance, where you are, you're staging a play. You have a budget and you've decided in the movie you're going to employ Tom Cruise. Well, Cruise uses up almost all of your budget. So then you have to go around and get actors who frankly, aren't that good or aren't that interesting to watch. That's what they get me for. I'm hanging around Stratford waiting for Tom needs somebody to go and stand beside him.

I thought you were going to say you're a spear carrier now on the chorus. But anyhow, that's, that's the analogy when you're watching hockey these days it's like a it's like a movie budget and if you spend a lot of money on tom cruise you can't afford great special effects and you can't afford the kind of actors you want etc so if you're paying all this money as edmonton is for instance the edmonton oilers are paying a lot of money uh to two or three of their top players do they have enough money to pay the other guys to make them into a championship team? The Maple Leafs, another example, almost all of their good players are young players who are sort of on their first salary go around. They're at prices that the team can afford, but that's not going to last much longer. And so the Leafs, there's a lot of

pressure on teams like the Leafs, whose window is open, who have a chance to win this year. I can't believe I'm saying the Leafs are going to win a cup, but anyhow, who have a chance to win a Stanley Cup this year. But they've got to do it now because the economics are going to kill them in a couple of years. What about the overall economics for hockey itself? I mean, is the business of hockey, you know, have they adapted enough through the various things, salary caps, pandemic, you name it, that it's a

viable business well certainly the number of dollars that come in compared to when gary betman started as a commissioner uh there's a lot more money in the industry now so you have to give that to him we're seeing yet another expansion uh seattle this summer will join the nhl as the 32nd team uh there still seems to be an appetite for people to want to join the NHL. Plus, they're about to do a new TV contract, a new, well, it's not just TV anymore. It's TV and digital contract. And there is a sense that they will make a lot of money out of that. So the NHL at that level, I think, is a success.

You know, the on ice product, maybe you've talked to Ken Dryden about his latest book and some of his latest theories about what's happening. Ken's got some really interesting ideas about why the game itself is, is suffering on the ice, but as a business, you know, it's a franchise. It's like Kentucky fried chicken right now. It's a franchise business. And there's a lot of places who still want Kentucky fried chicken. My own feeling is, and I talked about this in one of my,

my earlier books, Cap and Hand, is that there are too many teams at the top level that we need to have, like soccer does in Europe. We have to have teams in divisions where you let the big dog eat. My own theory is that a city like Toronto, which has the ability to spend, should be able to spend the way the soccer guys do. But that's my own particular philosophy, and I don't think anybody's kicking Garyary bettman out before he wants to go so would it be fair to say if you you know

if you tend to agree with the fact that or the belief that that uh gary bettman has done a a good job in terms of a business job and if you believe ken dryden and who's not going to believe ken dryden that the product on the ice is not as good as it used to be is it fair to say then that the business is up the the game is down that that would be fair to say although i would say the skill level is better than it's ever been i mean the players even the even the 18th guy on the roster would have been a star back in the original six era. Ken's comment is that the players are fantastic, but what they've allowed the game to do, the referees and the owners have allowed the game to do,

is to suppress the skilled players' ability to express themselves on the ice as well as they can do it. And one of the reasons is the goalies. And the goalies are too good. The equipment is too good. And it's changed the game into something that's not as attractive as it could be. It's a plodding game in some respects. And you have thoroughbreds, and they're playing, you know, like they're pulling a wagon instead of out there running for the roses.

You know, Elliot Friedman had an interesting comment a couple of weeks ago. It was around the time that the referee got fired, the one who'd, you know. Tim Peel. Yeah, Tim Peel, who was overheard basically saying he was calling a penalty on somebody to even out one he'd missed earlier, one that hadn't been called earlier. And he got fired for that. And Friedman's comment about it was that

what the league is deathly afraid of is that they're moving into an era where there's going to be a lot more association between hockey and gambling and they cannot afford to have any sense that games are you know run the potential of being rigged. You're reading my mind on that. In fact, I was just about to move in that direction. My column, which I just published today on Not the Public Broadcaster, is about that issue, about sports. And in particular, I'm talking about baseball.

But all sports, how are you going to adapt to the new world of legalized gambling? The United States, of course, up until 2018, only Las Vegas, you could do sports gambling. Now, 40 states are able to do it in the United States, and I suspect others will come in. We are about to enter a phase in which people will watch a game in a bunch of different levels. You'll watch because your team is playing or one of your favorite players is playing. But you'll also maybe because you have put $5 down on the Oilers to win tonight or the Canucks to win tonight. And if they go the full Monty with this thing, you're going to see you'll be able to bet before the drop of a puck for a shift, whether Taylor Hall will score a goal or whether, you know, the Maple Leafs will give up a goal on the shift, etc. There's a whole new world about how people are going to

watch games. They'll almost be like video games. And there's a ton of money involved in this. So the sports, they're definitely headed that way. And as you just said, the thing about the integrity of the result is everything. Typically, we haven't had too many scandals about it because, frankly, Peter, the players who can affect the game most are paid such amounts of money. How are you going to bribe a guy who's making $20 million a year? So they've taken a little bit of that out. But the whole world of sports and gambling, how it's incorporated into broadcasts, etc., I know you couldn't believe that maybe one of the intermissions could be given over to something other than scratching your head and talking about the

third line shift or whatever. But I could see a whole first period intermission or second period intermission dedicated to how the odds have changed, what you can do, et cetera, as you follow the game at home with your laptop or even in the arena where you might have access to betting from your seat. So it's a whole new world and there's going to be a ton of money involved. And your point about the integrity of it is well taken. Last question. I mean, you've made almost a living out of hockey through all the various books you've written on it, which have mostly been focused, if not entirely focused, on the business side of hockey right at this point

um knowing as you do that hockey is such an integral part of somehow being canadian um what do you worry about in terms of hockey well uh my brother the university professor likes to say that the the only thing canadians share are hockey and the equalization program. He thinks those are the two things that keep us together these days. So when you ask me a question about what I think about the future of hockey, it is a big issue. My biggest concern could be that and especially because hockey and producing hockey players has become more successful in the United States. There are tons of really quality players. Look at Austin Matthews, players who were born and bred in the United States. My fear would be that American owners are going to get to the point saying, why do we have, except for the very, very best Canadian players, why do we have Canadians

here when we should have American guys playing? You know, sort of a Donald Trump sort of approach to it. But why don't we have Americans here? And possibly as Europe gets more and more good players, that they start doing it, that we don't see as many Canadians as we used to in the NHL. I think the figure now is below 60% of Canadians, maybe even 50%. I haven't looked at the statistics this year.

But that would be my concern as a Canadian, that we'll see fewer and fewer Canadians. The effort guys, the third and fourth line guys who we used to worship when we were kids growing up, that we may not see them in the league anymore. The Canadian teams, you know, I think financially they're okay. But as you know, Peter, if we have a problem with the dollar again, the way we did back in the 1990s, the early 2000s, that would be very tough on a city like Winnipeg, a city like Edmonton, maybe even Calgary. So those are the things that would concern me.

But I would think right now it's a pretty good status quo for them, and I think they're in a decent position. Bruce, always good to talk to you, and always good to talk to you about hockey. So thanks for this. Thanks, Pete. I appreciate it. Bruce Stobigan talking to us from Calgary about the business side of hockey, especially that we have a better view of the landscape right now and a better

understanding of some of the decision-making that goes into all this based on what we witnessed yesterday at the trade deadline. Bruce is a best-selling author and an award-winning broadcaster. You can check out his books on any of the various book sites, Indigo, Amazon, what have you. As I said, there's about a dozen of them. And, you know, they're almost exclusively on hockey, although he did do this great profile on Tony Comper.

He helped Tony write his book on his background as a senior executive at BMO. And it's really interesting on how Tony handled certain issues that confronted the bank during his term. And he was a guest on our program about, I don't know, a month or two months ago when we were talking about Bitcoin. Anyway, Bruce Dobrigan, author, broadcaster, and a pretty insightful guy when it gets around to the business of hockey. All right, that's going to kind of wrap it up for this day.

And a couple of notes about, you know, tomorrow, of course, Wednesday, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth, Bruce Anderson will be by. There's some stuff going on in the way Canadians are relating to their politicians and some changes in the dynamic

that we've witnessed in the first months of year one of the pandemic to what we're looking at right now especially in some parts of the country so we'll talk to Bruce about that and other things as we always do on Wednesdays. Thursday I got a special guest coming on Dominic Cook do you know who that is you know if you follow theater or movies, then you've probably heard of Dominic Cook. He is a British theater director and a movie director. And he's got a new movie that's coming out digitally. It's new in the sense that it was finished last year, but because of the pandemic, it couldn't be released. but it is being released now.

It's called The Courier, and it stars one of my favorite actors and possibly one of yours too, Benedict Cumberbatch. It's a story, a little told story, about what was going on in the background during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And if you're a student of history, and that period of the early 1960s intrigues you at all, you're going to enjoy this movie. You know, it's not an action thriller. It's not that kind of movie.

There are some thrilling action moments in it. But it's basically a story of espionage and the Cold War. And it's really, I found it quite interesting. Anyway, we reached Dominic in London the other day, and we're going to run that interview on Thursday. And it's more than just about the movie. It's also a little about him because he has this great record in theater

and in movies. And how you cross back and forth between those two platforms of the entertainment media is interesting to hear about. Anyway, that's Thursday. Friday, of course, the weekend special. So we've got

Chalkablock for the rest of the week. Hope you enjoyed this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. this has been the bridge thanks for listening we'll talk to you again 24 hours Thank you.