WORK

As part of the fight against COVID-19, Canada is urging “employees at all work sites … to work remotely whenever and wherever possible.” Although we might find comfort in thinking switching between office and remote work is mostly an IT problem, three decades of management research on telecommuting tells us that the real challenges are just starting. Thousands of teams across Canada are going through the difficult transition of redefining the way they function. How teams tackle these challenges will have profound consequences on their productivity and the well-being of their members. Below are three challenges teams will face, and practical recommendations on how to mitigate their effects. Redefining communication norms Office workers share a large amount of information in person — they ...

The U.S. unemployment rate climbed from a half-century low of 3.5% to 4.4% in March – and is expected to go a lot higher. But could the rate, as some predict, surpass the 25% joblessness the U.S. experienced at the peak of the Great Depression? CC BY-ND As a macroeconomist who has tracked the labor force for decades, I’ve been wondering about this myself. There are actually two figures the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to estimate employment levels in the U.S. One is the unemployment rate, which comes from the Current Population Survey. The U.S. Census Bureau contacts about 60,000 randomly selected households every month to get an estimate of this rate. The other is an estimate of how many nonfarm jobs were lost or created in the month. The Bureau of Labor Statistics creates these fi...

Remote work amid the coronavirus pandemic: 3 solutions

How high will unemployment go? During the Great Depression, 1 in 4 Americans were out of work