More than five years after the pandemic spurred a mass shift toward working from home, employers are increasingly expecting their workers to come back to the office.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
If there’s one sacred commandment of workplace etiquette it’s that fish should never be heated in the office microwave. Decency and common courtesy require that one person’s pleasure can’t become everyone else’s pain.
Unfortunately, as offices fill back up, not everyone agrees on the importance of peaceable co-existence. And these office frictions reflect bigger issues that extend beyond bad smells in the workplace. Since the pandemic emerged, Canadians have faced new levels of anti-social behaviour.
To combat this, everyone needs to think about what they can do help rebuild the social contract.
The idea of expected norms of behaviour may seem a bit antiquated – something from a more conformist time, perhaps enforced by tongue-wagging neighbourhood gossips – but it’s still how people are able to live and work together.
This succeeds, though, only if a critical mass of people buy in. And that expectation is showing cracks as white-collar workers spend more time in the office. Most of Canada’s big banks started requiring four days a week this autumn, the Ontario public service will mandate five days next monthand Prime Minister Mark Carney is looking to update back-to-work rules for federal civil servants.
That is a lot of together time when Canadians appear to be getting ruder. There are plenty of signs that the pandemic did something to behaviour, whether it was the lockdowns, fear of illness, the financial stress, or growing distrust of authority.
One impact was to driving. When work-at-home policies began roads became noticeably emptier, which led to much more speeding. That habit seems to have stuck, along with new levels of obnoxious behaviour behind the wheel. In 2023, nearly half of Canadians said drivers were worse than they had been five years earlier.
Online behaviour deteriorated as well. A 2023 scientific paper noted that the trend of increasing harassment and bullying on social media had “intensified since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.” When the authors looked at Canadian university students specifically, they found the people they studied lacked empathy and engaged in anti-social online behaviour for fun and social approval.
A lack of concern for others was also reflected by many transit riders. In a number of cities, spikes in fare evasion put pressure on budgets, because someone has to pay for those free riders. The Toronto Transit Commission reported the evasion rate doubled to 11.9 per cent in 2023 from 5.7 per cent in 2019. Skipping the fare was more likely at the rear doors of buses and streetcars – removed from the gaze of the driver.
Such trends are more than a nuisance. Urban life can be fractious and a willingness to stay out of each other’s business is crucial. But minding your own business is step one. Not shoving your business in others’ faces is step two. Such social norms help large numbers of people to live close together. When anti-social behaviour undermines these norms, it can cause escalating problems.
Return-to-office mandates likely to worsen Toronto traffic, experts say
People will follow rules that they believe make sense and, importantly, if they feel they aren’t the only one playing along. A sense that others are getting away with bad behaviour can lead to a snowballing of rule-breaking.
Conversely, the sense that there are commonly held expectations of behaviour can be powerfully motivating. Consider how little garbage there is on Canadian streets. That’s not because people fear a ticket, but because they have bought into a social norm against littering.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy recently pleaded with Americans to be more civil while flying. His evoking of a golden era of travel missed the mark in a key way. Flying back then was exclusive and expensive, so of course it was different than being crammed into the economy section. Mr. Duffy was correct, though, that courtesy still matters. Doing the right thing by your fellow air traveller – or driver, straphanger or desk-mate – is part of the grease that helps society operate smoothly. It’s also contagious.
Returning to the office is increasingly putting in close quarters people who may have become a bit too accustomed to doing their own thing working remotely. The office is a microcosm of society and colleagues are fellow citizens. Respect goes a long way. So leave the fish at home.
The Sunday Editorial: This year’s top 10 editorials, according to Globe readers. Find it tomorrow morning at globeandmail.com.