Ms. Catrina Tapley:
Thank you for the question.
When the pandemic hit in March, we realized that some parts of our workforce were better equipped to work from home than others. For about 55% of our workforce—and we have about 9,000 employees here in Canada—it was easy to disconnect a laptop from their workstation and continue to work at home. “Easy” may be a stretch.
However, for many of our workers, particularly those on the processing side, where we run shifts—two shifts and sometimes three shifts a day—it's pretty difficult for one person to take the equipment, and in most cases it's not equipment that is easy to take home. Part of the problem thus became one of equipping our own labour force to work effectively from home and to do it well.
We saw a real hit on productivity. As we've been able to equip our workforce, as we've been able to train and get people back up to speed, we've seen productivity rise steadily. In the fall, now that people have gotten used to this and gotten used to new equipment, we've seen very good results on productivity around particular files.
If you can indulge me for one second, I think a really good example of this might be found in the call centre. I know it can be a source of frustration from time to time, but it is a microcosm for how much of this worked.
We had to send employees home who were not equipped to work from home. It became a real conundrum to find out how to do this fast, how to get equipment to employees, how to find software that was going to work in both official languages, to test the software, to train the employees, and to get it back up and working.
We did it in about five weeks. We've just now reintroduced the call-back feature for the call centre, which I know is popular and I think provides very good client service. It acts as a bit of a microcosm for the things we had to reinvent in the department to be able to get the productivity numbers the minister mentioned back up.
