Given all the work we do with the industry associations and our common mission to serve Canada’s new car dealers, cohabitation made great sense.
Universus, the parent company that publishes this magazine, is now fully committed to what is often referred to as a hybrid office model. We now have new neighbours sharing our space—neighbours that will be familiar to many of you.
As of September 1, Universus is now providing office space to the Trillium Automobile Dealers Association (TADA). This is made possible by the aforementioned hybrid staffing model, which we (and many, many others) have been exploring since not long into the pandemic.
Let’s summarize what this means:
- Before the pandemic, Universus maintained enough office space for ALL our GTA-based staff. Everyone worked from the office every day;
- To my knowledge, so did TADA;
- Moving forward, we won’t. TADA is subletting a portion of our office space and our two organizations will work side-by-side;
- As we aren’t adding space to make this possible, it means neither Universus or TADA will have enough office space for everyone to come back to work at the office every day. Hence the term hybrid.
Now we dive into that place where the Devil always lies: in the details.
Over the next few months, we will complete our review of every role in Universus. Some will be defined as flex roles, where the people in the role will have the option to work a portion of the week from home and a portion of the week in the office.
Others will be defined as either fully in office, or fully remote roles. Exactly what “flex” means will likely be a moving target too. From all the reading I’ve done, it’s clear this needs to be very carefully defined, and not left simply to each individual’s day-to-day discretion.
Once the role definitions are in place, we’ll see how individual staff members want to proceed. At that point we will, like the rest of the office-based economy, see how it goes and adapt as we learn because I expect there to be some real challenges.
We’ll be happy to share what we learn so others may benefit. For now, a number of our staff no longer have their offices to come back to post-pandemic, and that is an adjustment.
In some ways, having TADA under our roof takes me back to where Universus started and spent the first seven-odd years of our life. We launched in 2010 as the first external tenant in the building jointly owned by the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association (CADA) and TADA.
Given all the work we do with the industry associations and our common mission to serve Canada’s new car dealers, cohabitation made great sense. It did then, and it still does now.
Universus and TADA work together on a range of projects and initiatives, and we expect that connection will only deepen. Having no fences helps make for productive neighbours (I know that’s not how the saying goes, but still).
To TADA, I’m thrilled to extend a welcome to 205 Riviera Drive. To our staff at Universus, I continue to be thankful for the remarkable way you’ve adapted to remote work through the pandemic. We’ll apply the lessons we’ve learned, learn some new ones, and show how much sense a hybrid model makes for this industry even when it doesn’t have four wheels.
