Daisy moseys over to greet visitors, her tail wagging. She’s listed as chief morale officer on Tungsten Collaborative’s website, and is among the many pets joining their owners returning to Canadian offices after working from home through the pandemic. The 12-year-old Lab sniffs for treats. Before long, a Basset Hound named Delilah waddles over, offering up her belly for a rub, along with other four-legged colleagues Eevee the Greyhound and German Shepherd puppy Hudson, who lets out a bark.
Daisy’s proficiencies include “stress management” and “client engagement,” according to her biography, which notes that many of the industrial design studio’s “greatest innovations can be traced back to a long walk” with her. “We encourage people if they have pets to bring them (to work),” Tungsten president Bill Dicke, 47, said in an interview with AFP. “You develop this relationship being at home with your pet on a day-to-day basis and all of a sudden you go back to work, so now they have to be crated for the day or roam the house alone, it’s not fair to them,” he opined.
“The tolerance for pets (at work) during the pandemic has increased,” he added. These dogs sleep under desks or in the boardroom throughout the day, chase balls down a hallway or chew squeaky toys. There’s a row of water bowls in the office kitchen, if they get thirsty.
The Ottawa company is listed by the Humane Society as dog-friendly, and it’s actually helped drum up business, Dicke said, as well as increased staff productivity. Workers are forced to take regular breaks for dog walks instead of “eating lunch at their desk,” for example, and are not fretting about their pet being left alone at home, he explained.
According to a recent Leger survey for PetSafe, 51 percent of Canadians support bringing dogs to the office. Younger workers were the most supportive, with 18 percent of those aged 18 to 24 years saying they would change jobs if their employer refused to allow them to bring their pet to work. With an estimated 200,000 Canadians adopting a dog or cat since the start of the pandemic in 2020, bringing the nationwide total to 3.25 million.—AFP
