Meet Daisy the dog – this company’s ‘chief morale officer’ as WFH ends | Video | World News

As companies around the world end their WFH, or work-from-home, arrangements and return to their offices, one big question is doing the rounds – how will employees get used to formal work environments (and the stress and tension of Monday morning meetings and frantic late nights fine-tuning PPTs) after more than two years of working from the comfort of their houses?

For a Canadian firm the answer is simple – hire dogs! 

Meet Daisy, a 12-year-old Labrador and the ‘chief morale officer’ at Ottawa-based Tungsten Collaborative.

She greets employees and visitors each day with a cheerful wag of the tail and a goofy grin that will lighten any mood and is one of several pets now a staple at post-pandemic Canadian workplaces because their caregivers do not want to leave them at home after all this time.

“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,” Bill Dicke, president of Tungsten Collaborative, told news agency AFP.

“We encourage people if they have pets to bring them (to work),” Dicke told AFP.

Daisy is listed as chief morale officer on Tungsten Collaborative’s website and is among the many pets joining their owners returning to Canadian office

She roams her new ‘workplace’ with at least three other doggie colleagues – an adorable Basset Hound named Delilah, Eevee the Greyhound and German Shepherd puppy Hudson – and her skills include ‘stress management’ and ‘client engagement’. Her ’employers’ note that many of the industrial design studio’s ‘greatest innovations can be traced back to a long walk’ with her.

An estimated 200,000 Canadians have adopted a dog or cat since the start of the pandemic, and hundreds of thousands more have been adopted worldwide.

And companies in Canada, the US and other nations are responding positively, with Amazon and Google among those to now have ‘pet-friendly’ policies.

Not everyone is in favour though, with AFP quoting some employees as expressing concern because they are afraid of dogs or just don’t want to have to deal with stains on the carpets.

With input from AFP




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