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Business service centers have challenges from the pandemic well handled.
Mike Rublack, from Opportunities New Brunswick, said business service centre sectors range from a five-person shop to hundreds of employees.
The Investment Attraction team reached out to more than 90 companies in the province. These companies represent 12,000 jobs across different sectors.
Rublack said it’s still a work in progress but at last count they had reached out to 75 per cent of those and half of those fall into business service centre sectors.
“Some of the insights that we heard, to no surprise, revenues pretty much across the board were impacted negatively but scale of the impact related to the industries that the centres serviced,” he said.
Rublack said other centres servicing essential services were much less impacted.
“Servicing the essential services, the insurance, banking, telecoms, retail supply chain, logistics, all of these centres were much less impacted and for the most part it was business as usual for them,” said Rublack.
“On the headcount front, voluntary and temporary layoffs occurred in the companies playing in those harder hit industries. It’s very tough for sure,” he said.
Rublack said the majority of the centres he had spoken do did not have any layoffs, as it was important to them to show the employees their commitment.
He said the majority of the centres are doing OK, likely because of the diverse interests which also is of benefit to the province.
Rublack said challenges for the centres came in stages. He said the first challenge was understanding who was and was not essential and then from there, because of how large some of the centres are, they had to figure out workplace distancing, facility floor mapping.
“I know a lot of the companies that I talked to they had reached out to contact NB, they reached out to EDGSJ, they reached out to our business navigators and all those folks played a huge role in helping these companies out of the gate,” he said.
Rublack said the shift to working from home required equipping staff with the tools they needed to work remotely, and it happened smoothly, with some companies able to shift 75 to 100 per cent of the employees to remote work.
He said while the companies are working on a return to work playbook, they are also looking at their real estate footprint especially in more expensive jurisdictions.
Rublack said because of the success of the work from home, they’re looking at expanding that opportunity in the future.
He said one of the opportunities the pandemic presented is showcasing the New Brunswick brand due to the success of planning and preparation, especially to the US, which we didn’t have before this.
“Usually when I’m attracting companies, one of the first questions is what’s the population of New Brunswick and they’re sometimes concerned about the smallness of the province or the population but that played in our favour this time,” Rublack said.
“Less densely populated jurisdictions so far are the ones who are coming out on top, and it’s good to know from a business continuity perspective.”
He said many of the business service centers are critical functions to their organizations and now their headquarters are recognizing it.
Rublack said infrastructure and technology were absolutely key. He said business service centres worked quickly to get people operational from home and that isn’t standard across the board for more global centres where infrastructure is lacking.
He said Saint John is well positioned to these problems companies were facing world-wide.
“I think we’ve got a really awesome and positive story to tell companies going forward.”
