Toronto - Nov. 16, 2021 - A newly released survey by Zoho Corporation has revealed a surprising amount of growth among Canadian businesses in 2021 - despite the extreme challenges of navigating the pandemic - as a majority of the respondents indicated they experienced year-over-year growth in 2021.
The survey - which queried 501 business owners across Canada - found that 72.5% of businesses had year-over-year growth in 2021 and even more said they had high hopes for the future, with 82.6 % stating they had optimism for growth in 2022.
“The pandemic has greatly accelerated digital transformation for many Canadian businesses, and they're seeing fantastic returns on their investments. The innovative technologies they are embracing have enabled them to manage a distributed workforce like never before, which sets these businesses up for a new future of work,” said Chandrashekar LSP, evangelist for Zoho in Canada. “As business leaders and entrepreneurs continue to drive digitization and automation within their organizations, it is vital they determine how to best support their team with the tools they need, and collaboration and productivity tools like those from Zoho will be a key part of that.”
Key Survey Findings:
- 72.5% of Canadian businesses say their business is growing when compared to 2020, with the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) leading the pack at 77.6%, Montreal lagging behind at 66.7%, and Calgary coming in last at only 59.3%.
- 82.6% of Canadian businesses are optimistic about the next 12 months, although that optimism is significantly less pronounced in Calgary with only 67.9% stating optimism for 2022.
- 66.3% of businesses say they are at the intermediate to advanced level of fully digitizing/automating their businesses, indicating a strong acceleration in digital transformations.
- Business apps are popular among Canadian businesses with 56.9% of respondents using 1-40 apps and another 7.6% using more than 40 apps.
- 64.9% said low-code apps improve speed-to-market and another 62.2% plan to use a low-code tool to build more apps.
- While 40% say they'll maintain a work-from-home or hybrid model in the future, 33.3% of respondents overall said they're unsure about where their employees will ultimately work. This is in stark contrast to Montreal, where 50% of those surveyed plan on having employees return to the office full-time.
- Almost 1-in-5 people surveyed have relocated since the beginning of the pandemic.
"While some businesses struggled with the disruption of the pandemic, as we now see, a majority of entrepreneurs and business leaders continue to succeed in large part due to their use of innovative technology designed to improve productivity and collaboration,” said LSP. “Focusing their investments on apps that resolve operational challenges - including digitization and retention challenges - while delivering real-time insights for business decisions, will be a critical step to their continued success as we further navigate through the pandemic.”
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Report Methodology
Conducted in October 2021 by Zoho Survey, this study contacted 501 individuals across Canada. Participants of the study included a range of business leaders from manager roles to the C-level at small and large enterprises across a variety of industries.
