About this edition
Illuminating possibilities.
AI is supposed to make work easier, but new data says otherwise. This week on the SMB Pulse, we dig into what that means for your team, alongside a federal funding announcement that Canadian employees shouldn’t miss.
We're also hosting a free webinar on April 2nd with Employment Hero's Interim Regional CEO KJ Lee, and our own CSO, Dave Harrhy, built for anyone managing people in 2026 and wondering why retention keeps getting harder.
Ottawa invests in Labour Market Intelligence
$94.5M to close Canada’s growing skills shortage.
Finding skilled workers is one of the most consistent problems for Canadian SMBs, and it isn’t getting easier. The federal government’s Sectoral Workforce Solutions Program aims to address this national issue — it's investing $94.5 million over five years to support 14 industry organizations tasked with building real labour market intelligence for their sectors.
In practice, this means Canadian businesses will receive more employer-facing resources, including updated occupational standards, training curricula, HR tools, and 10-year forecasts of where workforce gaps are heading. The funding covers most of the industries where hiring pressure is most acute right now: Agriculture, construction, energy, forestry, mining, manufacturing, ICT, and more.
These sectors track closely with where the government has placed its economic priorities: housing construction, clean energy, domestic resource development, and digital infrastructure. If your business sits in any of these industries, there is now a federally funded organization whose job is to analyze workforce struggles so the government can build programs to help solve them.
Most of them already publish research, employer toolkits, and training resources at no cost. The new funding means those resources will be more current and tied to where the labour market is actually heading over the next decade, not where it was three years ago.
ActivTrak’s AI Adoption & Workforce study
Is AI really giving your team time back?
One of the most widely held assumptions about AI in the workplace is that it reduces workload. Employees use it to move faster, finish tasks sooner, and recover time for higher-value work. However, a large new study from the ActivTrak Productivity Lab challenges that directly, with data drawn from over 443 million hours of real workplace activity.
The 2026 State of the Workplace report analyzed more than 443 million hours of workplace activity across 1,111 organizations and 163,638 employees over three years — one of the largest behavioural datasets on this subject published to date. The finding that stands out: AI is accelerating workloads, not lightening them.
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Stop burnout before it starts.
Live webinar with Employment Hero, April 2nd.
The data from this week's AI story points to something business owners across every industry are already feeling: the pace of work is increasing, and the people absorbing that pace are wearing down faster than most leaders notice. Some are left with less meaningful work than before, as few businesses have figured out what to do with the capacity that AI freed up.
On April 2nd, Spraggs Group's CSO Dave Harrhy and Employment Hero's Interim Regional CEO KJ Lee are hosting a complimentary, live one-hour webinar on exactly this. The session is built around getting ahead of the problem with real data and systems, not gut-feel management after the fact.
This session will cover:
- Why burnout is spreading faster than most leaders realize
- How to build a data-forward feedback culture that employees actually trust
- Proven retention mechanics across recognition, career development, and mental health
- What to do when your team is already struggling
- The compensation and benefits trends defining employee loyalty in 2026
The session runs on April 2nd, 3:00 to 4:00pm PT. If you miss it live, it will be available on demand afterward.
Discover what Spraggs Group can do for you.
Create clarity, strengthen communication, and elevate your team’s performance. Discover how Vistera and our communications and training expertise help your business create engaging, compliant, and effective content. Schedule an informative, no-obligation call with our Small Business Liaison today.