The WFH public sector party is over

Tuesday, 24 September 2024

Luke Malpass is business, politics and economics editor for The Post.

OPINION: What the finance minister takes on the one hand, she gives with the other.

There may have been big job cuts in central Government which have affected Wellington’s economy, but now Nicola Willis - who is also public service minister - has set an expectation that public servants work from the office.

In a post-Cabinet press conference yesterday announcing the policy, there were no hard targets, and plenty of language around ministries fulfilling their legal obligations which includes providing flexible working arrangements, but the message was clear: get back to the office.

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, working from home has been much more common. Anyone who works in Wellington central has noticed that since the end of Covid, the number of people in and around the city has reduced. Some days it’s like a ghost town. Prior to the sharper end of higher interest rates and the current downturn, the effect of retail and hospitality sector was already clear.

In Willis’ simple words, 'If it’s possible for you to work in the office, you should.'

The most amusing and also concerning thing about the Government’s announcement was that it does not really, in fact, have any idea of the number of people who work from home, how often and on what days, let alone what roles they may be in.

This move comes a long time after many private companies made more aggressive moves to get more people back in the office.

It also comes a month after the NSW Government - led by Australian Labor Party premier Chris Minns - also put out guidance saying that public service work should be principally done in an approved workplace.

When making his announcement, Minns said the request was reasonable because over 85% of NSW public servants didn’t have the option of working from home anyway.

In typically direct Australian lingo, the popular Minns was blunt about the situation. 'You can't be a nurse in your tracky dacks in the lounge room, and you can't teach a class in your backyard while you're doing jobs around the house.'

He also said that it was about “building up a culture in the public service,” and claimed that overseas studies had shown that widespread working from home led to a drop in productivity.

“There is a drop in mentorship. There is less of a sense of joint mission,” Minns said in August.

Although, like this Government, there was no direction given on exact numbers of days. Minns said he expected it was a minimum of three per week in the office.

This particular aspect of the announcement was safe space for PM Christopher Luxon who views himself as being a proactive and active manager of teams. More prosaically than Minns, Luxon talked about the importance of workplace performances, building “cadres of talent” and engaging in “ideation” in the office. Nicola Willis talked about asking colleagues in the tearoom about document management systems.

However you talk about it, the vibe is the same. Many in management in the public sector are sceptical of widespread working from home arrangements - because it does often affect productivity, can affect culture and may mean workplaces lack spontaneous conversations where creativity and problem-solving occur. Some people thrive working from home, but others don’t.

And the fact that there are either patchy or no records kept across the public sector should be a bit of an eye opener. How can senior management manage the practice when there is little understanding of what the practice actually is?

The Public Service Association leapt out of the blocks denouncing the moves four minutes after the Government announced them. Fair enough: they want flexibility for their members and don’t want what they view as entitlements being lessened (the PSA in NSW did the same thing).

The Restaurant Association also, unsurprisingly, weighed in supporting the move and one Wellington hospitality owner said he was dancing around the room.

However, nothing is mandated. The various Government departments could well coincidentally decide that whatever their current numbers come in at, happen to also be an optimum level for high performance.

This is a management move, not some hard-arsed economic rationalist move some might claim. That would be to assume a decent level of working from home, encouraging a bit more of it and then right-sizing (reducing) the amount of government-leased office space in Wellington. It would mean rostering days in the office while moving to complete hot desking, with lockers and so on. And that would genuinely screw Wellington for years. The government is doing the opposite.

Willis has said she intends to get the Public Service Commission to collate all the data and make it public early in the new year. At that point the voters, politicians (and Wellingtonians) will get a truer picture of just how flexible public service working conditions really are, and be able to draw a more direct line to economic activity in the city centre.

It may of course turn out that the anecdotes are largely wrong. But is seems unlikely.

What does seem likely is that whatever each department’s public number is, ministry chief executives good at reading the Beehive will be keen to drive it down.

Working from home isn’t over in the public sector. But it looks likely to drastically reduce.