Obviously, it’s just a wild coincidence that the WFH days are on either side of the weekend. It
won’t be at all because that creates a four-day weekend and allows a public servant to spend four whole glorious days at the beach house.
No, it’s because of productivity. One is so much more productive at home when one’s colleagues can’t just bowl up to the desk and ask inane questions every five minutes.
It started with the first Covid lockdown when everyone went home. But when most of us went back into the office, public servants didn’t.
They stayed at home, putting on the washing and baking casseroles between Zoom meetings.
The impact on the Wellington economy has been massive. Shops and bars and lunch places have fallen one by one. Many – probably public servants breaking briefly from their casserole preparation – will argue with this analysis and blame Wellington’s decline on other things: the country’s economic downturn, the Government’s firing of public servants.
But they’d be wrong. Because while those factors make it much worse, this story started as soon as the Covid restrictions lifted and shop owners noticed fewer grey suits coming in on lunch breaks.
The numbers doing remote work are staggering. At every single government agency for which data is available online, more than half the staff have some flexible work arrangements. The only exceptions are our spy agencies. The two worst offenders are the Ministry for the Environment (94% of staff on flexible work) and the Serious Fraud Office (95%).
Fidel’s owner calls remote working Wellington’s number one crisis.
Some bars have seen Friday after-work drinks completely disappear. Others say they’ve moved to Thursday after-work drinks. That’s a hint, isn’t it? Obviously a few public servants are treating Thursday like the end of the working week.
The public service obviously thinks this is the future. Things will never go back to the way they were. Some departments have downsized their office space to accommodate fewer in-person workers. Others are moving to new, smaller offices big enough for only a third of their staff at any one time.
They may be in for a rude surprise. Rumour has it the coalition Government is considering whether to order them back into the office a bit more often.
About time.
The New South Wales government has ordered its public servants to work primarily from the office. Amazon just ordered its staff back in fulltime, five days a week from January 2 because they think it’s better for business.
If the world’s sixth biggest company reckons it’s better for workers to be sitting at their desks rather than under their duvets, the rest of us might want to consider why.
The Government obviously doesn’t need to go full Amazon on Wellington. There should be some room for flexibility. For mums with sick kids, parents doing pick-ups and drop-offs, disciplined workers who’ve earned the privilege of remote working.
But thousands of taxpayer-funded workers absent twice a week feels like taking the mickey.
There’s no downside to ordering them back into the office. It’d be good for the governing parties, given that they tell us they’re here to whip the country back into shape. It’d be good for the private sector too, providing an example for corporates to point to while they still struggle to get the reclusive IT teams to actually turn up at HQ. And it’d be good for the Wellington economy.
The only people it’d be bad for are the public servants forced to cut down their time at the beach house.
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