Kerre Woodham: The Public Service Commission should be keeping track of who's working from home

The big corporations have already started ordering their staff back into the office, now the Government’s had enough too. Nicola Willis made the announcement yesterday. While carefully defined, working from home arrangements can benefit workers and employers, she said, if the pendulum swings too far in favour of working from home, there are downsides. And that's even before we consider the effects for the CBD retailers, restaurants and cafes.

She said there are good reasons why employees have traditionally been physically brought together for work. It allows for face-to-face conversation, the sharing of skills and experience, and relationship building. It supports younger and newer employees to observe, learn from and form connections with their more experienced colleagues. She said many good employers have been taking active steps to ensure their working from home policies are fit for purpose. Nicola Willis said its time at the government did the same.

Damn straight. Conor Whitten from the Wellington Chamber of Commerce told the Mike Hosking Breakfast that the directive will indeed have a positive impact.

“We do think that this has the real potential to make a difference for Wellington and it's important to recognise that at a time when public finances are pretty tight, it's something that really doesn't cost the government a cent. We all know it's been a hard time for businesses in Wellington, but particularly for retail and hospitality, working from home trends are definitely a very big part of that.

"And look, you're right, the numbers are a little bit hard to quantify but we will have those numbers because public sector CEOs will be required to report on it. But look it’s the ballpark figures, there are 28,000 public servants who still work in Wellington according to the Public Service Commission, if they're working from home and average of two days a week, that's more than 50,000 fewer potential customers for businesses in the CBD and in a city the size of Wellington, that makes a real impact. So if we get some of those people back in the city, not everyone's going to buy a coffee or go shopping or head out for a Friday drink, but tens of thousands more people in the city the size of Wellington, it’s going to make a real impact at a time when businesses are doing it tough.”

So sure benefits, but I cannot imagine that workers are being ordered back to work simply to save Wellington's cafes. From the release, it would appear that the Government is simply looking for the public service bosses to be a little bit more aware of who's working from home and whether they're earning their keep or not. I find it incredible that, according to the press release, data is not currently being centrally collected by the Public Service Commission regarding the prevalence of working from home arrangements. So if you asked the Public Service Commission how many public servants are working from home, reading that line, you'd expect them to say, oh, I don't know. A few I suppose.

If you're a boss, wouldn't you want to know how many of your team were actually working from home and how many were expected in the office? And if they were working from home, what are they doing there? Are they meeting KPI's? The people we talked to last week who either phoned in or texted in said that they had KPI's that they had to meet, that there was an expectation about what their role would be, that for some of them there was flexibility - they could look after a sick child or they could go for a long run if they're training for a marathon or something, and then the work would be done in the evening. There was no real need for them to work between 9 – 5 pm so long as the work got done.

But reading between the lines here, it would appear that many public service bosses have absolutely no idea who's at home, who's not, who's expected to be. And it's that sort of sloppy record keeping that I think the government's going after, and I think the taxpayer was getting sick of. If you go into any Public Service department and said how many of your people are working from home and what are they doing there, as a minister, I'd expect them to know. But the line in this press release says data is not currently being centrally collected by the Public Service Commission regarding the prevalence of working from home arrangements. Does that sound like a breach of business management 101?

The bosses that we talked to last week said it can work. They were quite happy to have staff working from home. There were clear expectations of what they would do, they were regularly checked on – where there was a high level of trust, the arrangement worked. But when you've got somebody going “oh whatevs”, it's not going to work. People will extract the Michael if they think there are no controls on what they can do, or no checks and balances on what they do and how they do it. They also made the point that it doesn't mean there won't be any working from home arrangements, you can still negotiate to be able to have flexible working hours, hello Wellington civil service, but they are not an automatic entitlement.

But you can't really blame the workers, if nobody's checking up on you, nobody cares, nobody has an expectation that you'll turn up in the office, nobody is requiring you to account for yourself, when you haven't been in the office for a week or so, why wouldn't you?

Kerre McIvor, is a journalist, radio presenter, author and columnist. Currently hosts the Kerre Woodham mornings show on Newstalk ZB - where this article was sourced.