So. *cough* Right, a way forward. Sure.

Why am I hesitating so much? Because this instalment is inherently challenging to nuance correctly. When I write, I try to stick to “explaining what is”, not “what should be” nor even very often “what could be”. I describe, I elaborate, I explain. I unpack complex elements. I try very hard to leave “shoulds” to others. And even in this post, I’ll try to stick only to what is possible, not what we “should” do.

As I’ve argued in the last four posts on this topic, there are certain realities we have to face:

a. There is nothing sexy about the rack rate (i.e., how much it costs for you to get out of bed), and any room for enhancement is likely limited to arguing that certain basic human needs (like food) might have gone up by a much larger inflation rate than the average consumer cart/basket;

b. Within the commute rate, there might have been some room to build out some nuances around transportation or childcare, but well, the narrow group of FMs who didn’t understand the issue and yet went on blast with their opinions forced TBS into a blanket one-size-fits-all response that stifled any hint of creativity. I doubt it would have resulted in any raise, as the commute rate is already baked into our pay rate, but there might have been some flexibility.

c. The core parts of the labour cost (for actually expending energy to do the physical labour of a job), which include economic factors like inflation and wage compression, direct compensation leverage for individuals (doesn’t work in PS), tenure + experience growth in existing skills (in year experience bumps by bands), and/or experience growth in new skills or role expansion (promotions), likely won’t go beyond general cost-of-living increases.

d. TBS and the unions negotiate the whole rate at once, knowing that changes to R+C+L are likely going to be somewhere around inflation, less any other perks added to the overall compensation package for benefits or pension, and that individuals are ALSO getting band bumps and promotion bumps that together with CoL bumps far outstrip actual inflation. They’ll argue otherwise publicly. But the result will be CoL increases around the rate of inflation and not much more.

So, if we can’t change those factors…?

Several niggly elements keep bouncing around my skull.

The first bouncing niggler is the number of people who want to argue about the benefits of working from home and never having to return to the office. That the benefit is non-existent, that people have the right to stay home, etc. With a kicker that the employees are producing just as well at home as they are in the office, and hence, no reason to RTO. I want to harness their frustration and passion, but it’s a challenge to do so effectively.

Starting at the beginning, we lose ground immediately. People argue that they should have the right to choose their work location. While that would be nice, there is literally zero support for that premise anywhere. It isn’t in any labour-related legislation; you won’t find it in any constitutional clause, Charter or Bill of Rights clause; there is virtually no labour law case precedent that would support such a claim; and there is nothing in any collective agreement that says it, nor will any employer agree to it outside of IT-related fields, and most of them are saying no too. In fact, every single piece of “evidence” backs the employer as being the one with the inalienable right to choose the location of work. Across the board, top to bottom, end to end, from startup to the winddown of employment. We will never win that argument, and so it is likely better to treat such claims as irrelevant to start.

If we want to target RTO as an issue, it also cannot be based on anything related to the Commute rate. From previous posts, the “average” employee is already getting a commuting premium of $50 a day; pushing on that issue will just trigger TBS saying, “Okay, let’s start by you giving us back $250 a week / $13K a year, and THEN we can talk about an in-office ‘premium’.” That is not a good foot from which to launch. Because they’re not wrong. And thus going anywhere near the Commute rate hurts us.

The second thought that bounces around is where people keep arguing that they are doing the job just as well from home. The argument, in its simplest form, is that people have a set of tasks to perform in their job, which can be called A, B, C, D, and E. If the person does ABCDE at the office, and does ABCDE at home, what difference does it make? The work is done, easy peasy lemon squeezy, so the person should be able to work from home. Except there’s a long list of problems with that premise.

First and foremost, there are years of research that suggest in-person communication is more effective than video or phone communication. It’s mostly horse puckey…the comparison, not the research. To be honest, the majority of old research focuses on the best forms of dynamic in-person communication, which include reading body language, mirroring behaviour, and adjusting angles and compares it against the worst forms of video interaction, such as fixed-position talking heads in a box.

Second, very few jobs have well-defined metrics that would support that argument. If you are in some sort of processsing environment (and I’ll come back to this later), you might have good key performance indicators that say you have to process X files in a day/week of complexity type Z with quality metric Q. It looks like a good argument. “I have to meet blah metrics, and I am meeting blah metrics whether I am at work or at home. At home is easier, so why can’t I stay home?”. Ruh roh. Almost nobody notices what the employer hears — no difference between home or work in terms of deliverables, and yet in office can be monitored more easily by management, and the employer is already paying you to commute…Why WOULDN’T they want you back in the office 5d a week? That argument works against you, not for you.

But there was an assertion by me in there that you may doubt. I said you can be monitored more easily in person. Just about every manager, director, etc. believes that statement to be relatively self-explanatory and true. Although it’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy, to be blunt. While AS and PM managers at mid- to higher levels might have dozens, even hundreds of reports, the work is structured that way given the highly routinized type of files being processed and administered. By contrast, teams of ECs are often limited to 8 per manager, but in some instances can be up to 20, which is near chaos if the group is busy. It often only happens if there is a missing manager or director, and someone is covering a team in need of a structural transition/adjustment.

I’ll use myself as the manager, although lots of other managers have shared similar stories. We generally don’t get much in the way of training to be a manager. There are lots of things about principles or forms, not much about daily interactions with staff. Most managers start with some “vision” of what they think a good manager is, more so than what they think they could do to be a good manager, and over time adapt to their own strengths and weaknesses. In a relatively ideal scenario, they are flexible enough to be the manager each employee needs, not the same one for everyone. When we were in-person, it was easy to tell how people were doing. Signs of stress were more evident; signs of struggling were more evident. Heck, even signs of too low a workload were more evident. I could tell just stopping by your desk as I was coming back from a meeting, might be only 30s long, that you were looking for something else, you were done with the tasks you had or were waiting on stuff to come in. Sometimes, you could even sense a disturbance in the force, so to speak, because more than one person was stressed in a cluster, even though you knew of no reason for them to be. Hence, a clue to follow up and check in with people, let them tell you what they need. Preventative maintenance, if you will, instead of ignoring it and waiting until a giant warning light appears on my car, saying ‘engine failure.’

Then the pandemic hit, we all switched to virtual, and there was … silence. There was virtually (only small pun intended) no guidance on how to switch to being a virtual manager. Fifteen years of sensors suddenly went dark. I could poke someone in Teams, ask how they’re doing, and the text back will say, “Fine”, or “sounds good” for proposals. But with no nuance, no emotion, no real undertone. All managers have faced similar issues with a Teams environment. The human side of management went dark. Or at least dimmed.

That has had THREE implications for me as a manager.

1. I can’t rely on an open-door policy and expect people to pop by and chat, before saying, “Oh, btw, since I’m here, let me update you on ….”. I have to work harder to get them to feel free to call me, anytime, and to try and keep my schedule open at various times for them to do unscheduled check-ins.
2. I absolutely have to have weekly one-on-one check-ins with my team members. I schedule 30m, sometimes we’re done in 10, and sometimes we’re done in 2, but we slowly segue to some sort of almost-mentoring conversation because they’re having trouble with “blah” and just looking for some input. Things that would have happened organically in-person, I have to create the space for them to still happen virtually.
3. I struggle to consistently manage a distributed workload across staff. As I said, in person, I could easily tell if someone whipped through a memo in 2 hours or they’re taking a bit longer, often just by walking by their desk and saying “hi”. Virtually, I have to balance getting a feel for how it’s going without feeling like I’m breathing down their neck or micro-managing.

Yet you tell me you’re doing the same job you were doing in office. I don’t know that by observation, other than you have completed the specific tasks I’ve assigned you. But there is more to your job than just what your boss gives you, namely under the heading of initiative, and it is harder to tell if you’re keeping busy, have more capacity, or overwhelmed. The WFH environment hides that information.

However, management also sees a lot of stuff you don’t. For example, horizontal networks are collapsing in a virtual world. In a dynamic policy environment, there was always the “foot” network when we were in the office. Using myself again as an example, I was regularly pointed to by executives and my own staff as an excellent “networker”, a phrase that makes me cringe. That is simply not true. Not really. What they saw was that I had a GREAT network, and thus equated that to networking. Except what I would do is, for example, take a file over to the ADM’s office, and on the way back, walk through another division’s area and say hi to a friend from that team. We’d get chatting, someone else would join us, we’d talk about our kids and lives in general, as well as what we were working on, and life would go on. I wasn’t networking, I was just chatting with friends. But I picked up intel on what other people and teams were working on. And three weeks later, someone would say, “Hey, does anyone know if anyone is doing any work on ‘blah’?”, and I could say, “Hey, yeah, let me connect you with someone, do you know Joel?”. Part of that burgeoning network was based on a lot of coordination work with different people, and part of that was just me being curious about other people’s lives and jobs. I am NOT an extrovert by nature, but lots of people thought I was. I used to joke that I just played one on TV. And that “foot” network went both ways. People would call me and say, “So, I was talking with Joel, and I hear you are doing something around “blah”, can we chat?”. Or just stop by my desk. Synergy would result.

Since the pandemic, and the use of Teams, many of those foot networks went the way of the dodo. Silos that people spent years trying to dismantle have returned, stronger than ever. Cold calling people in Teams can seem almost impolite. For me, I hadn’t realized how bad it was until about 14 months into the pandemic. I had a friend in the department who was a DG. He offered me a Director position way back in 2007 and I said no; he offered me another job in 2010, and I said no again; in 2018, I knocked on his door about a recently announced project to find out who was leading it, turned out it was him, and I worked for him for eight months or so. But from 2007 to 2020, I had never gone more than about 2 weeks without talking to him. Perhaps 3 if holidays were involved. Our files overlapped, we’d run into each other in hallways, or if I hadn’t seem him, late in a day I’d wander by his office and wave, see if he was free to catch up. Great guy, good friend, good mentor, and fantastic source of intel, even when I wasn’t looking for any. Yet, with WFH, I hadn’t talked to him in 13 months. There was no reason to do so. Our files didn’t intersect. So I cold-called him and said “boo”. He was like, “Holy doodles!” We couldn’t believe it had been so long since we chatted.

That’s what WFH can do. It can kill organic opportunities for relationship-building across work silos, turning many relationships into transactions. There are ways to prevent that, or more accurately, overcome the momentum in that direction, but it takes sustained action and a plan. And virtual watercooler initiatives are not it.

ADMs and DMs are seeing proposals come forward that are not, well, fully cooked. What might have come in previously when developed in-person would have been relatively vetted by all the main groups, even if some of them only informally. Now, many of the proposals coming up to them have only been vetted to the extent that they may have gone through some formal committee. As informal and foot networks decline or reduce their effectiveness, formal systems must compensate, and the machinery’s gears are grinding a bit. Like there’s sand in them.

Equally concerning, some ADMs and DMs are receiving proposals from different parts of their organization that are contradictory, and yet the formal networks somehow missed the conflict.

Now, let’s go back to people saying they are doing their job just as well in WFH as they do RTO. Really? So if that’s true, how is it that you don’t know anyone in other areas? Why are all your requests defaulting to formal taskings? Where’s the networking component? Working with others, which is more than just your immediate team?

I’ve had people try to tell me, that’s not part of their job. Really? Cuz it is officially or unofficially part of EVERYONE’s job. No person is an island. We’re all part of a team, and if the team is collapsing, you can’t say, “Not my job.” DMs know that not everything that was being done before is being done now “properly”.

Some people pivot. They say, “Okay, I go in the office, but it’s stupid. I don’t talk to anyone, I’m not with my team, I take meetings from my desk rather than in a board room. It’s a waste of time.” In other words, every “feature” of RTO that would actually make it better like physically meeting with people, connecting, networking (however much I hate that word), are things that you are ACTIVELY choosing not to do.

Soooo, here’s a reality check from management. If you were pre-pandemic, and you went to your desk, spoke to no one, only did what people sent you, and never went to your team meetings, you’d be on a performance improvement plan, even if you completed your assigned paper files. It would be a giant red flag.

Now, here’s my kicker. Nobody cares what you think about your own performance. You may be knocking it out of the park. You may be phoning it in. Doesn’t matter. Management is seeing a system that is producing less than it did previously, not necessarily in terms of quantity but absolutely in terms of quality. Which is what they tell TBS and TBS only manages in bulk. You might be a rockstar, and can get everything done through WFH, maybe you’re even networking your butt off. But they don’t care.

When everybody argues about this, and I get their frustration, they are not seeing what management sees. They’re seeing their little box and that’s it. Some will even want to jump to their PAs as evidence — “They said ‘Succeeded!’ so I am doing great!”. Hmm. So I have some bad news for you. You know how in major league sports, there are stats of all the great achievements? When there is something amiss about the stat, like someone hit the most home runs but was later shown to have been using steroids, or there was a longer season, or a higher win ratio but in a shortened season, or whatever, they add an asterisk to the record books. It isn’t widely discussed transparently, but an informal asterisk has been applied to almost everyone’s PA since the pandemic. The asterisk says basically, “…taking into account the chaos that is our current unstable WFH/RTO transition-to-virtual work environment.”

So arguing that we’re doing as well at home doesn’t help us. It actually hurts us. Because the system is not all right. That argument has no persuasive power at all.

The last niggly thought is a bit like the first, but it is people who want to argue that location of work was stated in many letters of office, and they relied on that statement. To use the legal vernacular, even if the employer has a right to choose the work location, and even if there’s nothing in any document or precedent that says otherwise, it says it in person X’s letter of offer issued in the last five years. As a right of “estoppel”, the government is estopped from exercising its rights to change the work location of that individual as a matter of contract law and the fact that the employee has relied on that commitment.

It’s a beautiful argument. I love it. There isn’t a single court anywhere in Canada that would accept that argument, because the government, as the employer, has the absolute right to change the location. They have moved departments across cities, disrupting thousands of people. They have relocated processing centres across the country, disrupting thousands of people. They have devolved programs to the provinces and territories, disrupting thousands of people. They have terminated people hired in those same letters of offer, a far more serious component than the location of work, and there is nothing to “stop” them from doing so. The only thing that a person MIGHT get is some form of compensation i.e., a reasonable job offer. No guarantee to work out of a coworking site, no right to work out of random government office of another department or even the same department that might be closer. Nada. They can change the location of work, and the Letter of Offer doesn’t mean diddley in that regard. On top of that, many people were told OUT RIGHT that the location of work was a temporary commitment while the pandemic was on, and subject to the rules of TBS, blah blah blah. TBS changed the rules for everyone, you have to comply too. Deputy Heads derive their power from the Centre, and they cannot contract to override the TBS requirements if they never had the power to do so in the first place.

Are you having a stroke, PolyWogg? You lost me

Nope, nope, I’m trying to point out that the passion and frustration that people have and feel are justified, but relatively unusable in the way they they have been applied. Yet I wonder about a different way to frame the question.

I can’t argue that we need more money based on the rack rate.

I can’t argue that we need a new commute premium if we are already getting one, and no flex on the issues that might have helped.

I can’t argue for more than CoL based on the current job that everyone has baked into the structure, along with performance increases each year and promotion levels for high performers and growth.

But…

Could I argue that:

1. The job has become much harder and could even be argued to be NEW and DIFFERENT from the previous challenge?;
2. There’s a better way to manage WFH and RTO that would solidify the current approach and make it harder to return to 5 days a week in the office?; AND/OR
3. There’s a better way to manage overall compensation in general?

A new and different job?

Let me get something out of the way real fast. I cannot argue the job is harder to do and thus deserves more money, based on the fact that it is harder to do from home. The quick reaction to that will be, “Sure, no problem, come back to work 5d a week, it will be easier, problem solved.”

We can only argue that it deserves a RAISE (the original premise) if we can show it has several characteristics:

1. The job is harder overall, both in the office and at home;
2. We get better results at home, either as a component (hybrid) or as full-time WFH.

I think the first part is not as hard to argue as people might think. For example, we have new technologies that both empower us and challenge us. Teams gives us new collaborative tools, new interactions, and access to almost anyone, everywhere.

Yet we also have to learn all those new tools, new ways to collaborate. We have to adapt existing management styles, and working styles, to work across a team. We’ll need to figure out ways still to combat siloing. And to embrace all the power that we now have, to use it responsibly and effectively.

However, it has also created a culture of “always on.” When we were in the office, we ended our day, shut down our computers, and started our commute home. We separated our work life from our home life, both in time and distance for the commute. Now, we log off and immediately transfer to our home life, no buffer, no wind-down, no decompression. We take our stress with us.

We’re hyper-scheduled — no more need to walk from meeting to meeting across buildings or floors. We log off one call and hop on the next, often with mere seconds between each, no time to decompress. Equally, previously, someone might have had either a lot of calls or a lot of emails driving their day, but now we have also added team messages, team meetings at the drop of a hat, video calls, virtual phones, etc. We’re physically tied to our monitor for all forms of communication and work. Previously, people might have printed out documents and reviewed them over a coffee chat or a collaborative space; now, they’re on the screen with almost no paper options available. Power BI screens and dashboards are expanding, increasing the focus on quantitative data over qualitative. Directors have always faced such hyper-scheduling, but it is expanding downward for managers, analysts, worker bees. What might have previously been a meeting between three or four people can now have another three or four added with no limits on boardrooms, etc. — just add them to the invite, and if they are free, they can join. Good for info-sharing and inclusion, not so great for prioritizing who really needs to be there. Meetings that should be about decision-making are increasingly used for consultation and formal networking.

I mentioned above that managers may have a harder time managing virtually, particularly without training on being a better manager in that type of environment. However, it’s also harder for the managed employee. Take illness, for example. People have sick leave for a reason — if they’re sick, they should prioritize their health and take the time they need to get better. Instead, more and more people tend to “work through it” from home. Or if they’re going through something more challenging, a family trauma or upsetting event, for example, or something more mental than physical, some keep working. In a similar vein, from the pandemic experience, some people did not do well working from home in isolation, and if you’re struggling with something now, there may be no sign to your manager. You may need support, an EAP referral, or extra flexibility, and yet you’re showing up, with or without your camera on. Unless you’re comfortable telling your manager that something is going on and have the space to do so, the manager’s responsibilities of humane management aren’t triggered. We cannot help you if we don’t know what’s going on, and WFH / virtual work makes it easier to mask or ignore potential issues. Metaphorically, you could be drowning, yet no one will see your head dipping below the surface.

I don’t have a crystal ball for every type of job out there in the PS. I cannot itemize every way that people’s jobs have gotten harder. But there are signs that life has gotten harder in general, outside of work, too. Not just economically. Attention spans and depth of thought are disappearing in public spaces. Anyone can pull three disparate thoughts together and create an argument that it’s a policy issue that government should respond to immediately. New ideas are celebrated as successes or failures before they have time to mature. There is an increase in social polarization in lifestyles, values, and a hyper focus on individuals over the community. At the same time, there has been decreased efficacy in traditional institutions like science, media, education, government, everything. It is hard to cut through the noise. Some argue that you are seeing more and more paralysis of analysis, with an overload of choice and information/misinformation, greater focus on commercialization, increased surveillance and data mining, the rise of AI, failing social constructs like the importance of home ownership or marriage or even being part of a community at all. Life is becoming fragmented. And the public service both lives it and tries to run programs within it. Life and work have sped up, switched themselves on 24/7, and there is little reprieve.

The job is harder than it used to be, and perhaps harder than it needs to be. I’m not quite at the “get off of my lawn” stage at work, but I’ve been working in the PS in varying forms for 32 years. The last five years have disrupted the day-to-day business model of government, and continues to evolve and change faster than at any other point in the 32 years. Add in the planned reductions in staffing, and you can expect asymmetrical downsizing. People keep pointing to statements by senior leaders that there will be thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate decision-making about downsizing. Except that isn’t entirely accurate. Senior leaders will be thoughtful and intelligent about which jobs will be eliminated, aka which boxes or programs are eliminated; they will be compassionate about how they manage the subsequent process when they come to tell you that the box they chose happens to be yours and you’re out of a job. But they aren’t being compassionate in establishing criteria about which boxes to cut, that’s not the way it works. For example, a program isn’t going to be targeted for reduction because it has 20 staff all within a year of retirement and can absorb the downsizing more easily than a program with all its staff having young kids and families to raise. They make business decisions first, and address the HR implications second.

There will be disruptions, with people moving around to continue to work for the government when their previous programs end. With the early retirement options, that may mean that individual programs have sudden gaps where they had perhaps ten staff and two take early retirement. A 20% reduction in staffing. Maybe the department lets you replace them, maybe they decide you can get by with only one replacement. But the loss of staff will not coincide with an immediate downsize in workload. That too will be asymmetrical. They’ll adjust workloads and coverage to compensate, some of their files will get transferred to others, who will shift their workloads to others too. But a 20% reduction in staff often looks like a 5% reduction in workload for the first 6m, 10% by the end of the first year, and 20% by the end of year two before it is “right-sized” for the staff complement. In the interim, stress goes up, priorities start being delayed along with everything else, people have less time to spend on files before they have to move forward, there are fewer people to do consultations and research alternative options, etc. And that is just in a section that had no cuts, people just took the early retirement package to help with the overall size of the PS.

In the 1980s, Quaker Oatmeal ran an ad campaign trying to cash in on the health craze that pushed aerobic studios and rice cakes. Their ad slogan was “Quaker Oatmeal…it’s the right thing to do.” No response from the market. They decided consumers didn’t like to be told to do the right thing. So they added to the slogan…”Quaker Oatmeal…it’s the right thing to do, and a tasty way to do it!”. The same metaphor applies to downsizing. An organizational unit of perhaps 100 people will thoughtfully and intelligently go through the planning process and identify perhaps 10 boxes it can/should/might cut. Call it positions 1-10 on a list of 100 boxes. “It’s the right thing to do”, they’ll tell management above them. Awesome, they have a plan. But then person 22 says, “You know, that new early retirement thing looks pretty good to me. I think I’ll take it.” And management says, “Oh, well that helps. One down, we only have to cut 9 more now, and let’s take #8 off the planned list.” Early retirement volunteers are a “tasty way to do it”. Except you weren’t planning to cut position 22. Your analysis said you still needed that position. But you conflated “easy” with “right”, and now you have asymmetry in your planning. In the worst-case scenario, person #22 might have been in your most critical position that you wanted to keep, but well, processes are processes. In an organizational unit of 100, you can fix that easily enough. You’ll see the impact. But will you see it with 30,000 departures out of 360,000?

Not to mention the potential impact on staff. In the ’90s, with program review, lots of staff left very happily and voluntarily with large buyout packages. It was manageable for the people who remained. After DRAP? Offices that went through SERLOs felt like bombed-out cities. Survivors crawled out of the rubble and felt grateful to have survived, many knowing that it could just as easily been them who were carried off on stretchers. They were unaffected by the bombing, but still felt the effects of being in the larger blast radius. Two years after the last cut, one of the biggest and most pressing questions at town halls in many units was, “Are we safe? Is it over?”. Two years after the DRAP wars had ended, survivors didn’t trust it was a lasting peace. Trauma takes many forms and has a very long emotional and psychological half-life.

We could talk about some of our losses from WFH. The simplest example of course is “unit cohesion” to use the military term or “community identification” to use the social HR term. Schools experienced it mightily during the pandemic and still are feeling its effects. They couldn’t do graduation ceremonies, assemblies for regular school, or class trips. Teachers became individual widgets that students saw on screen but never really got a chance to bond with them. Some students can’t even remember who their teacher was during certain years because they only ever saw them on screen, never even met them in person. For some, that’s enough; for others, they missed out on prime elements of their educational experience. Some high schools have started just waiving graduations entirely as some students came back after remote schooling and never really re-engaged. They consume it like a commodity; it doesn’t touch their identity. School spirit is often seen as a relic of the past. Workplaces have the same issue. Employees who might have felt a shared identity of working on program X with coworkers they saw every day, sat beside, talked with about life, the universe, and everything during breaks or at lunches, now have increasingly “transactional” relationships only with their peers and colleagues. Job satisfaction is lower, for many reasons, sure, but lack of connection is part of that list.

And yet talking about that challenge works against us. If WFH is a problem, then RTO is the likely answer. It is a fine line to explain the challenge without pushing the needle in the wrong direction. As with childcare and transportation challenges, you want space to expand the discussion, dig into the nuances, before someone occupies the space with uninformed and unnuanced claims. My reaction is often like the situation with comparing the best of in-person collaboration to the worst form of remote collaboration. First and foremost, our in-person collaboration at work was NEVER like the ideal / best examples touted. Dysfunctional would be closer to the norm. Secondly, why would we compare it with the worst form of remote collaboration as opposed to figuring out and implementing better forms for remote? It’s a sad day when using Kahoot or digital whiteboards is considered “innovative”. Surely, we can do better than that as a comparator.

The real key, in my never-so-humble opinion, is to focus on the fact that it doesn’t really matter if we are WFH or RTO, the job is harder. Our schedules are compressed regardless of where we sit our butts for the day. The switched-on nature assumes “instant on” as well, even if you’re in the office. Every meeting becomes instantly hybrid with someone who’s working from home, or regionally, or it’s just a different day in the office for them. We have more people in meetings, with an increase in pre-meetings for consultation before decision-making meetings and more formal use of committees than before, or even a proliferation of committees at multiple levels to “force” consultation and fight silos.

Yet that argument isn’t really enough. Not for a raise, not for WFH. The part that is missing is to tell a complete story:

Yes, the job has changed and can’t change back. Yes, it is harder, whether remote or in-person.
But the hybrid model of some days in the office and some days at home is needed
aka hybrid work makes the dream work.

I know, it makes me want to gag too.

But that’s the model we want to sell. We’re not going to convince anyone of 5d WFH, not on our own work. Cost savings of building space is good, but there’s too much pressure from taxpayers and others to be in the office like “every other company”. It doesn’t matter if it is true or not. Like the Steve Miller Band lyric, we “make our living off other people’s taxes”, and the one who pays calls the tunes.

So what does hybrid give us that 5d in office doesn’t? We can already claim the benefits that they worry about above that in-office “seems” to give us. But when employees talk about WFH, they almost all talk about the personal benefits. Not commuting. Or if it is a larger benefit, it is about office space or the environment. That is not going to convince anyone in management. The only thing that will, in my view?

Better results. An obvious one for me is the increase in knowledge work. The office has moved to call-centre setups and hotelling. This is NOT the best physical environment for focusing on complex issues that requires intense concentration. It’s the same argument people used before the pandemic. “Hey boss, I want to spend some dedicated time going through those reports we got from our 20 partners. But it’s pretty noisy in the office, can I take them home and work from home on Thursday?”. A quiet place to do a specific type of task. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Personally, I think that is the second half of the argument. Identifying which parts of your job are BETTER done outside the office. Not for your benefit, for the work itself. Nobody cares if you can do it in your pajamas. That’s not the question. People keep wanting to show that we can meet the same work standards as if we’re in the office; I don’t want the “same”, I want to know how we can show we do BETTER at home.

For those doing processing, it would be awesome to be able to say, “Hey boss, when I’m in the office, I can do 20 files in a day. But when I’m at home, I frequently can do 23 in a day.” Aka? A 15% improvement in performance. It’s still a challenge because as per the old beliefs, being in the office has you doing other things that you couldn’t do at home (like meet in-person) so it’s more complicated than the simple statement. Yet higher results are ALWAYS good arguments.

If we go back to the example I mentioned earlier, where people go to the office, sit in a cubicle, talk to no one, do all their meetings from their desk, etc., people really need to shut up about that experience. They are literally tanking it and making all of us look bad. That’s like joining a gym to improve your health and all you do is go sit in their juice bar, you never work out, and yet complain you are not seeing any benefit. You’re doing it wrong. Instead, your management should see you KNOCKING it out of the park in both models. When I go to the office, I absolutely meet in person with my bosses. I schedule meetings with other coworkers in other units, the ones I don’t see every day. I’ll not only go out of my way to make it work, I’ll go out of my way to SHOW that it is working, and then follow it up with showing that when I’m at home now, I can focus on the more intensive analytical tasks. Or meeting with regional folks from home, where I’m not giving up in-person time. It’s hard to do. But I want my bosses to know I’m making it work.

I also have some interesting anecdotal experiences to share, such as the benefits of video conferencing. Yes, “always on” is hard BUT I can also point to the benefits. I do Federal-Provincial-Territorial files right now as my day job. In the past, before Teams, I would have had conference calls sporadically with my counterparts. I might have travelled (and yes, reductions in travel budgets, events, etc. are another “challenge” to flag), or simple phone calls. Now, I do monthly administrative emails to all of my counterparts (13 of them, individualised and adapted to each situation), and regular ad hoc video calls. It’s easy to get a question, which likely would have resulted in a more formal email response previously rather than an audio phone call, and to now hop on a quick, informal video call where they can see me, chat about the issue, give them some feedback and answers, and move on. I do that with various PTs 5-8 times a month right now, sometimes more. Pre-pandemic? It would have likely been emails only or perhaps 1x per month. I’m “always on” to chat, and it works well. It changes the job, it can be a bit harder as responses tend to need to be faster. But the biggest part of my job, the success factor if you will, is the ability to change what could be a simple transactional relationship with formal exchange points to a larger ongoing relationship of collaboration and partnership that goes beyond any single transaction. Teams has made that better. And if I happen to throw in that it is easier to do that sometimes in the quiet of my home instead of the call-centre atmosphere of the office, well, that’s another point for hybrid.

In effect, I’m in favour of anything that promotes a conscious approach to hybrid work without disparaging one over the other. It won’t end well if people simply slam RTO, or worse, argue that WFH is easier for them. No one cares about your comfort. To quote Harrison Ford when asked about challenges in certain jobs, “That’s what the money is for.”

What does that mean for negotiations? In practical terms, it means arguing in effect that the job is harder (and therefore different from that used as the basis for the previous rate of compensation), and potentially hard enough that we should shift all of the in-year raises up at least one band if not two. In other words, the extra challenge is the equivalent of one to two years of experience to meet it well. To go back to the previous posting, it means moving from Band 1 up to where Band 3 is currently. For all categories.

That is a near-impossible feat. But if we want an actual raise for doing a much harder job, that’s how it works. Not a CoL boost. A practical target. And no fussing around arguing about commuting premiums.

But what did you mean about solidifying current WFH/RTO limits?

Right now, the current system of RTO is a mess. There are large-scale inconsistencies across departments, confusion with managers knowing what’s allowed or not, elaborate plans for new monitoring systems that everyone knows in advance won’t work very well, lots of informal monitoring to stay on the right side of the rules, lots of unhappy employees feeling like Big Brother is watching them, and external pressure to abolish all of it and just send everyone back to the office five days a week.

In short, a potential clusterf***.

You know what else could be a complete dumpster fire but isn’t? Leave and overtime. If you go into PeopleSoft, and put in leave, you will see the following list of 88 elements:

1. Additional hours (1 option)
2. Compensatory time (1 option)
3. Family time (8 options)
4. Furlough (1 option)
5. LWOP (11 options)
6. Lieu days (1 option)
7. O/T (44 options)
8. One-time vacation (1 option)
9. Other Paid (13 options)
10. Personal (3 options)
11. Sick (2 options)
12. Travel Status (1 option)
13. Vacation (1 option)

Think about that. There are 88 separate ways in PeopleSoft to record when you’re out of the office and for how long. Limited monitoring, strong elements of trust and usage. Not perfect, but everyone already uses it. Call me crazy, but couldn’t it be a natural fit for registering when you’re out of the office and for how long for WFH too?

The system isn’t complicated. You could follow TBS rules and say, “Hey, great, Dave is in a position that requires him to be in the office three days a week and therefore up to two days a week can be at home. That’s 2 days a week times 52 weeks, let’s give Dave 104 days of WFH credits.”

Immediately, people will want to argue if it could work. Lots of details to manage. Yet most leave, except for sick leave, is already subject to constraints like operational needs too. Oh, you want to take 3 weeks in the busiest part of the year? Umm, maybe not. Or maybe yes if there is good coverage already. Or there’s lots of notice, whatever. So, while you might have views about whether Dave should be able to use a WFH leave credit when there is an all-staff meeting in the office, the issues are not much different than for vacations.

There are some issues with potential stacking or not. Personally, if someone suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder and doesn’t handle commuting in the cold very well, maybe they should be able to use all their WFH credits between mid-November and mid-April (or whatever the #s come out to) and end up working the rest of the year five days a week in the office. They may go in once a month for group work, but they’re shifting for what works for them, and the TBS “goal” is met.

Or perhaps someone has custodial sharing with a divorced partner, and five days one week works really well for them, followed by five days in the office.

Or they end up using their WFH credit as a coping mechanism for just a mental health day, while dealing with a chronic pain flare-up.

All of the same reasons why there is a simple system that automates requests and approvals, no “in-office” monitoring required. If you’re working from home, send your request to your boss. Let them approve it like anything else.

I’ll confess, I think such monitoring would be annoying. Overkill even. But it meets two giant requirements.

You control the leave credits that people have, and make it very formal. No “guessing”, no need to play with scheduling, it’s all in your hands. If you use up your vacation leave early in the year, that’s on you; if you similarly use up WFH credits early in the year, that’s on you.

However, far more importantly, it would put in place a system for managing WFH in a way that is:

a. Embedded
b. Formal
c. Negotiable in collective agreements (*ding ding ding*)

A+B would make it relatively permanent. Right now, any day of the week, the Government could wave its magic wand and say back to the office 5 days a week. There is literally nothing to slow them down, let alone stop them. If there was a system in place, there would be basic inertia to say, “Wait, why are we abandoning a system that removes all the pain points?”.

Equally, while embedding leave in a system would not make it permanent, the terms of the “pseudo-leave” would be part of the negotiating range for collective agreements. In effect, it would make it something that HAS to be negotiated. Like leave, for example, where after so many years of service, you could get additional WFH credits. Or perhaps some WFH that would be like bereavement leave or parental leave, where you have a couple extra weeks of one-time WFH leave to make life easier for dashing out to appointments and stuff. Where you might need flex more than leave. There would have to be elaborate analysis of what would be usable or possible. But right now it isn’t anything that managers don’t already have the flex to approve in some cases. It would just give you a process to help regularize and approve it formally, AND monitor its usage over time.

Heck, if you want, call it a five-year pilot.

Systems like PeopleSoft are designed to manage this type of issue and to change it from chaos to predictable and easy to manage. It would have the side effect of making it more embedded in the ecosystem, and thus almost formalize hybrid as a default. And it could even be negotiated differently by categories. Or give some authority to Deputy Heads to award more leave credits or less leave credits to certain units in their department. We already have exceptions for many aspects of pay, unions, etc. It’s certainly doable.

But wait, there’s more. What if we found a way to improve wage negotiations overall to get more of what YOU want?

Employees could control more of their compensation options

Let’s make up some random numbers of what an employee might get in a given year. Suppose, for example, the current collective agreement says you can have 2% per year for cost-of-living increases. Equally, in-year band raises might be higher, call it 4%. And overall, across your vacation, benefits, and pension, you receive an additional 2%. Eight percent in total. TBS generally doesn’t care how that 8% is broken down. It will cost them 8%; they’re going to pay it. Suppose too that the union negotiated on behalf of all its members, and the union position was that it should be a 2/4/2 split. Done.

Except…

Was that YOUR personal position?

Maybe you’re feeling underpaid, you don’t care about your benefits or pension improvements or leave improvements, you want it all in pay. Or maybe you’re expecting a promotion soon, and don’t care about in-year bumps as you’re going up a level anyway. So you want the CoL of 2%, just for kicks, but you want to put the 4% into more vacation instead. Or maybe it’s as simple as you have a spouse with another source of income, and you want all 8% to go into improvements in vacation leave. Maybe your 3w to start doesn’t match your desire to be more European in outlook with 5 or 6w to start. Or maybe you want an option to preload your pension upfront, make the extra savings work for you over the years that will give you a higher replacement value when you retire or let you retire earlier.

It wouldn’t work as the Wild West, i.e., not just anything goes, but could you consider:

a. Default 1.5% that has to go to Cost-of-Living and your current wage;
b. Default 1.5% that has to go to band increases and your current wage;
c. Default 1% that has to go to leave improvements;
d. Four percent left that could be spread against a series of combos:
* A pension combo that would add 1% to wages, 1% to leave and 2% to pension improvements of a specific type;
* A wage combo that would add 3% to wages, 1% to leave and the pension would be the default;
* A leave combo that would add 3% to leave, 1% to wages, and the pension would remain the default;

It sounds chaotic, right? Except we already have health benefits that are chosen by the employee — L1, L2 or L3, plus family or individual. We pay a bit extra on benefit options. What if we allowed for changes for all the categories, as long as the combination didn’t exceed 8%?

The obvious problem is the union. If you’re getting 8% to do with what you want, what role would the union have on wage negotiations? Not much, other than calculating the minimum CoL component. Instead, unions would have to provide analysis on how all the other features interact, aka service to members to help them choose wisely, while negotiating other terms of work (like RTO/WFH options, or the Ts&Cs of different types of leave). There is more to the collective agreement than just the wage rate, but it is the biggest leverage point.

Going back to the EC-04 I mentioned earlier, they might take 5 years to get to the top of their band. But what if flexible benefits under the agreement let them put the whole 8% to wages? Could they perhaps max out in 2 years, help cover the cost of bills at home, and then change their choices for future increases later to focus on vacation or benefits?

It would eventually let individuals invest their raises in what they feel is important to them, rather than the union negotiations deciding the balance for everyone.

Don’t get me wrong, it would NOT be easy. The pay rate systems are already chaos in some ways, particularly for Phoenix. Or, and this would be a controversial bit for some employees…could you say, “Hey, let’s put 1% ongoing against getting more WFH credits per year”, assuming you’re still meeting operational needs?

Where people who REALLY want to WFH can, in some ways, give up a bit of a pay raise (as opposed to their base pay) to be able to WFH more than someone else.

Again, it would have to likely start as a pilot at most. It would require a HUGE change in the way compensation is considered by the government. I don’t think it’s doable, approvable, feasible within the current environment.

It is likely a bridge too far even before you get to the myriad of operational/implementation challenges. While it might look like chaos, initially, the result within five years would be complete gamification of options and people would follow very predictable pathways for what’s important to them at different parts of their life path.

But if you really want control of your own “negotiations”, what better way than to put the decisions in an individual’s hands?

After all, I did say I was going to talk about alternatives

I started with an alternative approach to negotiations, which would be to argue that we need a raise based on the fact that our job has actually changed and become harder to do. Adjusting for pitfalls and opportunities.

I have a way to monitor it so that hybrid options would become more “baked into” the existing landscape. A bit through the backdoor of PeopleSoft implementation and monitoring rather than a frontal assault of committing to permanent hybrid forever.

And I have an out-of-the-box consideration of flexisecurity options for managing compensation more “individually” within a union-based negotiating environment.

Other people might have better ways to achieve the same aims, with either more creativity, higher probability or less risk. But any of these are preferable to my mind than flailing around with overly-simplistic criticisms of RTO.

But I’m not optimistic. Cost-of-living is easy; true change is likely too hard to achieve in negotiations. However, I’ll support any approach that doesn’t drive TBS towards ordering 5d/week RTO.