WFH vs. RTW: Links to the 9 posts
Yep, I started with a trilogy and ended up with 9 posts. A few people have said, “What if I miss one?”. I don’t think of that as a normal risk per se, but sure, I can do a single post with all nine linked…
Category Archives: HR Guide
WFH vs. RTW, part 9: It’s showtime!
When it comes to figuring out the way forward, we’re pretty much at showtime. In September, departments started mandating RTW options, “forcing” people into the office as it is pitched by employees and unions.
Some people want to argue whether the government as the employer has the right to make the decision unilaterally. Others want to argue that the employer has consulted with employees on the best way forward and many have said RTW is a good thing that offers benefits that WFH don’t. They did pilots, and the people have spoken! Others want to argue that it isn’t safe and there’s a giant occupational health and safety issue with people being back in offices together.
I don’t have much interest in any of those topics, to be honest. Primarily, I don’t care because there’s nothing really to “debate” in any of it.
Labour law is 100% on the side of government about who chooses whether a job is done at home, at work or in the office. There is virtually no case law, legislative framework, collective agreement support or anything else anywhere on the planet that says a employer has to make the decision with its workers or with unions.… Read the rest
WFH vs. RTW, part 8: A rare Call to Action
My normal schtick is description. I explain why something is like it is, why seemingly opaque decisions or processes are not as dense as people might think. Other than sharing tips and tricks in my HR guide, I rarely try to tell people to do x or y. I’ve been a bit more directive on some of these topics, maybe a bit more rant-y. But, today, I have a different goal.
I want to tell people what to do if they want WFH as a continued option for the future and not as a slowly diminishing option until everyone is back in the office five days a week.
Change your script and talk about hybrid work
Let’s make this super simple for everyone to understand. There are three models:
- Remote model, never have to go into the office, 100% work from home
- Hybrid model, some mix of in-the-office and work from home
- Old school model, 100% in the office (Edit:
work from home)
We need to stop saying full WFH (5d) is working just fine (model 1). You may believe that everything is working, and maybe it looks that way to you for your files. But management sees the whole spectrum, vertically AND horizontally, and they know better.… Read the rest
WFH vs. RTW, part 7: No black swans required
When I started this series of posts two weeks ago, it was with the intent simply to share some views on what’s going on for preparations around Return to Work options in the federal government. I’d been seeing a bunch of stuff online where people were saying, “Hey management is a bunch of idiots, everything is working fine, blah blah blah”, and while that may be an employee/bottom-up view, it is NOT what management is seeing looking “down”.
While people in the past might have complained about stuff if they were actually AT work to colleagues, etc., the growth of Reddit fora and FaceBook groups, Twitter, and other social media for people working from home has sparked a surge in people expressing their views online about anything and everything. Some of that is good, and some of that just creates self-bias mini-groups where people hear the same thing coming back at them and assume that means it’s now a fact. And like the echo chambers that some of these groups become, people are frequently posting what they saw as fact (everything is working) yet is really more about their own desires (no need to go back to the office).
And so I started blogging, thinking maybe I’d do 2-3 posts, with a goal to let people know, “Actually, management isn’t all idiots, they’re seeing some real problems”.… Read the rest
WFH vs. RTW, part 6: If management is left to their own devices
I’ve been struggling to figure out how to organize this post, ever since I started the first one in the series. I want to talk about what departments are doing, but I don’t want it to be some sort of inventory. That’s not why I’m writing. I don’t care if Fisheries is doing one thing and Environment is doing another. I don’t care if one person reports that Transport is doing something and all heck breaks loose arguing it’s either not what someone else heard or it’s not the right thing to do or they spelled cluster truck wrong.
But as I thought about what I wanted the conclusion to be with “episode 7” in my increasingly misnamed series of 4-5 posts (with apologies to Douglas Adams), I realized what I wanted, or even needed, this post to be about.
It’s about what management is doing when it is generally left to their own devices.
What they heard
As I mentioned previously, they’ve heard LOTS of people say “We want to work from home forever”. Great, that message has been heard. And guess what? It’s about the same as everyone saying they’d like their salary doubled and their annual leave banks tripled, and retirement after ten years of work.… Read the rest
WFH vs. RTW, part 5: If an employee falls in an empty office, does anyone hear it?
So let’s recap my series so far and reorder the elements a bit. Hardly revolutionary, but decisions about RTW will be taken in a larger context:
- Pre-pandemic “norms” that assumed everyone was working “in the office” but that even face-to-face interactions were not enough, transactions and communications were not enough, you still needed intentional effort to make proper connections;
- Early pandemic transitioning to WFH and rolling out of all the cyber tools we take for granted now, while managers have been left to mostly “muddle through” too;
- Throughout the pandemic, public servants have been working with their paycheques intact, and relatively speaking, being spared much of the extreme personal economic, social and financial disruption that every other sector has experienced in the last 2+ years; and,
- Executives looking at the emerging-from-pandemic world and seeing not only that things are not all working perfectly, even if many employees don’t see the cracks, but also that there are huge risks looming on the horizon.
What are they hearing
Senior management is making decisions based on their own inclinations as experienced managers, as well as the input they get from three large sources. First, the Centre has gone out of its way not to be too prescriptive.… Read the rest
WFH vs. RTW, part 4: It’s not about Subway
If you’re reading this, you’re probably in the public service (not necessarily federal, but mostly), and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have heard the story about the health townhall meeting where one of the executives suggested that going back into the office was a good thing because you could go to Subway for lunch and support local business. There are lots of people who argue there was more to it, and memes blew up about Subway-gate, with many of them coming from people who weren’t even in the room nor work in the same department. It was a catalyst where people were saying management was tone-deaf and they needed to read the room.
My reaction was that management weren’t the only ones. The audience was too, and they weren’t reading management right at all. Management at all departments is trying to walk the line between two very difficult views to express. On the one hand, they want to tell people they’ve done a great job over the last two years; on the other, they’re seeing cracks in the foundations and know people are going to have to do SOME of their work in the office for different reasons.… Read the rest
WFH vs. RTW, part 3: The research (mostly) shows…
For all the departments looking to have people back in the office, they frequently will use the phrase, “So, yeah, we’re looking to have people back in the office at least some of the time because the research shows that it’s better.”
And when they say it, most people listening think it is complete bullsh**. Particularly EC policy wonks who see and hear that phrase every day from stakeholder groups, academics, think tanks, lobby groups, Joe who works at the corner deli. Everyone. And our job is to look at their evidence. “Really, you have research? Well, let’s see that research, show me your evidence, your methodology.” We eat that sh** for breakfast. I don’t want to overstate the case, but honestly, most of the ECs have spent the last 80% of their career ripping apart false claims based on so-called “evidence” that group A’s approach is better than what we’re already funding. Heck, we TRAIN our policy wonks to look for those tricks.
But, well, the people making the claims are not completely wrong. Let’s look at some of the areas of research.
Decades of academic research about business
If you go back to the era just before the introduction of the assembly line, people had realized that a central site for working was better than a whole bunch of solo workers working on their own.… Read the rest
WFH vs. RTW, part 2: A baseline year…
In the world of performance measurement, a friend and I have a cynical joke between us that it seems like every year is a baseline year for some programs…if you’re always moving the baseline, there’s never anything to measure or report other than activities undertaken. There’s no standard for success. When it comes to the question of working from home, any year up to the end of 2019 would have been a baseline year, and there is still not much evidence of a performance standard for success.
What did it look like?
If you looked around the government on January 1, 2020, you would have seen very few departments leading on anything resembling working from home except in exceptional circumstances. Generally speaking, the only people who had full remote access from home fell into one of three categories:
- Duty to accommodate — remote logins, bad gateways, slow networks, little in the way of IT supports, occasionally people making noises about having the government pay for their internet and especially so if they had to get faster internet to run work applications, etc.
- People dealing with emergency issues, where timely access tended to outweigh security concerns; and,
- Senior personnel.
Almost no departments were offering full remote access to internal systems.… Read the rest
WFH vs. RTW, part 1: Something to talk about
As everyone has seen over the last 2.5 years, every business entity has had to deal with the labour organization aspects of the pandemic. Separate from all the labour and health and safety issues, or supply-chain issues, one of the most pervasive questions has simply been one of location. Could employees work from home or did they need to return to work at a specified location? In the private-sector goods and services world, many of those business decisions were obvious. For example, fast-food restaurants in set locations needed employees to be on-site to work. It’s hard to flip a burger in your kitchen and upload it to the drive-through window.
But many knowledge-economy jobs are digitally-enabled. People could and did pivot to work from home when the pandemic hit. Banks. Gig economy workers. IT. Insurance. And, yes, government.
For the Canadian government, that was about 360,000 employees suddenly working from home. I’ll go into more details in future posts, but let’s say generally that the response was positive from most employees (> 80%, with > 95% in some cases). Fast-forward 2.5y, and they are still mostly working from home. Departments have experimented with different pilot options, while some went back earlier to hybrid configs (some days in the office, some days at home) and others doing specific jobs were in-office immediately.… Read the rest
Great practice from PHAC on HR notices
If anyone has read my HR guide, you already know that there are notices of appointments that go up on the Jobs.gc.ca portal. When it is a non-advertised appointment, and it says promotion, you really have almost no idea why the person is being promoted. It just says “non-advertised” and “promotion”.
Common rationales for non-advertised appointments
From a process perspective, a non-advertised appointment is a perfectly valid tool to be used by any manager. The requirement isn’t to assess everyone everywhere in the world for the position, nor even to choose the best candidate available, it’s to demonstrate that the person being appointed meets all the merit criteria.
One rationale (A) for that appointment might be that they were in the job for 2 years on an acting basis, have clearly demonstrated they meet all the requirements for the job, and are performing at-level for the position. The manager could run an open competition, and lots of people would say that was the fairest option, but the likely result is the person will make the pool and get selected. There might be people with better qualifications, but not better experience than the person doing the job already. One might quibble about how they got the acting in the first place, but that’s a separate issue.… Read the rest
Demonstrating merit, non-advertised appointments, and frustration as a manager
Normally when I write about HR, I do so as a public servant talking to other public servants on how to prepare for competitions. I might draw on my own experiences competing or running processes from the other side of the table. But rarely do I write as simply a manager talking about my job. Today, I’m frustrated with the tools available to me as a manager for a specific type of non-advertised appointment process. I apologize for the upfront context, but it takes a bit to get us to where the problem comes up. If you already know all about non-advertised appointments, you can skip to the “But what if…” heading below.
Quick context
Most managers know that all PS staffing, maybe even all of HR outside of leave and benefits, is about “demonstrating merit”. Performance measurement, documentation, competitions i.e., selection processes, it almost all comes down to how we demonstrate merit.
In staffing, we generally have a matrix combining the elements to be demonstrated down the vertical axis while across we have a box for the lines of evidence. In most processes, we have:
- Basic eligibility for status and location of work (i.e., some jobs are restricted to internal candidates only or regional areas)
- Education;
- Experience;
- Knowledge;
- Abilities;
- Personal Suitability;
- Expanded eligibility for security and language profile; and.
Is work-from-home the new government normal?
For those who work in government, almost universally around the globe, the workforce response to the pandemic was pretty much the same. Everybody pivoted to work from home (WFH). And as time goes on, people are generally coming to the conclusion that WFH was not as terrible as everybody used to think, the current “normal” is generally working in many if not most areas, and so as people discuss how to “build back better” (BBB), there is a general informal consensus that BBB means WFH is now permanent. In short, while WFH started as an accidental outcome of the pandemic, people want to assume it is the “new normal”. But is it?
Over the last week, because of my HR guide, nine separate people have asked me variations of this question. Some of them want to know if they should buy a larger house with space for an office. Most want to move back home and work from a distance. Everyone wants to know if all departments will be WFH or only some. One of the most ironic things is that Global Affairs, the department with the most distributed workforce of all to begin with, is telling people they will be back at Fort Pearson, and that WFH will generally NOT be part of their new normal.… Read the rest
Articles I Like: 21 HR Jobs of the Future
Harvard Business Review’s mailing include a link to a cool article by Jeanne C. Meister about what HR people will be doing in the future, or doing “more of” in the future, given the impact of COVID-19 and the likely enduring switch to working from home. It’s based on a think piece from one of the thousands of organizations looking at the “future of work”, and there are tons of these reports coming out, as they have for the last five years. Most of them are, quite frankly, wrong. They’re pie-in-the-sky visions of “what could be”, not very practically tied to the current environment. In order for most of the predictions to come true, we would need to see a massive disruption in the workplace and workforce.
Like COVID-19 has now done, which makes some of the more recent predictions more closely tied to reality.
The report outlines 21 different job functions that HR people expect to see in the next 10 years and plots them on a 2×2 grid of how “techy” the companies are and time. It’s an interesting idea, but my take on it is that most of the 21 functions are “options” and not necessarily cooperative ones.… Read the rest
Why I hate “inventories” in Government of Canada HR
There are processes in GoC HR called “inventories” and they are often done in one of three instances, all of them generally bad for the applicant:
A. They are hiring for LOTS of different categories
You’ve likely seen these, as it will say “Come work at Transport! We’re hiring AS-01, AS-02, AS-03, AS-04,…” and they then list 7 levels of AS, 5 levels of PM, 7 levels of EC, etc. It’s called a “cattle call” and it is basically the equivalent of having a large drop box in front of their building that says “drop your resume off here and maybe someone will look at it”. There are no specific jobs identified, just an open lazy-ass HR process that screams “We have no idea what we’re doing but we need a lot of people and it’s easier to do this than a real competition where we tell you in advance what we want. We would like good people, but since good people won’t apply through this process unless they dream of working at Transport, we’ll settle for warm bodies who have no dignity, self-esteem, or standards. Oh, and since we have offices in multiple locations and can’t tell you what the job is, we won’t bother giving you any details on where the jobs are or what the requirements are, so try and be psychic to include what we’re looking for!”… Read the rest
Articles I Like: Five Changes Facing Public Employees When They Return to the Office – If They Do
As a public servant, and similar to every other industry, there is a lot of speculation about what post-Covid workplaces will look like. Many of our operations can be done well-enough from home, and the challenges we have now are mostly about IT infrastructure, home office solutions, and privacy. Much of our work is digital and email-enabled, so it’s not a giant leap to work from home. We just traditionally haven’t done that transition for all the usual pressures related to remote workers and supervision/monitoring, and some unique pressures related to privacy, taxpayer dollars, and supporting Ministers in person.
Paul Taylor over at Governing.com wrote an article about five changes he sees coming to the public service post-Covid. Here’s an excerpt:
… Read the restYour Cubicle. Our Conference Room. Where Did They Go? Your space may get bigger as facilities staff reconfigure space to conform with the 6-foot separation requirements. Coupled with limits on group size, that is likely to grow cubicle row into what were once conference rooms.
…
Beyond the Point of No Return. Social distancing is bound to spread employees across more square footage than agencies have to reconfigure to handle everybody at work. What’s more, as governments confront the need for budget cuts in the tens and hundreds of millions, the public-sector layoffs announced to date are likely to rise exponentially as the tax base shrinks.
Lynda.com: PowerPoint 2013 Specialist – Lesson 03: Working with slides
While Lesson 03 is only 14.5 minutes long, I started following along with the video and pausing it here and there so I could do the steps myself. It drastically increases the training time, but it really helps with learning the new stuff that goes beyond the simple basics of Lessons 1 and 2. This lesson is about working with the actual slides, managing their order for example, and so it includes adding and removing slides, changing the slide layout, organizing slides into sections, and simply rearranging slides.
I confess, as I mentioned previously, I was pretty confident that I could do most things I needed to do in PowerPoint. Which is apparently not the same as doing them the RIGHT way, which is way faster than my hacked techniques. Take for example where I’m really not sure how I want a slide to look, so I might start with a slide with dual text box layouts. Then, half-way through the slide, I might realize that it would be better for it to be in a table layout for more understandable visuals. So I would then add a table, resize it and play around with it, and make it fit. Not according to the default slide-with-table layout, just me doing it manually.… Read the rest
Articles I Like: The Best Mentors Ask These 8 Questions
Because of my interest in helping people with HR processes, and learning techniques to be a better manager in general, I am frequently attracted to articles about mentoring. I’m also frequently disappointed with those columns that advocate a “one size fits all” closed approach to mentoring.
So colour me surprised when I saw an article on Pocket recently about questions that the best mentors ask, written by Gwen Moran (and originally shared on Fast Company). Some of them are pretty common-place in my view:
- What does success look like to you?
- What do you want to change? (usually as “where do you want to be in 3-5 years?”)
- What options have you identified?
- What are you reading? (not usually as a mentoring question, often more for interviewing)
But she also includes some more interesting open ones:
- What does success look like to you? (a better phrasing than asking about their goals as it often leads to both visioning of ST and LT outcomes)
- What are the obstacles you’re facing? (great starter)
- What can you control? (now that’s getting a little harder-edged, I like it)
However, the one I like the best is asking what outcome the person wants, which is far more immediate than lofty goals.… Read the rest
OPL resources: Language tools while working from home
For those who are in language training, or who simply want to take advantage of some extra time to work on their language skills, the Ottawa Public Library has some language resources available. You’ll need an active OPL library card for it to work, and if it prompts you for a PIN you don’t know, it is probably the last four digits of your phone number. If you’re not in Ottawa, your local library likely has similar setups.
On the OPL website, choose Browse / Online Resources and then one of the following resources.
A. THE CANADIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA
While at first glance this may not seem like a “language resource”, it has lots of info about Canada and it is available in both English and French presented at a fairly junior reading level.
I already mentioned in an earlier post (OPL resources: Research tools while working from home) that the library has french and english newspapers and journals too. Other french resources include Encyclopédie Découverte and Encyclopædia Universalis.
B. CANTOOK STATION
In addition to a large number of french e-books available in the regular library catalog, this is a separate collection available as well.
C. FRENCH AUDIOBOOKS (Cloud Library)
For those early to studying, audio books are a bit of a challenge often because the language is more complicated and it is hard to sustain your interest for long.… Read the rest
OPL resources: Research tools while working from home
If you are struggling to access decent resources while you’re working from home, here’s a quick overview of some of the resources from the Ottawa Public Library that might be of interest to you. You’ll need an active OPL library card for it to work, and if it prompts you for a PIN you don’t know, it is probably the last four digits of your phone number.
On the OPL website, choose Browse / Online Resources and then one of the following resources.
A. ACADEMIC ONEFILE
Many libraries offer access to online journal databases, and OPL has Academic OneFile. It is produced by GALE, and it is not a full replacement for what you might have from EBSCO or an academic library like Carleton or UOttawa. But it’s pretty good. Let’s work through a couple of examples.
If I search for something like “nudging”, the popular term for the more technical field of “choice architecture”, it finds:
- Academic Journals (2,906)
- Magazines (4,446)
- Books (37)
- News (14,843)
- Videos (5)
Of course, some of those materials are going to be behind additional paywalls, but most will be accessible. The above search brought up this one from an academic journal:
Supiano, Beckie. “When a Big Idea Falls Short: New studies cast doubt on how well ‘nudging’ can work nationally.”… Read the rest