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

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

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

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

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