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. They have not mandated that everyone will be a minimum of 2 or 3 days a week in the office or said, “Okay, that’s it, everyone back in all the time”. They have told departments to basically “figure out what makes the most sense to your department.”

Second, they hear advice from their transition leads and their management teams. Mostly that things are working in some areas better than others, some are potential disasters, and few employees want to go back full-time with many wanting to WFH forever.

They are also hearing from employees through town halls, surveys, direct feedback, and pilots. About 90% are saying WFH is the greatest thing since sliced bread with 10% saying it’s the worst thing since indentured servitude. Those who have tried hybrid said it was great to have options other than only WFH (in the most basic form, at least; for others, they sing its praises from the rooftops, part of the 10% who can’t figure out why everyone doesn’t just go back to work).

But management is also seeing a lot of other discussions happening online. Someone asked me if I was going to comment on the rise of Reddit and Twitter in recent years as a tool to allow many public servants to have workplace discussions, almost like union-building efforts of old. The argument, to the extent it holds, is that internet discussions give people a chance to truly exchange views on what is going on, to consensus build on common issues, to inform the preparations by unions on what is important to members for future negotiations while also giving anyone with an internet connection a live view of what’s on employees’ minds right now.

It’s a great premise. But I’m not sure it particularly holds for the “greater good” or even for the benefit of the public service. After all, it’s not like simply having FaceBook or Twitter democratised the world into useful civil and political discourse, right? I don’t mean to be too snarky, but I find the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty damn low.

What doesn’t help “our” cause

I’ve written five posts and haven’t fully declared my own position and preference. So, let me be clear. If I had the opportunity to work from home for the next five years, basically to the time of my retirement, I would do so. If I had the choice of Job A which was WFH and an equivalent Job B which was RTW, I would take Job A. If Job B’s sweetener was a promotion, I’d probably still say no.

Working from home is a huge factor, it works well for me, I love not having to commute. But I’m under no illusions about which pieces work well and which pieces don’t. So when I say it is “our cause”, I mean it. I’m firmly in the camp that we should have (some) options to continue to WFH on a semi-permanent basis. But my desire (WFH) is tempered by my experiences managing before and during the pandemic and my realistic expenctations (hybrid for just about everyone).

So when you ask me if all the discussion on Reddit helps, if online stuff helps or hinders, I’m of two minds.

On the one hand, I hope so. I blog regularly on issues like this, sending my missives off into the void, seeking resonance with someone. Yet much of my blogging is about explaining stuff to a majority of employees who don’t understand the issues as they have never worked on anything horizontal or corporate or both, and they have no clue what the reasons are for doing something. As a small digression, one of the best episodes I ever saw for The West Wing was one where Josh was trying to push hard on AIDS medicines for Africa. And it goes through all the rhetoric you see online, all the pop-psych level attention and understanding most people have of Africa, healthcare and/or governance, and deals with each of them to realize that those aren’t the real challenges. The end example is that almost all the drugs are designed to be taken on a strict regimen at specific times of the day, and most Africans that they would be trying to reach don’t even have a watch or clock to allow them to follow the regimen. It’s my favourite episode for showing that “Hey, who knew that an issue like AIDS prevention and treatment in Africa was actually more complex than some pop singer’s take on how to solve the problem?”. I think it resonated with me because I used to work on issues tied to UNAIDS funding, and some of the weird side-impacts of what seemed like straight-forward policies showed that most senior experienced people making what looks like a stupid decision are not, in fact, as stupid as you might think. Yet lots of people who should know better like to throw stones and say, “Well, OBVIOUSLY, all these people don’t know what they’re doing.”

On the other hand, I don’t feel that much of the online conversation reflects well on public servants, our issues, or our ability to come up with creative solutions going forward. To come back to the issue at hand, let’s peek at popular online threads related to WFH.

First and foremost, everyone wants to know what department X or Y is doing. Sometimes they want to know because they’re at department X and haven’t heard, so looking for any intel / wisdom of the crowd; other times they want to know if department Y has something better to offer. They want the facts. Yet, you know what a ton of people posted? “My friend who works in another branch talked to her admin assistant who told her that their union rep heard from someone in HR that the ADMs want to implant 5G chips in everyone’s neck.” People are posting CRAP that they have no basis for other than random rumour or conspiracy theories. Up until recently, it hasn’t been particularly useful intel, it was just an echo chamber for people to vent their fears. I am not saying that maliciously, I’m saying many people simply heard what they already feared, or hoped, whether it was what was actually said or not.

A small digression. A few years ago, 3 years post-DRAP, we were having a branch-wide event, 700 people. Someone asked in the pre-meeting chats if there were any cuts coming down. Not an unreasonable fear after Strategic Review, reorgs and DRAP. We knew the question was out there, we prepared a response, and to be as transparent as possible, we drafted two elements for the talking points. First, there were some reviews going on for efficiencies related to processes and streamlining, routine cyclical reviews. That year, I think it was focused on correspondence and hospitality requests. Which people had heard about, we weren’t hiding them, hence the question. They were actually about process, not people. At most, it might have meant that some people doing correspondence AND scheduling might have a bit more time to do only scheduling. Nothing “substantial” to the review, nothing being eliminated, and most of it was asking the employees doing it, “any best practices we should be looking at or any irritants we should be working on?”. Routine stuff. But people heard “review” and in the post-DRAP world, that was a sensitive concept. So we didn’t duck, we acknowledged it. But we also directly answered the question / concern / fear, i.e., we included a very clear communication that “no, there were no cuts to personnel envisioned by any exercise”.

Now here’s the kicker. The ADM answered the question by saying, “No, there will be no cuts. However, we are doing a review of x and y.” That was NOT how it was drafted. It was drafted the opposite, “We’re doing a review of x and y, but no, there will be no cuts”. People who weren’t fearful might have heard both as being essentially the same answer. But those who were listening with fearful ears heard “no cuts” but watered down by “however”. By the end of the day, I had six calls from colleagues in the branch asking me how many would be cut and where the cuts would be. Because the fearful types spread their fears like a contagion.

Departments have been similarly dancing on the head of a pin for the last 18m about how to communicate what their plans were when they didn’t know what their plans would actually be yet. One of the health groups (Health Canada? PHAC? I don’t remember) posted a job posting about a year ago and had the same issue as the ADM above. They wanted to say two things — “we don’t know what the future will hold” and “WFH seems to be working”. There’s no “right answer” on how to put that together in a job posting. Is it fairer to say, “While we don’t know what the future will hold, WFH is the current plan” or “WFH is the current plan but we don’t know what will happen in the future”?

Lots of people — the ones perhaps who like Nike’s “Just do it” slogan — see those two as semantics. Those who understand language and psychology a little better know that they are VERY different formulations and communicate very different messages. The first says “WFH is the plan” while the second says “Who knows?”. Both are true, which one did you read?

Why am I harping on this? Because people heard one and drew a conclusion from it; other people heard the second and drew a different conclusion. The REAL conclusion was that both were true simultaneously. We’ve renamed Schrodinger’s cat as “WFH”. We’re both working from home forever and not working from home forever. Yet people heard what they feared or hoped and dashed to the internet to post it as fact.

And if a DM went to Reddit to see what people were saying, or more likely their advisors did, they were confused. “Hey, according to Reddit, we’re WFH forever. Did someone make an announcement I don’t remember?”. Nothing had been decided but online fora said it had been. As fact. No nuance, no “leaning towards”, nothing other than, “this is the way.”

That is not helpful, in my view. Because then senior management often had to react to the news that a decision had been made, when it hadn’t yet, so they would then tell all their managers to squelch those “positive” or “negative” rumours until it was decided. And so people then heard push back the other way, not because it was ACTUALLY the other way, just that it wasn’t decided yet. But people would then post and say, “People said the other day it was WFH, but we were just told today it wouldn’t be, ergo it must be RTW five days a week.”. The rumour mill REALLY doesn’t help our cause. Actual facts help; rumours, innuendo and conjecture do not.

Secondly, people want an answer to the question, “Why would we go back when we’ve proved everything works just as well from home?”. The short answer, already addressed, is that it isn’t working, not completely (passports, anyone?). The public service does not generally advertise when things go wrong. They correct them, they don’t blow it up to make a headline. I gave some highlights in my previous post of things breaking down. Things are, in a nutshell, going wrong more than they should. There have even been a few instances where a person has done something so monumentally stupid that in the past, they would have been suspended and possibly terminated (a definitive rarity but when it is so egregious, it happens). Now? It’s treated like a slow Thursday. Because management looks at it, shakes their head, may even be supremely pissed off, but they know if it goes to a tribunal, the argument will be, “Pandemic, amiright?”. Questions will be, “Did they get adequate training, were they properly supervised and mentored?” Except, that’s not working as well as it should. Onboarding is a huge challenge. So maybe full discipline isn’t the right response if someone screws up. Maybe they’re struggling with mental health, even. Ultimately, if we know employees and systems are strained, when something goes wrong, was it a systemic issue or poor performance?

Just because the average public servant doesn’t hear about things going wrong, and just because YOU think everything is going well in your area, that doesn’t mean the system is working the way it should. Vertical work is mostly getting done, with some cracks, and horizontal is struggling. But I don’t think it is particularly helpful for people to rant and rave online and suggest anyone who thinks RTW makes sense is obviously a stooge, an idiot, a lackey of big business, etc. In short, people have made ZERO effort to listen to what management or their colleagues who did pilots have told them, and so they can look like a bunch of Karens who want to speak to management right now. That too is not helpful to our cause. We look like we’re the ones who are tone deaf, and yes, I mean all of us because you can’t argue “it’s great for employees to come together” and then say, “Oh, but if it’s nutjob city, don’t tar us all with the same brush.” An employee-led forum full of wrong content and analysis? Yeah, why would management think the employees were showing really bad understanding of the issues?

It’s a bit like all the unions. Vaccine requirement? Day 1, they said “Great, all for it!”. Day 2? They were silent. Day 3? Oh, well, they clarified they mean that its good-ish, but GoC should have discussed it with them before announcing. Another example where we looked like self-serving morons.

My third point seems silly even to me. It’s the Subway thing. People started to rally around it like it is management being tone deaf, it was funny, maybe even an effective catalyst and slogan. But it was funny for about 60s and then it descended into chaos. Management at the department had to practically threaten legal action against some employees who were HARASSING AND THREATENING other employees about the issue. It is just plain stupid that anyone descended to that level.

People may have had a good point initially, and the high ground, but they gave it up to sling mud. So management stopped caring about the issue, it was reduced to only being about employee behaviour. I don’t know how to put this nicely to people. Very few senior managers are seeing it as a cautionary tale of not listening to staff or misreading a room, they’re seeing it as evidence that if you try talking to staff about these issues, you’ll end up dealing with a bunch of assholes. So they might as well make the decisions without much input. We lost traction fast. As soon as employees crossed the line on behaviour and strayed off the issue, that was all anyone in management saw.

The most monumental blunder of all

Most of the above is about missed opportunities for management to see what people could have actually contributed to a real discussion. But they didn’t set us back so much as didn’t advance us. But we are sliding backwards on one thread. It’s the pay issue. (rant alert, rant alert!).

People are talking about how we’re going to have all these “extra costs” if we have to commute and go into the office, the extra hours commuting, etc. and that we should get a raise to compensate for it. I would love to be respectful of your views. I’d like to see some out-of-the-box thinking, some decent aspects, such as you see about actual inflationary pressures (part of any negotiation).

But if you’re suggesting that RTW should earn a raise, please, for the love of whatever deity or non-entity you believe in, shut the hell up.

As I said, I want to rant. I struggle to explain it so that it will get through some very thick heads who keep writing and posting about this as if they had any economic background whatsoever. I joke regularly that “I’m a bit wordy” (as HandcuffsOfGold notes on Reddit, now THAT’s an understatement!). But there are literally 200 years of economic research about what goes into your salary. I want to post links to thousands of Ph.D. theses that address these types of issues. Heck, I think even Trump understands it.

Instead, I’ll keep it simple. Your wage or salary is designed to cover:

1. Remuneration for your labour;
2. Remuneration for the time to do your labour;
3. Remuneration for any ancillary items you need to do your labour (like dress clothes);
4. Opportunity costs for things that you could have been doing instead;
5. Opportunity costs for extra things you had to do (like commuting);
6. Additional costs tied to accessing your work site (such as commuting and parking);
7. Additional costs for things that you had to do since you weren’t doing something else yourself (like childcare); and,
8. Usually an adjustment for regional costs of living.

Lots of analysis suggest more variables than that, but let’s just look at those for now. Those out there who keep talking about a raise, they want to point out that they want a raise to cover #3, 5, 6, and 7 as something they aren’t facing right now. Except I have a small update for them. The salary that we’re all getting? It was set pre-pandemic. It ALREADY includes those variables when it was negotiated. Which is why we were all going into the office and doing our jobs for that salary level.

In fact, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty, for the last two years while working from home, we got paid that “non-labour” component of our salary. I don’t remember anyone offering to give it back or taking a pay cut. We didn’t earn it, after all. We didn’t have to buy dress clothes; we didn’t spend time commuting; we didn’t pay for commuting; and many of us moved out of expensive cities to move “back closer to home” which had a lower cost of living in many cases.

There are 200y of academic history of economics (plus philosophy of wage labour) that covers this. You even see it regularly in the news in different forms. The jobs going unfilled because people aren’t willing to do a job for minimum wage because while it nominally pays more than social assistance, the “extra” costs aren’t worth it. The disincentive to work some call it when they calculate it for social elements, a living wage when you look at it the other way. You also see it on childcare issues…the person whose childcare is so expensive that their salary isn’t high enough to make it worthwhile for them to even go to work. They’re basically earning enough to pay for daycare, and not much more, so they might as well stay home and take care of their kids directly (gender-based slavery, some call it).

Estimates of how big the “non-labour” portion depends on who is doing the calculation. Unions will tell you that “no, all of their wage is labour”. Yeah, no. Academics estimate between 15-25% of wage is the stuff you have to do just to be ready to work (the non-labour component), and 75%-85% of the salary is labour.

But we don’t really have to rely on estimates, there’s a proxy hiding in our collective agreements. There are some variations across agreements, but almost all have an “on-call” clause. It says, generally speaking, if you are called into work for a special shift, you are entitled to a minimum of a four-hour shift. The employer — aka the government in this case — normally wants to offer two-hour minimums. So for the government, a two-hour minimum is enough to get you to come in for a special shift. But the unions have said, no, we need another two hours to make it worth it. If you were ONLY dealing with on-call shifts, the proxy would suggest that the unions are saying it’s a 100% premium to top up what you’re making (i.e., 50% of your overall shift pay). But that is an unfair base. A fairer calculation would be to compare those extra two hours against an average full period of work, a full day in fact, so estimating 2/7.5 days = 26%. 25% perhaps if it was an 8-hour shift.

That type of calculation is often close to what informal overtime pay looks like as well. Research for salaried workers often finds that people are willing to put in informal OT until it is more than an hour, and they insist on claiming something once they hit the 2h mark.

Other research has tried to ask people through the pandemic, “If you had a chance to WFH at a reduced salary, how much would you be willing to give up to allow you to work from home anywhere in the country?”. Lots of people are trying that research around the world. The data is REALLY unreliable because few are doing a real calculation as if it was actually being implemented, but estimates are 10-15%. Oddly enough, research going the opposite way (i.e., contractors going from WFH to move to a regional centre, go into an office, do all the “extra” stuff they never did before), their calculations tend to be that they need about 15-20% to compensate. Some fields are higher, of course, with others lower. There’s a huge element for regional costs of living too in urban centres, which is hard to isolate.

But my gut impression of all of it is that 15% is about right as a ballpark estimate. As I noted, some Ph.D. thesis work has spent 400 pages trying to estimate even a single component of that. But for rough estimates, I’m fine with 15%. It’s more than 0, less than 100.

Why am I going on about this? Because we have our pay set before all this started, and didn’t have a pay cut when we went home, TBS has arguably been paying everyone an unearned 15% premium over the last two years. And now people are suggesting we go into TBS and say, “We’d like a raise for you to pay us again for stuff you already paid us for when we negotiated the rates earlier?”.

I don’t want ANYONE doing this type of argument with negotiations, it shouldn’t even be on the table. Because the response from TBS will be immediate. They’ll say, hey, you’re right, there’s a non-labour component, you’ve been paid it for 2y, and now, if you go in the office we’ll keep paying it or if you’re WFH, sign here for a 15% reduction in your pay. Or just tell everyone, “Okay, back to work full time.” Cuz they are paying us as if we already are in the office full-time. Why WOULDN’T they negotiate on that basis?

Not to mention there is no support with the public for a raise of any sort for government. We’re one of the most protected sectors of the last 2 years. We kept getting paid while some sectors were decimated. Not us. We even GREW the public service considerably during that time. I’d love to consider cost of living stuff, it’s real, but when you got the equivalent of a 15% in-kind raise already? A little uncouth to ask for another raise without seeming like you’re in a fancy car asking someone in the next lane if they have any Grey Poupon to borrow.

Focusing our attention

With the various discussions going on in branches, people act like “up to departments” means that it could mean a different model for every day of the year. If there are 220 business days, we don’t have 220 different choices. Ultimately, it comes down to the seven I already mentioned:

1. WFH all the time, maybe go in for team events;
2. RTW 1 day per quarter;
3. RTW 1 day per month;
4. RTW 0.5 to 1 day per week;
5. RTW 2 days per week;
6. RTW 3-4 days per week;
7. RTW 5 days per week.

It’s pretty clear that few departments will be willing to do #1, WFH all the time. At least not officially. It may look that way, but I suspect there will be a lot of pressure for #2 (come in 1 day per quarter for a team meeting) to be the minimum standard.

At the other end, few departments are going to absolutely mandate #7, full time return. The implications for HR are pretty high. There are some other elements at play (I’ll address them in episode 7 probably — yeah, I have to bump the #s around a bit), but that is pretty significant. If everyone leaves and you can’t staff, asking everyone to be in 5d a week will be a pretty serious management challenge and it won’t hold unless everyone matches it.

Personally? I think #4 and #5 i.e., 1-2 days per week will be the top-end for most groups. Yeah, yeah, I’m not ignoring the PCO decision. But those are high-end wonks, they already sacrificed their soul to work there anyway. 🙂 I usually tease friends heading to PCO and TBS if they have bought a small vase/urn to keep their soul in while they work there. But neither are particularly bastions of model behaviour for work/life balance, so is anyone surprised they appear amongst the most draconian?

I named this post, “if an employee falls in an empty office”, because I think public servants need to decide what it is they truly care about. WFH permanent forever is not in the cards. It simply isn’t. I’ll deal with some giant risk factors in Episode 7, and about the options people are seeing in Episode 6, but none of them make WFH viable in the short- or medium-term, in my view.

Raises, Subway, all of that is just noise. If “we” really care about WFH, it should be the one and only issue up for discussion in negotiations. We are signing one-year telework agreements but that isn’t stability. Unions need to talk about what it means to sign a telework agreement only for a year. Are they presumed renewable if you’re in the same box? Some people are dreaming in technicolour and want it to be that if you are WFH, you can do it forever in any job you take. That isn’t even remotely feasible, and we need to get those stupid options off the table so we can talk about REAL options. Thinks that address how sustainable a commitment is. Does WFH mean simply WFH or does it mean WFH anywhere in Canada with reasonable accommodation on scheduling to make it happen? Will we guarantee a local office to anyone who wants to go in?

In short, we need to nail down what WFH means and what it means when it’s approved.

Management has been asking for 2 years what it should look like and we have routinely given them conflicting or unrealistic advice. Nobody has given them anything resembling anything practical. So they’re mostly relying on old research, their own preferences, and what some of the pilots have told them (there are some exceptions that I’ll mention in the next post).

But how is anything employees have offered for commentary helpful in getting us what we want? If you’re working at a department that mandated top-down what the new rules are, you’ll see that it wasn’t helpful, not at all, you had no say.

We need to cut out the noise, so we can hear the signals from the falling employees.

WFH vs. RTW, part 6: If management is left to their own devices