Civil Service - Post Lockdown - Blended Working?

I'm not saying a general rule is what should happen. 2 days in the office is the max that would be acceptable for those of us with a commute IMO, given there appears to be little chance in general of fully WFH roles, despite the evidence they can be done from home.

I think it will be down to the PO who knows best the roles and the people that are doing them. If their staff want to be in the office full time, at home full time or blended then it makes sense for them to accommodate them where possible. Demonstrate flexibility and they will get it back IMO. If a PO can decide where their staff carry out their job and has a mix of staff who want any of the three options then a one size fits all does not make sense, even if it is encouraged in the guidelines coming.

My understanding also is that the starting position is likely to be 3 days out and 2 days in. I expect that this will be rather formal at the start, with at least one day in required for the team as a whole. As inevitably happens, local arrangements under various POs will begin to diverge as time goes on.

For those who want full WFH, this is a very good starting position. The key thing to get at this point is more time at home than in the office. The reason for this is that it will necessitate and embed fairly quickly the key requirements to get additional WFH. Once you are out more than in the first thing that Departments will move towards (and this is part of Digital First in any case) is a move away from paper files almost entirely and moving towards electronic files. This is already the case is a lot of areas, but there are still some (especially customer facing) that are paper heavy and digital transformation efforts to move away from this are moving ahead across the civil service.

An additional reason is that, once people start coming in only for a minority of their time, the futility of this will become fairly immediately apparent - people coming in to the city center to log in to zoom meetings and send emails. Over the next few years I expect you will see lots of sections start to embrace and seek 4 days a week WFH, or more flexible arrangements allowing entire weeks to be WFH with office attendance only expected at certain times. 3 days a week WFH means the end of most face-to-face meetings, which were the main reason that most civil servants were office based in the first place - the amount of jobs which could not be done from home because those we interact with were working in offices is huge - that is now out the door. I've seen this in my area already, where people were called back in and found themselves working pretty much exactly as they were doing from home, with meetings with stakeholders still taking place virtually.

Managers will also have to get used to the idea of output based management rather than a presenteeism culture. The latter is much easier but much less effective, and any significant degree of WFH will demolish it as a management strategy. Managers will have to set and monitor output now, and while that culture will take some time to change, once it does the main barrier to WFH from the management side will die off. If you're focused entirely on output then you really don't care where or when your staff do the work provided the output hits your targets. We do have too many areas in which people just show up but do very varying levels of work when they're in. WFH will require a change there, and enabling mangers to develop output focused business plans and embed those in structures like PMDS is key to the cultural shift that needs to happen for WFH to be effective in an organisation as complex as the civil service. If you look at large law firms as an example (who culturally are fairly similar to the civil service in may ways) they've had less of an issue in adapting because they are super output focused: how much money are we taking in from fees; are billable hours up in X area; etc.

The watchword in my area, and as I understand in others, is that it is needed for "better collaboration". That's a fairly paper thin reason, and frequently senior management are using "collaboration" as a buzzword when all they mean in actuality is "information sharing" and in some cases "onboarding". I've worked in the private sector in more creative type work where collaboration was key, especially to new product development and complex problem solving. With a few exceptions this is neither how the civil service, nor most of the traditional professions, work. To develop collaboration in a real sense you do what, for example, the tech firms do - provide a workspace that encourages people, in a fairly flat management structure, to spend their time in common areas with those from different business areas and provide them with the "down time" (80-20) to work on ideas together that mostly go nowhere, but occasionally lead to new and creative products and solutions. The Civil Service doesn't, and probably can't, function that way. I can only imagine the look of horror from A/Secs if you had a handful of EOs, AOs, and APs playing pool and having a beer in the office while discussing some policy or process issue and deciding to send a submission up on the back of it.

Ultimately the kind of highly structured and constrained collaboration that occurs in the civil service won't be impacted greatly by WFH. A blended policy of 2/3 in/out will show this fairly rapidly. Onboarding is much harder, but it's not clear that the kind of informal training that is generally provided to new people is particularly efficient - there could be great gains in thinking about how we do that and providing a more formal process.

There's also the fact that, eventually, Government will recognise the profound potential of greater WFH in the civil and public service (who will be following leaders in the private sector). If you look at a lot of the major challenges facing Government over the next decade: housing provision, transport infrastructure, childcare, elder care, rural decline, climate resilience, etc; there is a lot of scope for WFH and the pattern of development it provides to reduce burdens here. Housing is the obvious one and enough has been said about that. In terms of transport infrastructure the challenges all stem from having to move a large number of people daily into a very small geographic area from a very spread out geographic area - WFH reduces that challenge immediately. Childcare expenses and elder care expenses are modern problems that are to a large degree caused by the atomisation of families due to the need to relocate for increasingly specialised work, the closer people can remain to parents the less severe these problems are - you open the possibility which many will take up of the traditional "the grandparents provide free childcare, and eventually kids and grandkids provide free eldercare". The benefits for arresting rural decline are also obvious, country people have been moving to Dublin in their droves reducing the attractiveness and economic health of rural towns at an increasing pace now for decades since services overtook industry here - rural Ireland is already seeing the benefit of WFH in new coffee shops, restaurants, etc., suddenly becoming economically viable. A PO in many rural towns would be among the higher income earners in the area, and also has skills and experience that community organisations (local voluntary boards like credit unions, the tidy towns, Comhaltas, the GAA, etc.) increasingly find it difficult to find. The benefits for climate resilience are also fairly clear - the worst effects of climate change will be when densely populated areas become unlivable, particularly coastal locations like where all of our cities are. Spreading people out, especially when that doesn't mean carbon costly commutes, is a great way to mitigate that risk. The other big climate challenge is likely to be dealing with a large number of climate refugees over the next couple of decades. We will face a huge problem in integrating asylum seekers in a politically acceptable way if rural decline and urban housing shortages remain an issue: we cannot provide housing for them in the cities without being seen to "displace locals" who cannot get housing, and we cannot put them in rural communities that have no work available and are themselves experiencing the depopulation of their own children. Vibrant rural communities that have young and economically successful populations with a wealth of job opportunities will find it much easier to integrate these newcomers, and cities won't face the same degree of pressure on dwellings. That's going to be a divisive issue, and without a way to solve the problem there is a profound risk of political instability.

Ireland's politics are highly sensitive to rural needs and will remain so for as long as we retain representation solely from multi-seat constituencies. Politicians are highly sensitive to the needs of their heartlands, and the pandemic has shown the potential for rural Ireland of getting back their sons and daughters who've left to work in the likes of Google, PWC, Salesforce, Arthur Cox, and the Civil Service. Political careers live and die over issues like keeping the small school, the post office, the Garda Station, the local hospital, etc. open. The best way to do that is to ensure a mass of people who need the service. Without that you just delay the inevitable.

That doesn't mean working from bedrooms and garden offices though. Sure, many will go for that solution, but many more will go for rural hubs. There are increasing numbers of these, and more and more towns are looking to establish them at a rapid rate - it's not difficult when they have so many central premises vacant. I think I'd go mad working from my house every day, but I'd have no difficulty walking twenty minutes into the town center to take up a desk in the local remote hub. I might even buy a coffee and a sandwich in town, drop my kids off at my parents place (and maybe in 15 years time check on them in the morning and evening), or go out for pints in the evening with friends from the remote working hub.

TL;DR: 3 days a week is the sweet spot for further development. It builds a remote culture in the organisation. It shows the benefit to the political system of WFH, which is significant. It also gives the Unions a new front for making demands, and those who want WFH should get active in FORSA and AHCPS to make this a priority in negotiations, because if they are smart they will find themselves pushing an open door.

We have a lot of managers who are unwilling to manage. That's to some extent what you're describing. If one is actually followed their responsibilities as a manager, and set out and agreed realistic outputs with proper timescales, then the next step is clear when those goals aren't being met. There is a very clear policy on dealing with underperformance through the PIP process, but the fact is that mangers don't tend to go down that route as generally they don't feel confident in doing so as they have failed in some area of their own responsibility and they know that a union or legal rep will catch them on it (e.g. goals are unclear, staff have not been treated in a consistent manner, underperformance has been tolerated for an extended period, feedback and training have been lacking).

If as a manger you've set goals realistically and with agreement, provided feedback, addressed performance issues promptly, and treated people consistently, then there are clear underperformance tools open to you. Threats of bullying and whatnot won't go anywhere.

I recently joined the Public Service with the AGS.

With the announcement today that weekly hours are likely to revert back to between 35 and 37 hours per week (back to pre 2013 levels), does anyone know what hours were standard for Public Service civilians in AGS or did it vary depending on your grade? (I am an EO)

Thank you. Did that include a lunchbreak of 30 mins or an hour or were breaks on top of the 6.57 hours?

Great news on the hours, that's day a month back