Maybe so....
I don't know about other departments - mine does have physical flexi-clock terminals in our buildings, even though we've been clocking in/out on our computers during the pandemic. They'd have to find a way for the clock software to recognise the employee's location. Maybe if in the office you can only use the physical terminals?
I wonder would it be a case of only allowed build up flexi time the days you are in the office,no Flexi WFH ?
earlier start/later close would be something I'd like to see happen.
Right I get you , absolutely no reason to be giving them an hour a day for nothing so.
I'd LOVE that 😂
I could be wrong, but I think the point being made was that meetings are scheduled during core times - not that the poster is booked for 5 solid hours of meetings every day?
Sorry. I should have clarified
Those are the range of times the meetings are can be scheduled for. Typically I'd spend about 2 to 2.5 hours a day at meetings.
@gazzer -
I can't seem to quote your post above about lots of meetings, but some of my colleagues have implemented a rule amongst themselves - "zoom free fridays" 🙂
(I don't work on Fridays, so every Friday is zoom free for me 😉 )
A lot of meetings are a waste of time. No need for half of them.
I think the ability to accrue flexi leave will be lost in the trade off for blended working.
I think flexi time will remain, and may become even more flexible (eg. changes to core times, staggered working hours, lunches, etc)
Again, purely speculation on my part.
But most people I've spoken too about it (including some here) have said they are willing to accept that trade off, to continue working from home.
5 hours of meetings per day, FFS that's taking the piss.
Assistant Sec wouldn't be in that many hours of meetings per week.
Well meetings are scheduled from 10 to 12.30 and 2 till 4.30 so more or less in core times but still need to do my work around that so tend to get a good bit done from 8.15 to 10 and after 4.30. We have a LOT of meetings 😁
Would you not speak to your manager and ask that meetings are scheduled for core time .
I don't know why anyone would be giving an extra hour a day for nothing.
The one thing that needs to be clarified when blended working comes in is how will flexi leave work. Can you only work up time when you are physically in the office?
It doesn't really affect me as I tended not to work up much time but since wfh I'm definitely doing approx an hour a day more due to timings of Zoom meetings etc as I tend to start work around 8.15 and finish around 5.30. There are a lot of people who pre Covid would have worked up flexi leave each month.
The unions have been extremely quiet about flexi for some strange reason
Initial discussions with management for my role suggests I can expect a good shot at 1 day in office, 2 at most
Its going to be heavily contingent on dept and role, and its still just too soon to be stirred up about it either way imo
Well I for one certainly don't want a 5 day week back in the office. I am saving a good bit of money (approx 50 euro a week) from no commuting costs and eating lunches I make from home.
My bedroom is free during the day as I am not in bed so I have no problem using the room as an office. A laptop doesn't take up much room 😁.
Of course my electricity bill is higher but with the savings I make I am still up around 30 euro a week.
On top of that I have much more free time. I was spending the guts of 2.5 hours getting to and from work each day.
I realise some people might cycle to work or live very near to their office but I'd be fairly confident that the majority of people drive or use public transport to get to the office.
Using my section as an example from 25 people only one lives walking distance to the office. One other cycles. The rest drive and commute.
If I really need to be in the office for a particular day I just have to let the accommodation unit know the day before.
When blended working does eventually come in I hope to still be able to wfh 3 days a week
Duration? Who knows, really. People were telling me here two years ago that it was just going to be for a couple of months. You'd be foolish to make plans for the future based on this virus. So what is 'just for the duration of the pandemic' going to be?
There's no-one in the office to mingle with. There's a lovely, wide, open plan space for about 40 people sitting mostly empty, one other person once a week, lighted and heated, manned for security and cleaning. And I can't use it.
On a permanent basis? Or is it just for the duration of the pandemic?
Surely a chap like you, conscious of health and safety and all, would be glad not to have to mingle with others while a deadly virus is in the air.
Well, they are often unwilling to manage because it is not worth the heat to them from bullying complaints (trust me I have seen it - attack is the best form of defence for any employee who feels their performance is coming under scrutiny). HR often won't let you put people on a PIP as they are talking a risk of a legal case by the employee for unfair treatment and that's their number one objective - avoid legal issues.
Once you start asking questions on documented timelines you get "you're pressuring me, you are singling me out" etc and you start getting manipulated and undermined which is very difficult to deal with. Honestly, managing in the PS is not done by a lot of managers because with the culture it's impossible to enforce things with disengaged and non performing employees - the manager will be the one taking all teh risks while the employee continues to get their way.
That's exactly what's happening to me and others today - Government demanding that employees work from home, with no consideration of the feasibility of same.
Are you saying it is the Government that are demanding their employees work from home on a permanent basis? In order to free up Government office space? Do you have a link for any of this? Were the Government requesting this free work space prior to covid?
Or is it in fact the employees who are requesting they provide their employer with free work space once it was experienced due to covid how beneficial it is?
From what I can see in this thread, quite a lot of people are insisting they provide free work spaces within their homes.
In return for providing free office space to the employer? You haven't done much negotiation with unions, have you?
There is a big problem with poor management in the CS whereby underperforming employees are allowed to fester. Some managers don't want to look weak if a PIP is implemented. It reflects badly on them that they couldn't nip problems in the bud before it got to that stage. Also the last thing a manager wants is a case of bullying on their hands when they have ambitions for promotion. It truly is disfunctional in some areas of the CS when underperformance is not confronted and acted on in comparison to the private sector where the employee would be shown the door. The unions have a lot of power unfortunately in protecting the employee.
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.
Exactly. There is always a minority who take the piss in the office. Allowing WFH needs to go hand-in-hand with stricter and enforced disciplinary actions.
Everyone is talking about management needing to manage based on outcomes and timelines. Managers desperately want this imo, but aren't allowed by the employees and culture in a lot of cases.
The number of conversations I have about late timelines (which were agreed with the iniividual or even suggested by the individual, not me as the manager) with no explanation or communication or apology etc. and then I get the response that I am putting people under "pressure" and they go to the union and HR.
Employees need to realise if they are WFH they need to be accountable and deliver on timelines, and managers need to be able to enforce that and have serious conversations/warnings if they don't. Right now, managers simply can't have those conversations as they will get accused of bullying and there is literally no consequence for employees of missed deadlines and not answering emails from the manager whatsoever - no demotion, no risk of dismissal, and no bonus foregone, so they simply don't care, except for the minority who are driven high performers. What can the manager do if they don't do the work on time? Nothing so there's no incentive to do the work if you are not career-driven and looking for a promotion. That's the power that staff have and it will be impossible in the long term.
WFH works great if you can fully enforce accountability in a meaningful way - but this isn't possible in a lot of cases in the public service.
Some public service and civil service mid level managers hate their staff working from home and will resist it, I think blended work is the future for many jobs though if they can be carried out to the required standards.
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.
The reality is that 100% WFH will not be offered. Realistically it will be 3 days in the office and 2 at home, unfortunately. That is what has been proposed for us, despite various objections.
No doubt there will be some flexibility in how it works out over a monthly period, but in order to be equitable, I don’t see sections performing similar functions getting away with 1 or 2 days only in the office (unless it’s something that they already had).
Then there’s the issue of those who can’t work from home. Will there be complaints and cries for compensation because they don’t get a WFH perk? That will likely lead into new rules around flexileave. I won’t be surprised to see us penalised in some way for WFH, similar to how flexileave is currently suspended unless you work in the office.
Spoofer Veradka has gone awol over this issue.
Surely if this is to be implemted, there also has to be an easier way agreed with unions of getting rid of useless staff in return. I really hope the Government don't miss this opportunity to approve WFH demands without getting something tangible in return.
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