Civil Service - Post Lockdown - Blended Working?

Find out who the Lead Worker Representative for your Dept is, and ask them what way your Dept is leaning. Some depts are much more resistant to the idea of blended working than others.

I think that this was the plan for a staged return to work before Omicron hit us in a wave, so it should probably be viewed as a mere resumption of that approach.

I think that various departments will adopt various approaches between then and the agreement/implementation of blended working, and while you will be able to read to an extent the attitude of each department's management board in the interim period, the policy will at that stage lead to a much more uniform approach.

if not, the departments/units/teams (depending on where discretion sits in each dept) that restrict WFH are going to start bleeding staff very quickly indeed- with mobility now well established and certain skillsets in particular both in high demand and well suited to a wfh approach, managers will simply see this as a bargaining tool to snap up the people they want.

long before the WRC hammers home the right to work from home on a reasonable basis (and if you haven't run into trouble in the past 2 years, that's a slam-dunk case) the departments that drag their feet on this will be feeling the pain- now i dont think like an ASEC thinks but for the life of me if that's not obvious to anyone they must have a serious set of blinkers on them

I wonder how they will manage to screw this up all the same- can't believe that all departments will allow themselves to be held back by the few noteworthy foot-draggers (like happened when no consensus could be found last year on a policy)

All of the above can be reasoned without reference to luddite public sector workers, management who hate their teams, lazy workers getting away with murder. it's very simple to pick a path through the actual issues that will come into play without sounding like a crank.

@kennethsmyth

Additionally there are practices within the public sector to prevent private professionals moving into the sector - any person applying for a public sector job from the private sector can only start on the lowest increment for that level yet public sector employees can start on higher increment levels within that level.

All new entrants to the public service start on the first point of the scale for their grade.

Public sector employees can start on a higher increment level as the points on their payscales can overlap, and someone on the top of the EO scale will be earning more than someone at the start of the HEO scale. Do you think an EO newly promoted to HEO, should take a pay cut and drop back to the first increment of the HEO scale ? Promotion usually means pay increase not decrease!

The last time public sector pay was benchmarked against private sector, there was uproar!

A new entrant is not "taking a paycut". Its their choice if they wish to apply for a public service role or not, and it has always been the case that new entrants start on the first point of their scale.

Existing public servants are not new entrants, they are already employees

Why should a new entrant from the private sector be allowed to leapfrog in pay over someone who has worked their way up through the grades but have not reached the point on the scale that the new private sector entrant thinks they should enter on, because "that's what I was paid in the private sector".

Anyway, this thread is about blended working not pay. If you want to discuss starting pay rates, maybe open another thread.