Civil servants told to spend more time in the office - Irish Times - Mod warning #526

This is the way it should be.

The Civil Sevice should serve the tax payer.

Not the other way round.

Try getting a job where one is held accountable for once.

I work in a highly sensitive environment - we haven't had any issue across thousands of remote workers over the last 5 years. If anything being remote makes the whole organisation safer as standards are higher.

We mostly WFH because it makes employees happier and productivity is higher (plus less sick days), plus no problems recruiting (they will even take less pay to join us) plus less office costs and so on.

Requirement for being in the office depends on the type of work, but for most departments where we are, WFH works perfectly well.

Absolutely, couldn't agree more.

Wasting public and private sector taxpayers money paying extortionate commercial property rents when the same job could be done working from home.

Clogging up the roads and public transport system for public and private sector taxpayers who can't or don't want to work remotely.

Some people in power just have no sense.

School kids are at school most of the day. Not everyone looks after babies and toddlers.

This is the way it is. Civil servants do serve the taxpayer. (We are also taxpayers).

We are held accountable.

If someone has a baby, the mother will be on maternity leave, not working? Because feck all people have 100% remote working, they will have to have some form of childcare arrangements when that finishes. What percentage of the workforce do you think is producing/caring for small sprogs at any one time, anyway?!

Where exactly are you living, that you have friends and neighbours calling in all the time - during the working day - Coronation Street, or Fair City?! Are they all unemployed, or what?!

You presumably work in a "proper office", but post on social media during the day?

My WFO days this week saw several randomers calling in to my office to enquire where x, y, or z people were, and several "social" calls from staff where there might have been two minutes' discussion about work and five or six minutes' about what we got up to last weekend or what's planned for this weekend. I would not have had friends or neighbours calling in to ask the same, because who the **** does that?! (And if they did - "Sorry, Bob, what is it, I'm working at the moment, I've to go on Zoom call!")

I also got called in to two meetings that I didn't need to be in, just because I was there, and that distracted me from what I'd been doing. Colleagues took their tea-break today because it was a Friday. That was more than 30 minutes away from their desks. Their and my tea-breaks at home might be 10 minutes, where we might put on a wash or empty the dishwasher and sit back down at our computer with a cuppa. Big f'n swing, like!

I worked til 5:30-5:45ish on my in-office days, because I had a commute; and until after 6 on my WFH days - because I'd none.

The bottom line, itsacoolday, is that decent managers know when their staff are performing, and when they aren't, and when targets are being met and when they aren't, and that applies whether or not staff are in the office or at home.

You might enjoy life better if you had a better work-life balance yourself, and weren't so bitter about people who have taken the opportunity of availing of one when the opportunity presented itself.

Strange I know multiple people managers who said productivity hasn't declined with hybrid and WFH. These aren't colleagues, these are friends of mine.

The main comment is that some of members productivity has declined. They also say that other workers have really kicked it up a notch.

Stepping back, studies have shown the same results, and that it mostly nets out - often with hybrid being the best of both worlds.

All managers will quietly admit that productivity declined with wfh.

There you go again - bald assertion, not fact, with nothing whatsoever to back it up. Didn't you just get a warning for that already?!

Ok so the managers that you “know” claim that productivity is down so that’s a fact in your eyes. Others say they know managers who say there’s no change in productivity but you think they’re lying because they’re lazy.

Why is it that your anecdotal “evidence” is far superior to everyone else’s (the majority) on this thread?

god I really wish I didn’t have to pay tax hahaha these threads always refer to the taxpayers as if they are separate to civil servants hahaha morons.

You have given no more than four links since you got your warning. Not "dozens." Stop lying.

Two of the links you gave were to Irish Times articles - a newspaper that survives largely on commercial property advertising (but whose CEO is very much in favour of WFH for his own staff!) - so hardly unbiased. One of the links was to the Daily Telegraph, a UK Tory rag, which is also hardly objective.

I have refuted your and others' "Civil servants are never sacked or disciplined" with references showing actually yes, they are, which you then ignored.

Surprised to see some wfh workers posting on a Saturday morning. During the week, to be more expected. One survey in 2023 said that on average people are checking their phones 144 times a day, and not surprisingly people check them much more often when at home than when working outside home.

What's the causal connection between the NCH Planning and the bike shed budget and WFH?

You can't 'serve the people' with 80% rookie staff only in the front door. You need to retain experienced, quality, professional staff, which is already a challenge in a competitive employment market.

Kinda throwing stones from glass houses if you're posting on the forum at all.