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

What is hard to take seriously is the level of outrage about being asked to attend the office two or three days a week. For most people, that’s a compromise, not a hardship. Protesting that as if it’s some kind of oppression just comes across as childish and unhelpful.

Outrage? Hardly.

I'm a logical person who favours evidence-based policies and decisions. When my job - like many people at my grade - largely consists of emails, analysis, report-writing, and meetings, there is zero point in me commuting for between an hour and two hours to do exactly the same things that I could be doing at home, for no good reason. Or any reason at all. Just "It's our policy."

If the argument is genuinely that WFH improves public service delivery, then that needs to be demonstrated in outcomes, not just asserted because it suits the individual. Otherwise it’s just preference dressed up as principle.

Feeling productive is fine. Providing a better service to the public is the actual test.

Yes.

And I can see on the flexi system that my staff work longer when WFH compared to when they're in the office, where they tend to leave earlier because most of them have long commutes.

And I can see on our ticketing system that their stats go up when they're WFH, compared to when they're in the office.

This is replicated across the civil service. Case in point: Revenue (where most of the admin work is caseload based, and they absolutely have the stats available) telling DPER to **** off when DPER said bring your staff in more. Why? Evidence, on Revenue's side, assertion because it suits… someone? A Sec Gen?… in DPER?

Mrs OBumble apparently works for some call centre in the west of Ireland. Call centres do not have a reputation for being good employers so I can well understand her not being paid if she can't make it to work and she can't WFH because of a power-cut. There are a few other employers I could name who would treat employees poorly in those circumstances, not counting the gig economy and bogus self-employment, but they're few and far between.

Obviously, that does not apply to civil servants, or public servants, or, indeed, anyone working for most decent private sector employers, who of course pay their staff when the place can't open due to circumstances beyond their control and people can't WFH through no fault of their own.

I'm not sure where she's going with this insistence on "no, you generally do not."

I do have to agree on the flexibility when working from home.

We were fully Wfh and I would log off and log back on for later meetings and generally work later.

We are three days back now and when I am in the office the laptop is shut at 5 and I am done for the day.

The days I work from home I am usually on till after 6 and happy to log back on if there's a meeting at 7 with the US.