Civil servants face a crackdown on working from home as ministers plan the end of the ‘Tuesday to Thursday’ office culture in Whitehall that is blamed for plummeting productivity since the pandemic. The Telegraph has the story.
Downing Street is preparing to issue new guidance to all Government departments ordering them to make sure more staff return to their desks.
It will target mandarins who regularly choose to log in remotely on Mondays and Fridays, a trend that has prompted growing alarm in No. 10.
Jeremy Quin, the Paymaster General, will launch the push as part of efforts to boost public sector productivity, which has plummeted post-Covid.
Government sources told the Telegraph that ministers have become increasingly concerned by the impact of working from home on Whitehall delivery.
They are determined to reverse the pattern, which has seen mandarins choose to attend the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Departments were on average only half full last week, according to official statistics, with none getting more than two thirds of staff at their desks.
Mr. Quin has ordered Whitehall managers to draw up new advice on the best ways the Government can drive up those attendance figures.
A source close to him told the Telegraph: “This isn’t some fishing expedition against the Civil Service – it’s about delivering for the taxpayer.
“To be clear, we expect civil servants to be in the office wherever needed to drive delivery.
“The taxpayer forks out for Government buildings and rightly expects them to be used.
“Equally, junior staff cannot be expected to learn from behind their desks at home.”
Worth reading in full.
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Yawn.
When will people stop conflating laziness, poor management and poor incentive culture with working from home?
Yeah, get everyone back to their desks, where they were all so amazingly efficient before lockdowns.
Lots of people I know work from home, and they work bloody hard and are very productive. The ones that are not were not productive when they worked in an office.
While ‘plummeting’ productivity may not be exclusively due to lockdown (not covid), it is certainly true that some people are better able to manage themselves while working from home than others. Similarly, some jobs are better suited to such an environment than others. It seems reasonable to me that a job that includes directly mentoring juniors is not best performed remotely.
Trying to re-assert discipline among the civil service would be a task for Sisyphus. Come to think of it, I reckon many civil servants view their work to be as futile as Sisyphus’ task in Hades.
“It seems reasonable to me that a job that includes directly mentoring juniors is not best performed remotely.”
I used to think so, but having mentored juniors who have never been in the office, I now realise it is possible. There are for sure downsides to WFH, primarily in my experience social – but in my experience they are outweighed by the advantages.
Fair enough. It’s something new the civil service will have to learn.
I think that the same good management practice applies. In fact I think managing people remotely has made me a better manager because you need to think about what people are producing and how you measure their contribution.
Very well said. I really could not agree more.
Large organisations often have a ‘look busy’ culture inimical to productive effort; a concentration on superficial activity (endless pointless meetings which struggle to get past the first item on the agenda, if they even get that far) rather than measurable progress.
It may very well be that WFH productivity is higher in such organisations since Teams/Zoom meetings are time limited; ‘phantom’ meetings can block out diaries to allow some real productive effort to take place.
Yes, but therein likes the problem. If an employer is paying people to work, and wants to know who’s not working very hard, they can see that more easily when people are working in an office. Yes, it’s true that many people working from home work very hard indeed. I’m one – I often start working at 5.30 am and never take a ‘lunch hour’. But then I’m self-employed. The only person it harms if I slack a bit is me. I can quite understand that employers who are paying others would like to keep an eye on them, as unfortunately we all know that if you give people a bit of free rein to manage their own time, if you trust them to work when they’re not under the gaze of their employer and/or fellow workers, 50% of them will work hard and 50% will take advantage!
It depends on the job, but I measure contribution by what people produce, not how long they spend at their desk.
Yes, but from reports that I have seen, not much work is getting done. In my case I am waiting for HM Land Registry to get things done. May be it isn’t because of working from home, but they won’t tell me.
Working from home may well have contributed to this, but it doesn’t necessarily need to. IMO in the end it comes down to poor management.
Anecdotally, and from personal experience, DVLA is well up to standard using WFH.
Presumably because it has always been shyte?
The public sector product is always reliably shite.
I too was self employed and worked from home. Like you. if I didn’t work a full day then my income reduced. What incentive is there, for a civil servant, protected by his or her trade union with a guaranteed monthly salary, to put in the hours. Are they monitored by their employers, and are their salaries reduced by the amount of their railway season ticket? When I was self employed I sat at my desk dressed for a days business.
Sorry mate but please don’t add to the laziness of today’s so called ‘workers’!
They’ve got a bad enough attitude towards work as it is!
How am I adding to the laziness of today’s so called workers? I’m telling you that lots of people I know work from home and work bloody hard, including me, my boss, most of my team and the very profitable firm I work for and help run. Some of our staff coped better than others, but the answer is not some blanket edict but to treat people as individuals and manage them accordingly.
Cobblers! Work is work! and that means going there to work, there’s no way you can concentrate on work with kids ,pets,coffee and the wife and all the other distraction at home, simple as that.
Speak for yourself. I don’t get distracted, and colleagues that might have rooms with doors that close.
I’m obviously from an old school work ethnic, maybe I’m on my own, but getting out of bed and going to work gave me a sense of purpose! Not a “well I’ll take it or leave it, depends on how I feel today” attitude, in my day your feet wouldn’t touch the ground with how fast you would have been booted out the door with the shouts of “theres plenty more that would be pleased with your job” ringing it your ears!
I’m pretty old school too. Just no longer feel I need to spend 3 hours travelling every day at the cost of £5,000 a year. I do agree that for some people the act of getting out of the house and going to a place of work is very helpful and those people and their managers should certainly bear this mind. I personally favour firms offering both options, or a mixture – it seems regrettable that a firm would close an office completely and force employees to work from home – however perhaps if this happens the market should sort it out as people will vote with their feet. We shall see.
That’s something I do agree with, a choice, if, the work is possible from home, as a builder I couldn’t do my job from home but I would still say it’s preferable for ones own wellbeing to go and do gainful employment away from the home dynamic
We had lots of work done during “lockdowns” – almost without exception, the people who came to do the work were profoundly uninterested in worrying about covid, in direct contrast to my desk bound colleagues.
No doubt if employers provided decent offices, subsidised high quality food and a better standard of employee welfare management generally, more would prefer to go in to the office.
Open plan offices are a great deal more distracting than many home environments.
Where work can be done from home, the onus should be on the employer to provide an attractive working environment if they wish their employees to spend more time in the office, always given that WFH is more productive, as, in many, if not most, cases, I would suggest that it is.
HMRC used to respond far more quickly before the lockdowns.
I think lockdowns destroyed a lot of people’s already fragile work ethic. I think the problem with the public sector is how do you incentivise them.
Every year you make the bottom 5% redundant. That’s how you incentivise the leeches.
Maybe, but you’d to start by having a defensible way of working out who the bottom 5% were. I wonder how many state sector managers have any clue about that.
It’s called ‘Management’ and you’re right about that. They’re too busy with pseudo-activities such as e.g. getting
a gold star from Stonewall to do the job that they’re paid large sums of money (and a gold plated, taxpayer funded pension) for, i.e. serving the public.
Any slithering serpents who don’t want to work in any office should have their salary reduced by
10% for every day they choose to stay at home.
And given the number of non jobs fulfilled by these slackers the idea that they are more productive at home is an insult to the intelligence of the taxpayers who fund their shirking at home.
The bottom 20% would be more like it
I know people for whom the opposite is true as well. I dont think that is necessarily a golden rule. Its an obvious ‘thing to do’ to want to have people in an environment where their productivity can be properly measured. Whether productivity is given the keenest edge, and whether it is suitable incentivised is another issue altogether. The Civil Services appear to be mired in structures that are stopping them from delivering, and not helping them. They appear over managed, and top heavy, and they have far too many people who are ‘regulating’ their existence and activities instead of delivering core services to the tax payer. Apart from the local bars and sandwich shops who might be able to make some money on Monday and Friday, I doubt that this is any kind of solution to any kind of problem.
Indeed the problems undoubtedly go far deeper.
A fair assessment so why the high downvotes?
Must be a lot of public sector middle management on here without much to do now their productive workers are at home……
Possibly a couple of reasons
1) Some who are hard of understanding think I am defending the inefficient public sector, or lazy inefficient workers in general. I hope I am wrong, as I like to think DS attracts readers with more sense than that.
2) WFH took off with the covid nonsense, and any fruit of the covid nonsense is bad. I think this is an illogical reaction, but entirely understandable.
3) People think that WFH is bad for the soul and the spirit, and contributes to the further isolation and internet-dependency of humans, making them easier to control. I guess it’s sort of allied to Point 2. It’s a concern with which I have some sympathy, which is not to say I think it always applies. I work from home 100% and am far from isolated – but I am spared listening to normie colleagues talk crap about their vaccinations, climate change etc.
But they are claiming productivity has “plummeted”. I don’t actually know if it has (who can believe anything these days) but it seems to me that working from home post-covid isn’t the same as working from home pre-covid. A lot of people’s attitudes have changed since they enjoyed that long hot summer supposedly working from home (aka the garden), but in reality no one was checking up on them much or worrying about productivity because of the Unprecedented Dreadful Virus and the poor old NHS Heroes. Pre-covid, working from home was seen as a bit of a privilege and you would be checked up on regularly (my company wouldn’t even allow me one day a week away from the commute) whereas now it’s seen as a bit of a human right even for those in jobs which aren’t really suited to working out of the office. Why choose Mondays and Fridays? Because you can clock in a bit late on Monday and clock out a bit early on Friday, that’s why.
I’m not against sensible and limited home working if productivity remains the same, in fact I think it’s a good idea especially for those like me who used to be faced with a long and stressful commute. And some people of course will work hard, or slack off, wherever they are. But I don’t think the current attitude of not really needing to turn up for work any more is a particularly good one.
Damage caused by lockdowns is something of an obsession of mine but I can’t help thinking that they damaged people’s work ethic in the way you describe.
It’s probably easier to slack at home if your firm’s management practices are weak.
Speaking personally, as almost all of my team now work from home most of the time I am actually more aware of what they are doing than when it was an occasional thing, but I don’t know if this is typical.
My concern with the headline is that it’s a knee jerk headline grabbing reaction that is not thought through and will not solve underlying structural issues affecting productivity.
Much like all headlines really. I agree, it’s not WFH that is the problem per se, but the change in people’s attitudes towards it/work in general since covid and the belief some have that it violates their human rights if not permitted. Perhaps going back to the office for a while could reset their work ethic. Covid taught us really that so many things weren’t “essential” other than the sainted keyworker class. It’s no wonder it makes some people bristle to be ordered back to work so soon after being ordered to stay away. Just like teachers moaning that kids don’t turn up to school any more.
“Perhaps going back to the office for a while could reset their work ethic.” Yes, I think that may be something that could work for some. I would not favour a blanket approach though – it should be reserved for those who are underperforming.
I’m sure that “Work from Work” is racist. I haven’t quite worked out the nuts and bolts, but it feels racist, and that’s what’s important.
It’s clearly white supremacist, and harks back to the days of slavery for which everyone indigenous to the UK is clearly guilty. Reparations all round please.
The down voter clearly has a low tolerance of satire or no sense of humour. Perhaps both.
I’m going with “pig shit thick”
Well yes, there’s always that.
I’m pretty sure there actually was a study at some point that claimed having to go into the office was racist.
The perfect answer:
Clock in Monday morning at 8am or your sacked!
There is no shortage of available jobs so that could backfire horribly.
The carrot works far better than the stick.
Employees at a privately owned Danish Company would be greeted every morning with fresh pastries, excellent coffee and bowls of fruit (also, occasionally, Gammel dansk!) and then provided with an outstanding canteen lunch. I believe Companies received tax breaks for providing such things.
Outstanding British Companies like Ferranti used to do much the same.
If they are no longer public sector leeches, i don’t care if they do get a private sector job on Monday….
But you may struggle to replace them?
Better to incentivise employees you already have.
Hold on tight to nurse for fear of getting something worse!
Part-timers are easy to replace.
No one is indispensable but a constant churn of employees infallibly indicates cultural problems; potentially toxic management.
Something that has been terribly overlooked for far too long is that a lot of people are night owls, who don’t function well during early mornings, and having to “clock in Monday morning at 8am” is the worst possible start to the working week for them in terms of their productivity and usefulness. Whereas with a good lie-in, they can be at the peak of their powers later in the day and get far more done.
So work nights on a sewage farm, or cleaning shithouses, I’m sure that there are vacancies.
Coming soon, after a minor “crackdown” (you need to be careful using confrontational words like that especially in the civil service, look what happened to Dominic Raab when he expected civil servants to do their jobs), a tiny improvement in productivity and massive taxpayer funded bonuses all round. Luvly Jubbly.
With thanks to Allison Pearson, yesterday’s DT and the anonymous health professional quoted:
‘They are obsessed with reputational management and preoccupy themselves with empire building, wasting time on the plethora of talking shops and obsess over bureaucracy and process to ensure that, under no circumstances, does anything get done. This all takes place alongside absurd gimmicks and virtue-signalling.’
That is the kind of activity that takes place (not just) in the public sector workplace.
Where possible, WFH allows for a great deal more productive effort and a great deal fewer pointless ‘look busy’ meetings indulged in by those for whom office work is all about internal politics.
WFH offers the public sector a wonderful opportunity to spot the underemployed middle managers previously filling their diaries with unnecessary meetings and to ‘de-layer’; yet another open goal that they will miss by a country mile……
Then you fire the middle management and get the peons back behind desks
Sell the desks.
Save a fortune on office rent.
My partner recently tried to book a round of golf at our local course. We’re retired so it’s not a problem normally. She was told all tee times were taken. She asked if that was usual for a weekday. She was told, ” No, it’s a work from home day”
A great deal of business has been done on the golf course.
Productive effort is key.
We forget the value of personal relationships in business at our peril.