May: Building a culture of public service on hybrid work, Speer: It’s time for public servants to return to the office

Some good comments by those interviewed:

….Spicer, who teaches values and ethics, expects the government will face clashes between “individual values and organizational values.”

“There hasn’t been a lot of weight put behind ethics … and we now have a lot of younger folks coming in who don’t have the same kind of understanding of what it means to be a public servant, what it means to act purely within the public interest,” he says.

Spicer says many have a weaker connection to the notion of public service. Some still have the “spark” and see it as a calling. Others, however, see it as little more than a secure and steady job with benefits. Then there are advocates who want to advance a cause, such as climate change or sustainability.

The last group is more likely to quit if they don’t see progress, if their advice isn’t taken or if a change in government takes policy in a different direction or undoes policies, Spicer says.

New recruits are also more culturally diverse. Many have experience in the private sector, other levels of government or are transitioning between sectors. They tend to be professionals, bring expertise from their respective fields and often identify more closely with their profession’s code of conduct than with traditional public service norms.

The era of social media and gig employment

Spicer says they grew up on social media and juggling different jobs. Many see no reason why they can’t voice their opinions on social media or pursue a side hustle while working in government – both of which were traditionally frowned upon and are still controversial.

Public servants claim to be more productive since they began working from home, but a consensus that government needs fixing has emerged. It is too big, slow and risk-averse to deliver its basic services, let alone get ready for the world’s crises. On top of that, trust in government is dropping.

Turnbull says the political timeline “is already so much faster than the public service timeline” and working from home slows that down. The “values-transmission question” is urgent, especially with so many new public servants, she argues.

Fox says the government is committed to a hybrid work model, but departments must be more deliberate about creating a workplace culture that reflects “who we are.”

“We’ve got to have more emphasis on our environment and our learning within so people feel that they’re part of something larger and they understand the responsibilities that come with that.”

Linda Duxbury, a professor of management at Carleton University and expert on work-life balance and remote work, counters that both the unions and the government are misguided in the battle over hybrid work.

She argues there is no one-size-fits-all solution and that people need to be where the jobs can be done. A meat inspector must go to a processing plant and a customs officer must go to the border, but many other public service jobs can be done from anywhere.

However, she added that public servants’ complaints about time and money spent commuting and on lunches and child care are not the employer’s problem. These gripes also don’t fly with Canadians.

“Your job is to serve the public. So, are you serving them? Are you serving yourself?” she asks.

Duxbury says both the government and unions need to “stop with the stupid rhetoric” and start designing jobs to get the best work done. “There is not a simple solution here, so stop talking as if there is.”

Source: Building a culture of public service on hybrid work

And from Sean Speer on the politics and perceptions:

It’s time for Canada’s public servants to return to the office

On last week’s Roundtable podcast, Rudyard Griffiths and I were critical of the public sector unions’ over-the-top reaction to the federal government’s new policy that public servants must be in the office three days per week beginning in September. 

Our weekly exchange generated a bigger reaction than normal. Most of the response was positive. But some were critical of our comments, including those who support remote work in general and those who believed we were wrong to single out public sector workers in particular. 

I thought it might be useful to elaborate on our objections to the union reaction to Ottawa’s back-to-work plan. 

Although we generally think that the negative effects of remote work are underestimated and that all things being equal, workers benefit, individually and collectively, from being in physical proximity with their colleagues, we believe that it’s reasonable to have asymmetric expectations of public sector workers. 

That is to say, while our personal belief is that people should generally be back in the office, we recognize that in the private sector those decisions will be made by employers based on their understanding of the interests of their respective companies. 

Government workers, by contrast, should, in our view, be thought about differently. As taxpayers, we have a collective interest in their workplace arrangements.

There are three chief reasons why we think public servants should be back in the office.

First, we’ve discovered through the We Charity scandal, the ArriveCan scandal, and the details of public servants earning millions of dollars as third-party contractors that there’s a “crisis of culture” in the federal government. One proof-point: The federal public service has grown by more than 40 percent since the Trudeau government took office and yet its service standards and state capacity seem to have deteriorated. Getting back into the office is a crucial step to restoring a more performance-driven culture.

Second, the unionization rate is almost five times higher in the public sector which means that there are inherent limits on the employer’s ability to terminate unproductive or underperforming staff. This is important because we know that public-sector productivity is already generally lower than the private sector’s. Working-from-home can enable public sector workers to lower their productivity even further and yet the government has little to no recourse to address it. Getting back into the office should be understood as a key mechanism for accountability in an employer-employee environment in which traditional forms of accountability are weak or essentially non-existent.

Third, as we discussed on the podcast, there’s something inherently unfair about public sector workers who already benefit, on average, from higher wages, more benefits, and greater job security relative to their private sector peers to also have more flexible workplace arrangements. But there’s also a risk that, in an era of labour scarcity, an asymmetry between the public and private sectors could create perverse incentives for where people want to work. A growing concentration of scarce talent in the public sector due its long list of advantages could come at the expense of Canada’s long-run dynamism and productivity. 

That’s because, whatever the strengths of the public sector, it’s not generally viewed as a source of productivity. Many in fact would argue that Ottawa is actually a drag on productivity—which is to say, the deadweight loss of financing and staffing the government typically subtracts from the more productive deployment of these resources in the broader economy. Therefore, as we face a combination of slowing labour growth and ongoing weak productivity, we cannot afford for the government’s workplace arrangements to distort the labour market. 

The upshot: Federal public servants—it’s time to return to the office. 

Source: https://thehub.ca/2024-05-18/the-weekly-wrap-being-young-doesnt-make-right/