Pellerin: Shunting public servants to the office 3 days a week is dumb

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The federal government took everyone except maybe Ontario Premier Doug Ford by surprise when it decreed public servants would be frog-marched back to the office three days a week as of September. So, once again for the hard of understanding: It is colossally stupid to force smart people with options to sit in a crappy office because downtown restaurants they don’t go to aren’t adapting to new realities. So don’t do it.

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I am glad public-sector unions are pushing back against this. But I have a request: Don’t just push back to two days a week in mandatory cubicles. Push all the way back down to zero. Let managers and teams determine what makes sense to them and get out of the way so they can produce their best work for our benefit. Why is this so hard?

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The pandemic showed that many office workers are as efficient and productive (if not more) when they’re working from home. They’re happier, too. They save on commuting; have more flexibility to deal with kids’ needs; get to work with their pets; and enjoy healthier meals on actual plates. They also get to work outside on their back deck or balcony when the weather is nice. Happy humans perform better than unhappy ones. Work doesn’t have to make us miserable to count as work.

Some people dislike working from home and need or want the clean separation between office and home, and to that I say great! Have at it. When work demands the physical presence of most members of a team, they should be there in person to get the work done properly. Otherwise, no.

At this point, every manager who’s not completely asleep at the switch knows which employees are happy at the office, which are mostly indifferent, and which ones hate it with a passion. They know how to get the best work out of their people in a way politicians don’t.

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The worst part in all this is that since not everyone is at the office on the same days, what happens is people trudge to the office to have meetings on Teams. If that’s not worthy of a Yes Minister episode, it will do until something more inane comes along.

I and many others have written about this before and from a productivity standpoint there is no argument for mandatory office presence — except of course for employees who aren’t working unless they’re being directly supervised. Which raises an interesting and, I argue, important question: Why are they still employed if you can’t trust them to do their work by themselves?

The only “reason” for this stupid policy (I say with big scary quotation marks around the word for fear my dictionary will pelt me with rotten tomatoes) is to try to save downtown businesses.

I don’t wish downtown business owners any ill. But there is a giant but; two actually. One is that many reluctant cubicle-dwellers bring their own lunch and don’t patronize struggling downtown businesses anyway, and the other is that we should also spare a thought for businesses in all those other Ottawa neighbourhoods that benefit from knowledge workers riding their Navan or Barrhaven home desks. If everyone is forced back downtown, what will that do to suburban businesses’ bottom line?

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Professionals don’t deserve to be treated like toddlers who can’t be without supervision just because someone else wants a slice of their after-tax income. Fixing downtown shouldn’t be on them. It’s up to all three levels of government to work together to make downtown so attractive that people actually want to be there, day and night. Convert spaces that lend themselves to that into housing. Have more parks, amenities and places for people.

The world has changed and there is no going back. Those who adapt to the new reality will do well. Those who refuse won’t.

So, fight hard, unions. Office mandates are stupid and they need to go. Thanks.

Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.

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