Work from home

President-elect Donald Trump’s appointees for his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are planning to crack down on employees who work from home — those who are left, anyway, after the duo’s round of “large-scale firings.”In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out “the DOGE plan to reform government,” in which they purport to “reverse a decades-long executive power grab” while “following the Supreme Court’s guidance.

Rejoice, slackers of America! For there is a new figurehead leading your crusade for lunchtime naps, camera-off Zoom meetings and sea-level productivity. Yes, Joe Biden has, finally, excelled at something: he is the president that has spent most time at home. According to CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who has been meticulously keeping tabs of Biden's days off, since taking the White House as his official residence, the president has traveled to his home in Delaware fifty-five times. Whether he’s practicing his cycling skills, injuring himself while playing with his dogs naked or lounging in his $2.

Cockburn spent his long weekend the same way most Americans did: reading the Functional Government Initiative’s recent report. It found that “on any given day from March-December 2020, between 20-30 percent of HHS employees did not appear to be working.” Government inefficiency is nothing new, but in this case teleworking is exacerbating the problem. And that isn’t about to improve — at least not under this administration. Biden continues to push for more teleworking options, even as the pandemic finally begins to fade. The Washington Free Beacon reports that Brian Harrison, the former HHS chief of staff who commissioned the investigation of telework participation, speculates that many recent federal agency errors may be due to an inactive teleworkforce.

One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic has been the option to work from home (WFH). According to a Stanford University study of 17,000 employees, 50 percent of respondents who stayed at their jobs without commuting wanted to keep working from home at least part-time after Covid. And a September 2021 survey by OwlLabs, a video conferencing platform, found that one in three people who have worked remotely since the outbreak would likely quit if they could not continue to do so. While undoubtedly pressured by the current worker shortage to accept WFH as an employment benefit, companies have come to appreciate how decentralized staffing can improve productivity and substantially lower overhead.

Even after the one metre rule and the limits on numbers are removed on July 19th, we will not be back to anything approaching normal life. From self-isolation to travel we will not be returning to the status quo ante. Another way in which life will be different, as I say in the Times today, is that offices will still be nowhere near as busy as they were before the pandemic. Ministers will end the work-from-home guidance next month. But there’ll be no national ‘back to the office’ day. It will be left to employers to decide how much they want to push the issue. Most ministers think people won’t start to return in big numbers until after the summer break.

One of the big post-Covid unknowns is whether people will return to big city centre offices or not. As I write in the Times today, the truth is that no one in government can be quite sure of what is going to happen. The Government does have some levers it can pull if it wants to nudge people back to their desks. At present it is instructing people to work from home, advice that’s not due to be reviewed before 21 June. There is also the question of social distancing. If the one-metre rule remains in place after 21 June, it will restrict how many staff any business can accommodate. There is a recognition that you can’t push people to crowd onto public transport until you can be sure it is safe The government can set an example if it wants to.

Has government policy on going back to work just shifted? Today at his "People’s PMQs", the Prime Minister was asked about support for universities and the social distancing measures that will be needed to make it safe for students and faculty to return. But Boris Johnson applied his response further than the university sector, turning the formal guidance - 'working from home where possible' - on its head: ‘I want people to go back to work as carefully as possible – it’s very important that people should be going back to work if they can, now. I think everybody’s taken the ‘stay at home if you can’. I think now we should say ‘go back to work if you can’.