State government doesn’t know public servant work from home statistics
Mystery surrounds the number of state government public servants work from home, or how often they’re out of the office – but Premier David Crisafulli insists there’ll be no change.
The Queensland government does not know how many of its 322,600 public servants are working from home at any given time, nor how often, it can be revealed.
It comes after the federal government last month released a report detailing how many of its employees had working from home arrangements across each of its agencies – and how often they were working away from the office.
The Saturday Courier-Mail requested similar data from the state government’s Public Sector Commission – the organisation in charge of managing employment policies in the public service – but it was unable to provide it.
“Queensland does not collate and report flexible work arrangements in the same way as the federal government,” a commission statement read.
The commission pointed to a 2024 Working for Queensland Survey, which revealed 88 per cent of respondents used a work from home option – with 58 per cent of those confirming a formal arrangement had been put in place with their employer.
However, this data was not reliable as it only represented those who took the survey.
“The flexible work arrangement data in the Working for Queensland Survey represents the percentage of respondents who completed the survey not the percentage who access flexible work across the total public sector workforce” the commission said.
The commission noted that Queensland’s 16 Hospital and Health Services were not asked about their working from home arrangements.
It also said results from the 2024 survey “may not reflect the current status” due to machinery of government changes, with departments changing names following the LNP victory at the last election.
Of those who did take the 2024 survey, 30 per cent said they worked from home on average one day a week, 49 per cent said they worked from home two days a week and 19 per cent three days a week.
Another 2 per cent worked from home all five days.
A spokeswoman for Premier David Crisafulli said the government had no plans to change work from home and flexible work arrangements.
“Modern, empowered and productive workplaces provide flexibility for employees and that’s exactly what we’re delivering in the Queensland public service,” the spokeswoman said.
The latest federal data shows that more than half of the Australian Public Service now have a working from home arrangement in place.
This includes 52 per cent who sometimes work from home and 7 per cent who always work from home.
The federal government collates work from home data for all of its agencies.
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