Sydney, it’s time to return to the office after Chris Minns’ public servants call

Sorry Sydney, it’s time to get back to work. After the Premier’s call today, there’s really no excuse left for people to not return to the office.

Sydney, it’s time to get back to work.

More than two and a half years after his predecessor Dominic Perrottet essentially pulled stumps on the pandemic, Premier Chris Minns has finished the job, telling the state’s public servants that the work from home wheeze is over.

From tomorrow, the government workers are expected to be physically present in a “government approved space”, five days a week.

The right – such as it is – to work from home “should not be taken for granted or considered unlimited,” according to a memo sent to bureaucrats across the state.

Hear, hear. The move comes after a campaign by this masthead to get public servants back in the office to improve productivity and revitalise a CBD full of businesses struggling to make the rent while their once-loyal customers take Zoom calls from home in their fluffy bunny slippers.

And it arrives just as the city waits for the delayed opening of the last leg of the Sydney Metro, a $21 billion project to get workers to and from home in gold medal winning time.

The Minns government has sensibly recognised that this project would be reduced to a white elephant if people stayed home in their trackies.

Of course, there will be grumbles. Work from home has enabled far too many to coast, all but invisible to the boss, clocking in to video calls, and tending to domestic chores.

For too long, Sydney has been empty from Monday to Friday.

That said we concede it is hard not to be sympathetic to all the pandemic puppies and Covid kitties who will be put out now that their people have to head back in to the office.

But while individual workers may think they are more productive working from their kitchen table or spare bedroom, the numbers tell a much different story.

Last year a paper by two Harvard researchers found that – to take just one industry – call centre workers were as much as 12 per cent less productive when they moved out of the office and into their homes.

Other research has found that particularly for younger workers, the disconnection and inability to form connections and learn in person from older and more experienced colleagues is particularly detrimental.

All this when our economic future is being hamstrung by a productivity drought. See you at work, Sydney.