Patrick Carlyon: Why workers should don their dressing gowns in the office

It may satisfy the expedient, occasionally lazy, side of our collective natures to work from home, but there is a greater good to consider in the return to work debate.

Traffic and workers return to Melbourne CBD after 50% of workers are allowed back to work after the COVID restrictions. Picture: David Crosling

Office chatter turned to the idea of Dressing Gown Friday yesterday.

Why not recreate the excesses of lockdown, such as swanning about in bed clothes and uggies until noon, with the colleagues you didn’t see for so long?

Alas, the idea didn’t get legs.

But it goes to the plight of Victorian employers right now. Many of their employees are still working in dressing gowns (or similar) at home.

They don’t really want to return to the office.

Picking up the kids from school care, or ducking to the supermarket, is easier when it need not be squeezed between the dead time of the commute and getting dinner on the table before 9pm.

CBD businesses are struggling with few workers back in the CBD. Picture: Wayne Taylor

There is a three-days-in-the-office-a-week provision, and the days at work requirements will increase in coming weeks.

It’s long overdue – employers across the board have been largely “underwhelmed”, as it’s been put, by the work productivity of their employees at home.

Their getting people to work has been muddled by uncertainty about physical distancing requirements in the workplace.

Conflicting official advice led many employers to assume that they must abide by health provisions that are difficult, if not impossible, to enforce in the office.

Social distancing, whether at the footy, on the tram or in a shop, has been ignored for months in Victoria.

Yet many employers understood that 1.5 metres of separation should be maintained at work, and have consequently slowed plans to return the workplace to pre-COVID levels of presence and productivity.

Morning commuters walk along St Kilda Road Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

“Pretty much every business that we talked to, before we advised them, were still operating at 1.5m,” according to Victoria Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Paul Guerra.

“It’s a big issue.”

Even Mr Guerra himself was confused by the advice until he sought clarification form the Department of Health.

It may satisfy the expedient, occasionally lazy, side of our collective natures to work from home.

But there is no medical or health reason why every office worker should not return to work for their full allotment of employment hours.

Public servants should no longer be eased back into the workplace. There is no sound excuse for only a third of CBD workers being back at work in March.

There is a greater good to consider, such as failing businesses that cannot afford any more delays.

Victoria has been locked into a go slow for too long.

Dressing gowns or not, office workers should be in the office today, tomorrow and next week.