The crazy WFH experiment is over. Water coolers are the biggest winners

It was a blunt and unexpected message from NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns. Public servants, who make up the biggest workforce in the country, are to stop working from home and get themselves back into the office. Immediately. The crazy experiment is over.

NSW Premier Chris Minns and Transport Minister Jo Haylen travel on the new Sydney Metro. Their staff will soon be doing likewise, whether they like it or not. Credit: Nikki Short

The reasoning, so Minns says, is that young people deserve the knowledge of older, wiser heads.

“There are obviously some during the pandemic who made a decision to have what is called a more flexible workplace in NSW,” Minns told question time on Tuesday. “That rests on the premise that while those arrangements were in place during a global health crisis, they were not permanent additions to the arrangements between employer and employee in the NSW public sector.”

The premier was defending the snap change contained in a circular sent out on Monday to department heads from NSW’s top bureaucrat. Simon Draper, the secretary of the premier’s department, said, “sector employees should work principally in an approved office, workplace or related work site”. Draper’s message was more measured than Minns’. He wasn’t killing work from home altogether, but – nonetheless – his advice was immediately lost in a wave of panic.

COVID-19 changed the way we work and, for many of us – me included – the work/life balance finally became more manageable. Before the pandemic, as a working mum of three young kids, my life was nothing short of chaotic. Every work day was spent watching the clock and calculating how late I could push it before tearing out of the office and racing to the childcare centre or school to collect children. My husband and I largely shared the load (when he wasn’t travelling for work), so we both felt the stress. But I look back now at those years and wonder how I did it.

The why is obvious. I had no other choice.

While benefiting from a workplace that has always been supportive of working parents, the reality was that before life changed in early 2020, working from home was not standard practice. It was used for exceptional circumstances and simply having a child was not one of those. Fast-forward through the two years of COVID lockdowns and losing a couple of those wild afternoons (and let’s not forget manic mornings) has been a total game changer for me.

I like to see myself as one of those wiser heads here to offer mentoring and advice to younger members of staff, exactly the kind of role Minns rightly identifies as crucial. But truth be told, I also really like being around my colleagues. Working alongside them is engaging, stimulating and fun. The collaboration, the water cooler chat, the office gossip. All of that is important to the way we work and the quality of that work.

But my life does not need to be in a permanent state of chaos for me to work well and hard. I enjoy being in the office, but I also relish the days when my commute is non-existent and I am not clock watching. And I’m not alone. Most parents have embraced the changes to our working patterns and would never contemplate a return to the past.

Draper was on ABC Radio Sydney on Wednesday morning, explaining the thinking behind the overhaul to the public sector. Interestingly, he stressed it was not about improved productivity, or filling empty office blocks or even breathing life back into cafés and restaurants in the CBD, which the business community has been pleading to happen. “Although those things are very important,” Draper quickly added.

“Our primary driver,” he said, “is that we really want to build up the public service and build up our public institutions.”

Draper correctly pointed out that conflicting research around the pros and cons of working from home are bandied about depending on who they suit. The Minns government highlights a study published in the Harvard Business Review in June, where academics from the US National Bureau of Economic Research found that junior professional women benefit greatly from in-person mentoring and could miss out on promotions if not in the office.

Others, such as a report from the Australian Productivity Commission, found that “working from home represents a potential overall gain to society, and there is a strong case to allow workers and firms to negotiate mutually beneficial outcomes”.

Both pieces of research can be right.

No doubt there are some in the public sector (excluding, of course, the frontline workers) who disappeared into their homes during the pandemic with no intention of venturing back out again. That is their loss, and they are missing out on all the positives that come with a team environment.

But in his directive to the 400,000 staff employed by his government, Minns needs to ensure he does not make flexibility sound more like an indulgence rather than a modern way of working.

Alexandra Smith is state political editor.