Sam Mostyn says women will be the losers if staff are forced back to the office

Women workers have benefited from more flexibility to work from home as a result of Covid changes, says prominent company director Sam Mostyn.

Women workers would be the losers if employers forced staff back into the office full-time, the chairwoman of the federal government’s Taskforce on Women’s Economic Equality, Sam Mostyn, has warned.

Speaking at The Australian’s Competitive Advantage forum in Sydney on Wednesday, Ms Mostyn who is also chairwoman of Aware Super fund and a director of construction company, Mirvac, said women workers had benefited from more flexibility to work from home as a result of Covid changes.

“There is a place for quite a bit of flexibility,” she said.

Employers could make a case for why workers should be in the office but if they made it a condition of employment, they risked losing some talented workers.

“Women are going to be the great losers if we start to demand that employees have to return to the office,” she said.

“What we saw during Covid was that women could finally not be in the car dropping off kids for two hours before they got to work. They could be productive working from home.”

“Women will be the great losers again if being back in the office is the calling card for progress and promotion.”

She said Australia needed to have “smart, contemporary leaders” who could get the balance right in giving flexibility to their workers.

“Great leaders know that in a tight labour market, you are fighting for the best talent and talent will go where the conditions best suit them.”

She said there was a big part of the workforce who would never get the chance to work from home as they were in roles such as carers who had to be in the workplace.

Ms Mostyn said women workers paid a “catastrophic penalty” for having to take time out of their careers to care for small children.

She called for more to be done to encourage men to take time off to be involved in caring for young children, calling for more investment in early childhood education to help young people be better prepared for school and to help those with learning problems.

The chief executive of Lendlease Australia, Dale Connor, said that his company believed in the importance of the workplace, but also believed in flexibility.

He said Lendlease had workers around the country on building sites who continued to work during Covid.

He said the company had people who had worked from home in Covid but were now “coming back strongly” into the office.

“We are about projects, and we are about teams,” he said.

“That is sometimes hard to do when people don’t know each other or are not working with each other, but we try not to do that as a cost of flexibility.”

“If the teams are well led and well thought through, and there is great equity among the teams and great understanding, you can achieve at the office but can also achieve it with flexibility.”

“But we still believe in the workplace and what it can produce in terms of results, outcomes and productivity.”

David Bassanese, the chief economist at BetaShares, said the cohesion of the workforce could suffer over time if people continued to work from home.

“The big takeaway from Covid is that jobs don’t necessarily all have to be done in the office,” he said.

He said it was easy for people to be able to work from home with colleagues that they knew.

“But in two or three years’ time, when there are different faces around the Zoom meeting room, that cohesion may start to weaken,” Mr Bassanese said.

“That is where some of the work from home euphoria may start to fall over.”

He said there were situations where people could work from home, but he believed that employers had the right to insist that their staff come back to the office and tell them to get another job if they did not want to comply.