Public service looks for new blueprint for hybrid work

How do you avoid a two-tiered system in the hybrid work model?

Jacqui Curtis, COO, Australian Taxation Office

What happens to an organisation when the knowledge workers work from home as often as they please and the support staff are required to be in the office every day? How do you manage the potential resentment and anger that can flow from a two-tiered system?

That’s one of the Covid-induced challenges facing the Australian Public Service as it wrestles with how to develop a hybrid model of work that applies within and across departments.

At the centre of that challenge is Jacqui Curtis, the chief operating officer at the Australian Taxation Office, who also has the job of building a robust and modern human resources operation across the 150,000-strong service.

Curtis, who has been charged with leading HR professionals across the APS since 2019, suggests the return to the office needs to be carefully managed.

“My view is that unless we have some degree of consistency across the service, it will increase the imbalances,” she says. “We already have imbalances because of different enterprise agreements in some agencies and different pay scales.

“If you have inconsistencies, first with remuneration and then you layer it with inconsistencies of conditions of employment – at one end someone who never comes into the office other than once a quarter while another agency says you must be in the office – you are starting to get even more imbalance.”

Curtis worries too about the differences within agencies where lower-level staff whose jobs often can’t be done at home – for example working in a call centre, or dealing with confidential citizen information – are required in the office most of the time.

“Suddenly you have junior staff on lower pay scales who have to pay for public transport or parking because they need to be in the office, while senior knowledge-based workers like lawyers are working from home,” says Curtis.

“There will be real challenges around this, and my view is that a degree of consistency is essential.

“The workforce wants some sort of marker in the sand to give them assurances about the expectations regarding their work practices.”

It’s been a testing yet exhilarating time for the APS, as staff were called on to work through two key crises – the 2019-20 bushfires and the coronavirus lockdowns.

Curtis is delighted at how colleagues across the board stepped up, leading arguably to a much improved public image of public servants.

She joined the APS in 2003 when HR was “very transactional” and focused on functions like payroll, recruitment and work health and safety.

“HR was about process-driven functions and people tended to be experts in their fields,” she says. “Sometimes, HR was a bit of a dumping ground for people who were not performing in other areas.

“It was reactive and it wasn’t seen as having a role in driving organisational strategy, particularly around culture and leadership.

“There were pockets of excellence, but morale was low because HR tended to be consulted when there was a problem, rather than being called on for expert advice.”

That has changed greatly, with senior executives now aware of what HR professionals can contribute to organisational performance, she says.

“There is a move to recruit HR people who can add this kind of value,” she says.

“My role has been to build an enduring HR capability that really meets the needs of business and drives outcomes, rather than being a passive provider of a service.”

And Covid has sealed the deal, the crisis demonstrating how important it is to have people who are professional experts in HR, according to Curtis.

“People were asked to step up and do things they had never done before,” she says. “It has taken us in the ATO 20 years to get about 1000 working from home agreements with staff, and yet in Covid-19, we managed to put more than 14,000 in almost overnight. Covid-19 broke down a lot of barriers about working from home.”

Indeed, she says “we have expanded and stretched the elastic as far as we possibly can” and it’s time to settle on the sweet spot of hybrid working.

“We are saying to people ‘you can work up to 40 per cent at home and 60 per cent in the office if your job allows it’,” she says.

Going forward, “we don’t want working from home to spring right back to where it was before COVID-19.

“We want to see a balance and we need to find what works best in different jobs. I don’t think it’s about going as far as ‘no one comes back to the office’, but at the same time you don’t want it to spring back to where almost everyone was in the office.

“So, in the ATO, we are looking at the 40/60 hybrid and we will assess it after six months in terms of mental health, productivity and culture and see how it is tracking and set our policies around that.”

The ATO is working with the Department of Home Affairs on a piece of work on WFH issues for the whole public service on behalf of the APS Chief Operating Officers Committee.

“There are a lot of issues that flow from this that we’ll need to consider,” says Curtis. “There is some pressure to get it completed soon because of the need to have an agreed position. In the interim, agencies are out there doing their own thing, which may be where it lands.”

But Curtis warns the longer that an interim approach is in place, the “harder it is to rewind”.

She says the productivity levels of those working from home is a “very complex issue and we will have to very carefully monitor and track it over time.

“It’s far too soon to know how it will go. It’s been fantastic to see the productivity and the willingness of people to really lift during this crisis,” she says.

Curtis is a strong advocate of increasing the mobility of public servants between departments and with the private and non-profit sectors. The demand during Covid for expertise in various agencies has broken down barriers around agencies swapping staff.

“There has been a greater sense of trust and co-operation about sharing staff when needed,” she says. “Covid-19 has made us more prepared to facilitate mobility. In the past, moving staff around was often seen as offloading poor-performing staff.

“It is now seen as critical in developing the experience and expertise of your workforce.”