The government's "whipping boy"?

In the face of a flailing economy, New Zealand's government attempts to demonstrate its leadership by throwing the public service working conditions into reverse.

This week the National-led government announced new “guidelines” for working from home for public servants, summarising that: "if it's possible for you to work in the office, you should".

The directive made it very clear that Public Service Minister Nicola Willis and PM Christopher Luxon believe that working from home directly leads to public servants slacking off. Luxon said that it was “putting pressure on team performance, office culture and workforce development” and that “ill-managed work from home not only threatens public sector performance today, it also puts the quality of our future leadership at risk.” Media sources reporting on the day and in the aftermath noted that they failed to provide any concrete evidence to support such claims, despite being asked repeatedly.

This episode holds a few interesting points to unpack: the working-from-home (WFH) debate, the question of productivity in the public sector, and the relationship between this government and public servants.

Let’s deal with productivity to begin with. There are some public services whose productivity can be - and is - continuously monitored, such as health, policing, justice, customs, or transport. In other words, operational work where a myriad of countable transactions take place that can be collected and analysed. Public servants in these fields don’t tend to have the option to work from home though, not many nurses take work home for some solid focus-time. The people who have the chance to WFH, and whose habits supposedly “threaten” public sector performance, tend to be knowledge-workers, managers or administrators of some fashion. Measuring their productivity is a lot trickier. As a former knowledge worker in public sector myself, I don’t recall there ever existing any form of performance metric in my teams or even wider directorates, outside of employee satisfaction surveys going up or down by points being the comma. Given that Willis and Luxon have not provided any figures that show this supposed “pressure” on productivity caused by working from home, it’s fair to assume they don’t exist. This is not an evidence-based decision, it’s a moral one.

As for working from home in general, even a cursory search on google scholar shows how densely-studied and highly-debated its pros and cons are in post-pandemic times. The best source I could find is this systematic review by Anakpo et al from 2023, that concludes:

“WFH productivity and performance depend on a host of factors, such as the nature of the work, employer and industry characteristics, and home settings, with a majority reporting a positive impact and few documenting no difference or a negative impact. “

There are studies that show a fall in productivity working from home, but the reasons are more complex than the broad “if you can, you should” suggests. People with small children at home, for example, were found to work more hours with a smaller output (as was measurable). Oftentimes, however, it was the sluggish adoption of flexible arrangements by employers that lowered productivity - not the work from home itself. This discourse is far from over, and which side of the fence one falls on massively depends on circumstances.

That’s why to me, it feels more like the government is using the general prejudice that many New Zealanders hold against public servants “taking it easy” in a cruisey government job to beat their chests and signal some decisive, no-nonsense leadership, while the cost of living crisis continues, people can’t be certain they’ll get emergency healthcare on time, and we find out that when you don’t fund infrastructure such as inter-island ferries - they strangely end up falling apart at some point.

Being a public servant in New Zealand certainly comes with downsides. I myself had worked in agencies and large private companies for nearly a decade. Then I took a job on a public service program for two years, keen to understand what this side of the fence looked like. At my farewell at the bank where I worked, colleagues cracked jokes about the easy life that I would have in government and how much less pressure I would face. I found the opposite was true: work at the bank flowed in neat, rigid, micro-managed tracks, while working in public sector meant an onslaught of demands and responsibilities, way more complex than anything I’d ever seen before. I expect I’ll detail this in a later post at some point.

When I looked for a new role after the program wrapped up, I found myself struggling to get interviews with private employers despite a severe talent drought at the time. When I was invited, one of the first questions for me was: “how do you think you will handle the cultural shock of going into private sector from public?”

Little did I know that even after a short stint, I now carried a black mark, the stench of public service was on me.

It is this culture, this assumption that public servants are lazy, slow and ‘wasteful’, that neo-conservative leaders have harnessed, making public servants their whipping boy that can be blamed for what’s not going well, and publicly chastised when a demonstration of strength is in order.

It’s unclear how much - if anything at all - will actually change in practice from this working from home order, with local Councils already clarifying that they have the appropriate policies in place (unlike what Willis and Luxon suggested). I, myself, have negotiated over working from home in line with the ‘new’ guidelines over 2 years ago. The government’s statement made it sound as if public service organisations doled out WFH arrangements like lollies, when I’ve only ever known them as acts of managerial discretion, based on what is reasonable for the role and the team at the time. And not least - based on the amount of available office space. In my last workplace there was never enough space for workers, so home office use was requested by leadership and required for certain times.

Even if agreements between staff and managers prevail in this case, the symbolic effect and the continued vilification of public servants does not bode well for New Zealand. It’s insult added to injury for people who still have to fear for their jobs, and are now expected to return to their hot desks in order to keep spending so that Wellington’s economy doesn’t flail - which it does in part because so many public servants have been sacked. This sick cycle might continue to spin downwards for a while to come.