Many federal government workers are reluctant to return to their offices

The federal government is facing a pushback from employees reluctant to return to government offices after more than two years of working from home.

Online forums for civil servants have exploded in recent weeks with comments about the prospect of returning to the offices, with employees comparing notes on the hybrid work plans each department plans to adopt.

A comment by a Health Canada manager urging employees to return to the office, in part to offer workers at a nearby Subway restaurant more hours, has exploded into a series of sarcastic memes online.

Public service unions say that while some employees want to return to work in government offices or are happy with a hybrid arrangement, a majority want to continue working from home as Canada experiences a seventh wave of COVID-19.

“We’ve done research on our members that shows 60% of our members would prefer to stay in a work-from-home situation, 25% would like to do a hybrid, and 10% would like to return to the office full time,” said Jennifer Carr, President. the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), which represents about 70,000 workers, including scientists and computer scientists.

Union wants remote work included in collective agreements

Carr said the union has been inundated with messages from concerned members.

“I would say our inbox now is 90% about getting back to the office, how people feel uncomfortable, how they have questions about masking requirements, about the need and the need to come to the office when they can work in the safety of their own home and get the job done efficiently.”

WATCH | President of the Treasury Board on Federal Employees‘ back to work :

Treasury Board President Mona Fortier talks about the future of work in the public service

Treasury Board President Mona Fortier explains the government’s moves to embrace a hybrid work environment where many employees will work part of the time from offices and part of the time from home.

Greg Phillips, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE), which has called for a suspension of returning to the office, said its members have long favored hybrid working. They feel the return to the office is being rushed and their concerns are not being addressed, he said.

CAPE has over 20,000 members, including economists, translators, Library of Parliament employees and civilian members of the RCMP.

“Overall, people who don’t want to go back to the office have been vocal enough about it,” Phillips said.

“They didn’t even address … in many cases the accommodation needs.”

The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) – the federal government’s largest union, with nearly 230,000 members – is calling on the government to show flexibility in bringing employees back to the office and addressing their anxieties.

“We know that most of our members are still working remotely, and many want to continue to have that flexibility,” the union said in a statement. “Remote work has become part of the daily life of many workers and we will continue to fight to enshrine it in our collective agreements during this round of negotiations with Treasury Board and the agencies.”

“Hybrid work is here to stay”: Treasury Board

In an interview with CBC News, Treasury Board President Mona Fortier said hybrid working is the future of the federal public service. She said it was up to each department or agency to figure out how to make it work while keeping employees safe and getting the job done.

“Hybrid work is here to stay,” Fortier said. “So we really need to understand that hybrid working will be part of how we deliver programs and services to Canadians. I know a lot of people believe COVID is gone, but we’re still in COVID space.

The latest debate over where public servants should work was sparked by a June 29 memo from the Clerk of the Privy Council, Janice Charette, urging public service managers to develop hybrid work models that meet to the operational requirements of their departments.

“Now is the time for us to test new designs with a view to full rollout in the fall, subject to public health conditions,” she wrote.

Charette said hybrid working models offer “significant opportunities” such as a more nationally distributed workforce and more flexibility for employees, while bringing people together in one office has benefits such as better idea generation, knowledge transfer and the creation of a strong public service culture.

Different plans for different federal departments

The memo prompted managers to start accelerating plans for employees to start returning to government offices after Labor Day and contacting employees to formalize the number of days they should be working from the office.

Union leaders say the result has been a patchwork quilt, with some departments telling employees to return to the office several days a week while others are more flexible.

They say the wide array of policies is also leading some departments to try to poach the best and brightest talent from other departments by offering more flexibility to work from home and employees seeking transfers to departments that are more open to working from home. residence.

Still others are considering leaving the federal public service rather than returning to government offices.

In online forums such as Federal Public Service of Canada on Reddit, officials compared information about return-to-work plans. While a handful support the move, many are highly critical of the plan to return employees to offices, how it is rolled out or who is selected to return to the office.

In some cases, commentators said they were asked to return to the office only to spend their time in video conference meetings.

“Commuting an hour a day to not see anyone I work with and communicating almost exclusively with (MS) teams and emails is totally pointless,” one wrote.

“There’s the email from our DM ESDC – expected in the office at least once in a while,” another wrote. “Excuse me while I’m shouting obscenities into the void.”

Some have complained that their ministry has announced a plan – only to change it.

“We were asked to sign telecommuting agreements, in which full-time telecommuting was one of the options,” said a commentator who said he worked at the Department of Justice. “And now all of a sudden full-time telecommuting is off the table and it’s a minimum of two days in the office.”

The risk of contracting COVID-19 worries some

“They pretty much told us we wouldn’t be forced to come back if we didn’t want to,” replied one commentator who said he worked at Statistics Canada. “Now minimum two days from September 12.”

For others, the concern is the risk of catching COVID-19 from a colleague or the working conditions in some government offices.

Leaders like Phillips say comments on forums like Reddit are what they hear from their members.

“You see all kinds of government employees comparing notes between what one department does and what another department does and it creates mass confusion.”