Moves to bring staff back to government department offices for additional days a week would hit productivity and make staff recruitment more challenging, delegates to the Association of Higher and Civil and Public Servants (AHCPS) have been told.
The union’s conference in Portlaoise instructed its leadership to resist any change to current remote and blended working policies across the public service which currently range from one day a week on-site to five depending on a person’s role and place of employment.
Proposing the motion, Tom Morrin, who works at the Department of Housing and commutes from Portlaoise to the Custom House in Dublin, said staff there are required to come in three days a week and allowed to work from home the other two, a balance he believes works well.
“If you are commuting like me then you have to leave at a particular time to get the train, whereas if I’m at home I’m not in a rush to get the Luas to the train and I tend to work later.”
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The roughly 90-minute trip to and from work significantly impacts his day both personally and professionally, he said.
“In the mornings I can generally drop my four-year-old to the creche so I get to do more bonding with my family then I’m going to get more work done, so it’s good for me and for my employer.”
He said the staff in the department all come in on Thursdays in order to facilitate meetings and promote work interactions and socialising but after that they were free to choose the days on which they went to the office.
There is growing concern, however, that there will be moves to bring people in more, something he believes would have negative impacts not just in terms of productivity but also recruitment.
He pointed to a University of Galway survey which found 92 per cent of people would be influenced by blended working policies when choosing where to work as evidence of the potential to negatively impact the Civil Service’s ability to attract and keep staff.
The AHCPS’s deputy general secretary, Paul Malone, said there was already evidence that departments and public sector organisations that require more days in the office were finding it more difficult to recruit.
He said when it came to internal transfers, the figures showed it was “a pivotal factor” in where people decided to go “and that’s likely also to be the case to in relation to external recruitment”.
The Department of Social Protection was repeatedly criticised by the union’s officials for the way it handled a recent attempt to double the number of days some staff had to come into work.
Many of the department’s staff working in public-facing roles are on-site full-time but about 850 are allowed come to the office just one day a week and it had been suggested this would be doubled to two.
AHCPS general secretary Ciaran Rohan said the issue was one of a number between unions and the department that would now be discussed at the Workplace Relations Commission.
He said it was open to any department or public-sector organisation to consider amending their current policies but that they needed to consult on any proposed changes and “consultation does not mean sending a PDF five minutes before they announce the decision”.
“They’ve a lot of stuff coming up in relation to that and feel it can be best done when people are together. So they’ve made those arguments, and a couple of others will probably talk to us but others have done reviews and decided to leave things as they are. We were in last week with the CSO where they have three days at home and two in the office and they are going to keep that.”
