Jack Tame: The Working from Home directive seems reasonable to me

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

My take on working from home versus working in the office is you can’t really say any one model is perfect for everyone in every business or workplace and every sector or industry. There are workplaces where working from home might be better than working from the office. There are workplaces where the traditional model holds true. And there are workplaces that’ll find themselves somewhere in between.

I work six days a week, and typically do five in the office and one at home. Newsrooms are noisy, distracting, slightly chaotic, open-plan environments. That’s why I love them! But I have to read a lot, and I have to process detail. Once a week, it is so good to escape the office and bury myself in detail at home, without the risk of being distracted every two minutes.

Maybe I’m giving the productivity argument too much credit. If the primary reason to get public servants to go into the office in-person is actually just to prop up Wellington businesses, it’s a pretty lousy reason. But I actually think the reaction to the government’s directive this week was a bit overblown. They didn’t say all public servants HAVE to work from the office every day. They just said working from home was not an automatic entitlement, and that arrangements would have to be agreed between employers and employees. Working from home arrangements should only be agreed when they don’t impact agency objectives. Am I missing something? That seems pretty reasonable to me. I don’t see anything about mandating. My read is it still allows for flexibility, so long as it doesn’t compromise the quality of an agency’s work.

And actually, this government is making a bit of a habit of issuing directives that don’t cost it a thing, but will be met with a similar reaction from a big slab of the public.

A prime example is the cellphone ban in schools. I’ve always supported it. I just think it’s common sense, and now even the opposition education spokesperson supports it, too.

And teacher-only days! Unions and schools might rightly be frustrated at any implication they’re wasting time or doing something that isn’t worthwhile. Many schools time their teacher-only-days for long weekends, and regardless, schools still have to be open for a specific number of days a year. Also, I think it’s a bit rich to suggest that teacher-only-days have a major impact on truancy.

But I for one was surprised to learn that under the current rules, teacher-only-days are only supposed to be held outside of term time. Is there really a compelling reason that shouldn’t be the case?

It’ll be a blow to morale for many teachers and schools. But that directive was all about parents. And I can tell you now, a vast majority of them are not going to marching in the streets to demand a return of mid-term teacher-only days.

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