Why did the government take a one-size-fits-all approach on RTO?

I am a public servant based in Montreal and wanted to share my perspective as someone who is required to commute to an office even though all of my colleagues are located elsewhere.

My current project has approximately 90 per cent of its members located in Ottawa. I am one of several employees working alone from different cities.

I started working in the public service during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, I started working from home full-time as part of a geographically dispersed team. When I go to the office, I don’t know anyone there. I still participate in the same virtual meetings, using the same computer I would use at home.

The office environment itself can make it more difficult to work effectively. There is considerable noise because people are frequently attending virtual meetings, while meeting rooms are not always available.

In my experience, the result is that I am less productive in the office than I am at home.

I understand that there are legitimate reasons for bringing employees together, but those benefits depend on people actually being together.

Why don’t the requirements consider the actual composition of each team and where its members are located?

At the end of the day, everyone loses from this arrangement: the employee loses time and flexibility, the organization loses productivity, and taxpayers bear the cost of maintaining and using office space without necessarily receiving a corresponding benefit.

Thank you for considering my perspective.

— A public servant in Montreal

At first glance, your question about why requirements don’t consider the composition of each team seems pretty fair.

While I can’t speak for the government or the Treasury Board, I think I can explain to some extent how and why the federal public service has landed on its relatively hard-line return-to-office (RTO) policy.

As a starting point, it’s important to remind people that remote work isn’t an employment right. Under labour law, the employer gets to set the terms and conditions of service in employment contracts when an employee is hired. Unless your employment contract explicitly states you can work remotely, the government has the authority to require its employees to work from the office.

Once the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic had subsided, the federal government (as well as provincial governments and many large private sector employers) demonstrated significant flexibility on initial return-to-office policies, in 2022 and 2023. While I don’t have the statistics, I was still working at the time and my observations were that compliance rates with the initial, more flexible RTO policy were pretty low.

The net result was that the original RTO policies of government (and other major employers) did not produce significant results in terms of getting workers back into the downtown cores of major cities across the country, and not just in Ottawa and Montreal.

As I have written before, and notwithstanding the rhetoric of the benefits of teamwork and collaboration associated with the RTO corporate line, I personally believe one of the key drivers behind RTO policies is the desire by federal (and provincial) leaders to get workers back into the urban core to revitalize downtown economies. While it’s unfortunate that our cities are wired to rely on people living in the suburbs to commute downtown to work, it’s also the current reality.

Within this context, good public policy is hard in practice. Put simply, it’s difficult to come up with policy that applies across a workforce scattered throughout the country without being able to find exceptions, like your case, that don’t appear to make sense.

However, if your department was to make an exception for your case, your union and other employees would rightly demand, in the name of fairness, that the government apply that exception consistently to every other employee in a similar situation in every other department.

Such a shift in the current, relatively hard-line RTO federal policy would invite other employees in other groups to seek similar exceptions to the policy. For example, most IT workers would likely make the case that they do not need to be in the office to do most of their project management or programming work. Many administrative staff, particularly at lower levels, would likely make the same case. That translates into a lot more exceptions.

I personally believe easing up a little on the RTO policy for regional employees in situations such as yours may make sense.

The Treasury Board could implement such a change in policy by giving senior project executives the discretion and authority to make the call on a case-by-case basis. Such a change, however, carries the risk of unravelling the current RTO policy as a potential stampede of employees in similar situations would demand the same flexibility from their senior project executives.

Unfortunately, given the RTO experience to date, that may be a risk current officials would prefer to avoid.

— Scott Taymun, Public Service Confidential