Federal public servants ordered to return to office at least twice a week

Canada's Parliament is pictured on Sept. 30, 2013, in Ottawa.Dave Chan/Tausi Insider

Ottawa is mandating that federal public servants return to the office at least two to three days in a week, or 40 to 60 per-cent of the time they spend working, in an attempt to bring more uniformity to a hybrid work setup that has varied widely across different federal departments since September.

The government’s decision comes after months of contentious negotiations with unions over the inclusion of remote work clauses in bargaining agreements, and pressure from business lobby groups in Ottawa to get more workers back into downtown office buildings.

In a memo issued Thursday afternoon, the Treasury Board Secretariat — the government body responsible for the administrative management of the federal public service — stated that the mandate will take effect on January 16, 2023 with employees having to fully comply by the end of next March.

“While departments and agencies are each unique, the experience of working in the public service or receiving services from it should be the same across the government and across the country,” the memo read. “There needs to be fairness and equity across workplaces.”

To date, the federal government’s approach to how and where its 300,000-odd employees should work has been unclear. While the Treasury Board implemented a mandate at the recommendation of the Privy Council Clerk earlier this year that employees should be in the office a couple of times a week, the Board largely left it up to individual departments to decide where their employees worked from.

What has emerged since September, is a patchwork of remote and hybrid work arrangements that differ widely according to department. The Treasury Board itself, for example, expects its employees to be in the office twice a week, but other departments have left it up to the discretion of individual managers.

Unions representing public sector workers have been vocally against any kind of mandate from the government around hybrid work, as they seek to entrench remote work language in collective bargaining agreements.

Today’s announcement was met with swift condemnation from the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the union representing 165,000 federal public servants. “Just arbitrarily mandating right before the holidays that workers commute back into the office in the face of rising inflation, is completely disrespectful and a knee-jerk reaction from the government,” said Chris Aylward, president of PSAC in an interview with the Globe.

Mr. Aylward went on to say that his members have demonstrated very effectively over the last two and a half years that they can serve the public by working from home. He cited examples of setting up and administering the CERB and CEWS pandemic relief programs, which were “done entirely remotely”.

PSAC is currently negotiating collective agreements for over 160,000 federal government employees — it has been pushing for language around remote work to be included in agreements so that workers are able to individually negotiate how and where they work with their employer.

“I think we need to be clear that we are not asking that all employees be allowed to work from home all the time. What we are asking for is that the process to negotiate remote work be included as part of collective agreements,” Mr. Aylward said.

Enshrining the right to work remotely into a collective agreement will effectively give employees the ability to file a grievance against their employer if they perceive that they have been denied remote work on unfair grounds. For the union, the government unilaterally imposing a return to office mandate is a clear violation of the collective bargaining process.

It is unclear how many federal government employees work from home most of the time, but the union estimates that roughly 80-per-cent of its members work mostly from home. The lack of density of people in the downtown areas of the National Capital Region — Ottawa and Gatineau, QC — was mostly recently evident in data from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which estimated that foot traffic in downtown Ottawa as of November was only 45 per-cent of its pre-pandemic level.

Indeed, business groups have for months been urging Ottawa to encourage workers to back into the office more frequently, for the sake of small businesses that they say have been severely damaged by a persistent lack of foot traffic. In November, the heads of 32 business associations including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Ottawa Board of Trade wrote an open letter to Treasury Board President Mona Fortier, urging her to bring employees back in the office “as rapidly as possible”.

Days later, Ms. Fortier wrote an op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen strongly hinting that federal workers should be in the office a couple of times a week because “virtual interactions, while convenient, are poor substitutes for experiences that are essential to cohesive, collaborative, and high performing organizations.” The op-ed cited the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s call for workers to embrace hybrid work.

But according to the union at least, federal public workers themselves are reluctant to work from the office, even a couple of times a week, because they feel they can effectively do their jobs from home without incurring travel costs. According to PSAC, 90 per-cent of their members in a recent survey opposed a forced return to the office, and 83 per-cent said they would consider job action if mandated to return.

On the social media platform Reddit, federal government workers have set up a channel that posts an unofficial, crowdsourced list of which departments are mandating a return to office, and how often workers are expected to be on site. By Thursday afternoon, there were hundreds of comments on the channel, mostly expressing outrage at the Treasury Board’s mandate.

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