Highest-paid CFOs revealed and Canberra's WFH 'entitlement culture'
Public servants have been given uncapped, five-day-a-week work-from-home rights in a deal struck by Minister for Finance and the Public Service Katy Gallagher.
Economics editor John Kehoe described the agreement as inexplicable in an opinion piece this week that argued taxpayers would be protesting in the streets if they knew “the extent of the entitlement culture now pervading Canberra” .
Before we explain why, here’s a taste of what else to expect in this edition:
But back to Canberra. Kehoe said nobody was arguing against flexibility, which offered benefits to both employers and their staff.
But he argued the decision to grant public servants unlimited work-from-home rights without first conducting proper trials to test the effects of this arrangement on worker productivity, team work, staff development and mental health was “a small insight into why the country has a productivity problem”.
Working from home in the nation’s capital is now so widespread that a public servant friend complained to Kehoe that only three people were in the office on a recent Friday in a floor space that could seat 30 to 40. A senior bureaucrat said the public service was “living on a different planet”.
“Labor itself has admitted that to revive the economy’s lacklustre productivity, boosting performance in the swelling and notoriously low-productivity government sectors will be crucial. The uncapped work from home entitlement heads in the wrong direction,” Kehoe concluded.
His warning came as recruiters complained about job candidates refusing to meet them in person and requesting interviews with prospective employers be held virtually .
They argued the shift to virtual interviews, which was also partly being driven by some cost-conscious recruiters and employers, had made it more challenging to assess an applicant’s skills and suitability for a role and contributed to a marked decline in candidates’ people skills.
“Because people are meeting face-to-face less, they’re less practised in the ability to engage with an individual, walk into a room, shake their hand, feel comfortable in an in-person meeting,” Andrew Hanson, NSW managing director of recruitment firm Robert Walters, said.
“I’m constantly hearing stories from clients and friends in senior roles who are convinced that people are less capable face-to-face in the work environment because they are doing less of it.”
As AFR Success has previously reported, the most common hybrid working policy across the country is for employers to require staff to attend the office at least three days each week.
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Owner, Financial Educator at Accentuate Financial
6 个月For this to work, you have to be able to measure productivity, not just time. Measuring productivity is tough, and most managers in the public sector are given next to no training on personnel management, let alone the importance of setting proper KPIs and how to measure them. One of my first bosses in the private sector told me “What gets measured, gets done.” The obvious corollary being that if you measure the wrong things, the wrong things get done. And measuring time at the computer simply won’t cut it.
Business Development Consultant at Self Employed
6 个月Wait for it these poor overworked civil servants will soon be complaining how overworked they are. How in the hell are they going to supervise this and judge the productivity?
Professional
6 个月Lets be honest nobody wants to live in Canberra . You watch the city clear out if people can work 100 percent remote
Learning every day.
6 个月Economic vandals. The pendulum is moving quickly towards the extreme, a few more such moves and people will finally see what is happening and vote this Government out. I did predict well over a year ago they risked making Whitlam look good, they have not disappointed.
Sales Director Gibbon Architectural | Tretford, Synsisal, Modulyss carpets and rugs. Australian owned family business of 104 years.
6 个月As a small family business (that has operated in Australia for 104 years) we have to focus on calcuated strategies while creating efficiencies to keep operating because of financial impacts out of our control. More often than not these impacts are a result of poor government policy and unforeseeable global events. The fact that the government finds this as a sensible and acceptable option for a five day working week shows that they do not care about burning money gained from tax payers. If anyone thinks that this will be as efficient as people working at the office in a collaborative fashion to get the best results possible they are mistaken. That won’t matter though as there is a simple solution, employ more public servants at the cost of all hardworking Australians. Absolutely astonishing