The government of New Zealand has announced that it wants its staff back in the office.
In a statement, Public Service Minister Nicola Willis said that the government is following the path of many a private company in insisting its employees come back to the office.
The announcement comes as the tide slowly rolls back on remote work though some companies are ensuring that their employees will continue to be able to work flexibly.
New Zealand Return to Office Mandate
While the big tech companies have pushed the return to office as necessary for employees to interact and collaborate, the New Zealand Government says that this decision is driven also by the need to bring customers back to an ailing Central Business District [CBD].
Willis told Bloomberg: “While carefully defined working from home arrangements can benefit workers and employers, if the pendulum swings too far in favor of working from home, there are downsides for employers and employees,” Willis said. “That’s even before we consider the effects for the CBD retailers, restaurants and cafes.”
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New Guidance for Government Employees
Public service chief executives will soon have access to revised guidance but, says the news report, this will reinforce that “government expectations that working-from-home arrangements should only be agreed where they will not compromise performance and should be by agreement between the employee and the employer”.
Just weeks ago, the Canadian Government announced that it was going to start enforcing its RTO policy for federal public servants.
While the policy of three days a week working from the office has long been in place, the Government says that it is now going to be keeping a sharper eye on attendance. Christiane Fox, deputy clerk at the Privy Council Office, told the press that the Government is braced for resistance and “lots of noise”.
US Back to the Office Bill
In the US, Senators Mitt Romney and Joe Manchin have penned a bill to get federal workers back into their offices. In a statement, they explain: “According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), in 2023, 17 of 24 federal agency headquarters were operating at an average capacity of 25% less.”
Romney said: “It has been nearly a year since President Biden formally ended COVID-19 public health emergency declarations, yet most of our federal office buildings remain empty—wasting millions of taxpayer dollars every day. Americans deserve to have a federal workforce that is both present and productive.”
Both senators claim that now is a time for rolling back the clock. “This common-sense legislation that brings our society closer to pre-pandemic normalcy,” they write.
Meanwhile, in the private sector, Dell, Tesla and Amazon have all instigated strict mandates for the return to office. While some employees have pushed back, with morale at Dell, for example, taking a hit, CEOs are determined to corral staff back into their offices even threatening their jobs if they don’t fall into line.
