Civil service 60% mandate

[meagert]

What have your managers said to you? Do you think your department/SCS/line manager will be strict on this? Or do you think it'll be like the last time they tried a departmental push where it was a bit ad hoc?!

Possibly too soon to tell, our SCS haven't said very much yet and will "be in touch soon".

We have been auditing for quite some time and staff are now sent their individual report on attendance. What I find unhelpful is if you have worked in the office all day but then log on in the evening at home the system overrides your office attendance to indicate you were wfh. We have found your can avoid this by working on your phone not your laptop at home, which is difficult with lots of data / reports. Alternatively, one might make a small individual protest by not logging on again in the evening.

If my employers were classing office days as WFH if logged on after hours, I absolutely wouldn't be doing another minute after I got home! What's the point of completing individual audits if it's inaccurate?!

@LadyLapsang I'd be challenging that on data protection grounds, assuming it is within policy to log in at night (as it may not be, some places stipulate within a set time period eg 7-7) then to have your daily attendance effectively erased by logging in at night means the data they are capturing is not accurate, data should be accurate, especially if it is to have a negative impact on you. You have a (qualified) right to rectification. In the very least you'd have the right to ask for it to be amended and they'd need a very good reason not to, but as that would be pretty unsustainable to correct presumably a large number of people's data on a regular basis, they'd probably need to re-evaluate the whole system.

@hiddle You can correct the data by completing a form but that’s one more thing to do. We don’t really have any rules on working set times. I haven’t been in the office past 9pm since lockdown, but we used to have to sign out past 9pm or if we went in to the office at the weekend. We were reassured that if we logged on at home at the weekend it wouldn’t skew our data.

So this Jason Harper is a well informed and respected source on Civil Service matters

:-)

@LadyLapsang why on earth have the unions not challenged that complete nonsense?

My response would be that their data is clearly inaccurate and, unless they can ensure adequate levels of accuracy, then the entire individual tracking should be disregarded.

I'm really surprised the unions haven't challenged the mandate full stop!

Oh but wait, I do they are absolutely useless!

From the PCS dial in the other week, they aren’t challenging the mandate itself.
(There are some points subject to discussion union / management consultation meetings)

The announcement plus the staff/line manager guides accompanying this cover a range of possibilities for individual circumstances

If reasonable discussions aren’t productive the grievance process and union support apply.

Yes, in exactly the same boat. My team is in a mess so didn’t feel I could just bail out even though I am physically and mentally exhausted.

The issue is, we all have office based contracts.
the 60% is exactly what we had before lockdown so they have just wound the clocks back and learnt nothing from lockdown.

They are collecting data from your building pass when you tap in the building! And it’s compliant with GDPR!

I'm so annoyed I went for interview for a seo in ukhsa today. Went well but as we closed interviewer said its a hybrid position 3 days in colindale. I was so surprised because the ad said the default position was wfh. I had already finished then interview so thought well no point now but I'll have to turn it down because I live in South Wales! Waste of time :-(

@Shrim888 that is really surprising, UKHSA has been one of the most flexible ones the last few years, I assumed they were dishing out home working contacts the way their jobs were advertised.

It really depends on the job at UKHSA. Many jobs are lab based, or involve things like field work, in person training delivery, collaborative work or graduate trainee schemes of the kind where a lot of knowledge and experience can be picked up and shared in 'water cooler' moments, so workplace attendance is encouraged or even mandated.

The adverts may say hybrid (was 40% with an expectation of moving up to 60%) and there will be people who are mostly or entirely at home, but many will be going in at least 2/3 times a week even if it's a hybrid role so needs to be commutable.

Surely if you are told to go in 60% of the time you have. to do that
I don’t understand all this stuff about keeping your head down etc

What if you simply can’t find a desk to book in the much reduced office?

On what basis would the unions challenge the mandate?

I love working from home, it has been amazing for my ability to balance home life and work life and I don't necessarily agree with the arguments in favour of office working. But I think it's reasonably clear that they do have the right to bring us back in.

And I also think that if the civil service takes the piss too much with the 60% mandate, there's a chance Ministers just revoke home working altogether (unless there is insufficient office space)

My department has admitted there's been a 'recruitment issue'. Many adverts stated 'remote working - anywhere in the uk' and said 'hybrid office attendance to be agreed with your line manager in line with business need'. Many of us recruited recently repeatedly asked and were repeatedly reassured that this wouldn't change and that living 3+, hours away wouldn't be a problem. I personally go in once a month (and sit on teams all day as my team are spread in different locations). I hope they'll sort this mess out but am afraid I'll be forced to quit.

But that's the problem though. Quite a few departments, mostly the arms lengths one didn't have quotas, mostly because either they don't have space and they are specialised therefore struggle to retain and recruit therefore need to widen their areas. They were pushing a big move towards WFH as much or as little as you like way before covid. They brought in systems to facilitate it.

Now this has come in, with no idea practically how it's going to work it's sent everything into freefall. It's impossible to plan in case things change again. People who tried to get it tied down in FW requests were told 'but we don't have quotas so carry on as you are'. The implementation is patchy - in some it's down to line managers, some are mandating, and some are ignoring.

OH works for one of the above and they've been told (at the moment) that just a bit more face to face please and we're not going to set a quota as we can't due to lack of space/complexity/spread of workforce. Of course they may expand their estate so that could change or there could be a strict rota but in an area where recruitment and retention is in crisis due to the private companies offering much better deals then really this is not going to be a good thing.

Not a deal breaker for us as he goes in as much as he needs to and we've not made any major life decisions which will prevent that but others are and now are facing major upheaval for no good reason.

The whole thing is nuts. You can't apply a broad brush to a very diverse organisation unless you can to cripple it which in part I think our current shower of a government are aiming for. Set the barn on fire and walk away.

Yes seems crazy to me. I have a friend that is fully remote for ukhsa which is why I thought I could apply living so far away (plus the job did say wfh) most of their advertised jobs now say 2/3 days in so could be that new staff are put straight on to hybrid contracts and existing staff can keep their home working contracts?

@User65412 have you had any info at all on what will happen with the more recent recruits who live miles from offices? The call yesterday didn't answer the question from what I could tell.

I'm within commuting distance although it's longish and a massive pain in the arse. I'm 0.6 fte and was 60% in office pre-covid. Been mostly WFH since although I do go to the office now and again.

We've been 40% office since around 2017 and we had more office space then! We are going to have problems with office space and booking meeting rooms is almost impossible as it is

On what basis would the unions challenge the mandate?

Because it's moving things backwards, smarter working, digital ways of working, have all improved the way we work. We have set up meeting rooms with equipment that works for hybrid working some people in, some people on Teams.

We are collaborating, we are working together we are supporting new joiners - the latest one in Scotland who has an agreement to come in once per month. Why hit us with an arbitrary 60% in the office, when there isn't enough room & it will prevent us filling roles we're already having trouble filling!

All good reasons to challenge it! I actually think it's to reduce the number of Civil Servants without making anyone redundant!

@rockstarshoes

Oh I thought you meant formally challenge/dispute? But maybe you meant informally?

So all of the reasons you give are reasons you might disagree with the mandate but I don't think you could formally challenge or dispute the mandate on any of these grounds

The unions should also be robustly challenging departments who are monitoring their staff and sending individual weekly reports - especially where those reports rig the data to disadvantage the employee.

That’s clearly a problem.

When I was a civil servant, one of the things I worked on was an analysis of the (poor) quality of the data sources available to monitor compliance with the hybrid working mandate. The results were that they had no reliable data to base this on
at all. Even where access to buildings was managed electronic passes (only a subset of buildings), it turned out that data set was wildly inaccurate for a whole host of pretty ridiculous (but hard to rectify) reasons.

And that’s before someone has applied unfair logic that disregards a whole day spent in an office because someone had to log back in from home to finish the work they couldn’t get done during that office day.