Change is coming! LET’S FACE IT!
WORK-from-home (WFH), or “telecommute,” is not new to us. In fact, Sen. Emmanuel Joel Villanueva’s bill allowing employees in the private sector to WFH was signed into law on Dec. 20, 2018. The law, Republic Act (RA) 11165 — “An Act Institutionalizing Telecommuting as an Alternative Work Arrangement for Employees in the Private Sector” or the “Telecommuting Act” — permits private employers to offer a telecommuting program to its employees on a voluntary basis; that is, a work from an alternative workplace with the use of telecommunications and/or computer technologies.
The law emphasizes that the “terms and conditions shall not be less than the minimum labor standards set by law and shall include compensable work hours, minimum number of work hours, overtime, rest days and entitlement to leave benefits. In all cases, the employer shall provide the telecommuting employee with relevant written information in order to adequately apprise the individual of the terms and conditions of the telecommuting program and the responsibilities of employee.” Besides encouraging a balance between life and work, the Telecommuting Law alleviates the heavy traffic issue that these would-be WFH employees have been experiencing daily.
Recently, the Civil Service Commission (CSC) released Memorandum Circular 10 ( MC 10) dated May 7, 2020, on the “Revised Interim Guidelines for Alternative Work Arrangements and Support Mechanisms for Workers in the Government During the Period of State of National Emergency Due to Covid-19 Pandemic.” Concerning WFH, the circular stipulates that the following tasks are allowed: research; policy formulation/review/amendment; project work, including but not limited to, drafting of proposals/project studies/training modules; data encoding/processing; adjudication of cases or review of cases, including legal work; budget planning and forecasting; recording, examination and interpretation of financial records and reports; evaluation and formulation of accounting, auditing and management control systems; computer programming; database maintenance; design work/drafting of drawing plans; preparation of information materials; sending/receiving email; HR ( Human Resource) tasks, e.g. computation of leave credits, preparation of payroll etc., as the case maybe; and other analogous tasks which require the use of a computer and the internet for reading, encoding, printing or submission of written outputs for the review, evaluation or final presentation/ assessment of the immediate supervisor, the head of office or the management. Aside from WFH, a government agency may adopt other alternative work arrangements such as skeletal workforce, four-day/compressed workweek, staggered working hours, or a combination of these.
Come to think of it, examining these specific WFH tasks under MC 10 would also apply to RA 11165 and its Implementing Rules and Regulations released by the Department of Labor and Employment on March 26, 2019 (i.e. Department Order 202-2019). Both RA 11165 and MC 10 are innovative and preventive measures, respectively, to different stimuli leading to WFH solutions that are beneficial for both government and private employees. The former encourages the work-life balance of employees in the private sector induced by so much time spent in heavy traffic while the latter is intended to protect government employees in the time of a pandemic. In another perspective, I learned from Mr. Jaypee Abella, the author of the book Philippine Procurement Law: Principles, Requirements,Obligations, Issues, published in 2019, that he was already communicating via email with the CSC re WFH way back in 2016! When asked how he was inspired to do it, he said as a member of the systems improvement team of a government agency then, they were guided by the principles of clauses in ISO 9001:2015, an international standard for quality management system which requires an organization to be responsive to the changes of times and thus must continually improve its services in view of such changes. He further relayed that through his team, he proposed to their top management an “electronic work” scheme for the public sector in view of the traffic conditions plus the fact that there are employees, including contracted and job order personnel, who are coming from cities and municipalities outside Metro Manila. The only challenge for him then was that his proposal should be supported by law or guidelines from the CSC. Hence, he had email exchanges with the CSC starting in 2016, but he did not elaborate anymore on the contents of the exchanges. I can only surmise that his initial steps in proposing “electronic work” could have contributed in a way to the CSC’s planning activities in coming up with WFH guidelines.
By the way, Abella did not stop advocating this WFH in the public
sector. He drafted a bill called “Philippine Work from Home Act in the Public Sector” and submitted it in April 2020 to a senator for consideration. He was thinking that WFH in the public sector should be a permanent thing just like RA 11165.
One could have already observed the pattern from RA 11165, MC 10 to Abella, that the WFH concept was all triggered by innovative thinking and it undeniably requires high- speed, affordable and reliable internet services. Peter Drucker, the great management guru in innovation and entrepreneurship, once said, “Every organization must prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.” He only meant that change is inevitable…. And whether we like it or not, the “new normal” is coming! To top it off, let’s not forget what President Duterte also once said, “Change is coming!”
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Related topic: Digital transformation 2019-2022
https://www.manilatimes.net/2019/07/24/opinion/