It’s a home win for parents and planet
JACOB Rees-Mogg has been tasked with getting civil servants back to the office. Why? What is wrong with staff working at home as long as WFH can be cancelled in emergencies, as regrettably it was not during the chaos of the Afghanistan evacuation? Why is a supposedly green government, committed to net zero, so keen on commuters clogging up the roads?Why is a government so worried about Covid insisting on packed trains, tubes and buses?
Why is a government so keen to support the family wanting parents arriving home after the kids are in bed? Why is a government committed to reviving the high street keen to drain workers from small towns to big cities?
Civil servants have no more duty to work in London to keep the sandwich bars afloat than drivers had to abandon cars in favour of the horse to keep the grooms in business.
Too many commentators suggest that home workers idle instead of putting in the hours, but performance indicators and appraisals can still be applied, for goodness’ sake.
One of the biggest attractions of home-working is its flexibility. If somebody is on a Peloton bike halfway through the morning, what does it matter as long as the work is done? If that work is done before breakfast or during the evening to accommodate childcare, so what?
DOES anybody suppose that when people are chatting by the office tea-urn, all they are focused on is work instead of what they did last night or are going to do at the weekend? Indeed the absence of the distraction of colleagues allows much better focus on actual tasks, allowing homeworking to be more productive – and with Zoom and Skype colleagues can be consulted and meetings can be held at will.
I produce this page at home. Whether I write it at 6am, noon or 6pm is irrelevant as long as it is interesting, has the requisite number of words, is in the correct form and doesn’t give the lawyers a headache. So why should it not be the same for a civil servant writing a memo?