First gear lubrication on the new forum

Never Mind the B*ll*cks
724

These are just removing the covid measures though - unless they already had a flexible agreement in place, chances are they were already working in whatever their home office was, whether that was in a CBD or regional center.

So they were doing it previously, there is absolutely no reason they can’t revert back - after all, that would have been what they signed up for when they took the job.

It also doesn’t state they won’t allow flexible arrangements, so there is nothing stopping people putting forward a request for flexibility.

725

I’m at home 3 days and in the office for 2. If I had to go back full time I doubt I would spend any more money at local businesses in town. I’d try to take lunch from home, drink the office coffee etc. It would just cost me more in transport fees

726

For a public transport system where someone farts on a powerline in Hornsby and suddenly the whole rail network is fucked.

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727

The public service had easily accessible flexible work arrangements for like a decade before covid. Hybrid arrangements were very common so I don’t think anyone is going back to the office full time.

I have to question why anyone would have a hard-on for the government paying for totally unnecessary office space. Working from home allowed them to cut their expenditure massively. Everybody, including taxpayers who have nothing to do with the public service, won except business real estate owners.

All this is going to do is force people, mostly women, with young children to drop hours and prompt the more talented subset of workers with higher mobility to look elsewhere to workplaces with less archaic requirements. The lemons who have been mooching off the government for decades will just continue leeching from the office until their retirement onto a defined benefit scheme we’ll all pay for.

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728

The entire commercial real estate lobby. This whole thing is so pathetically transparent.

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729

just need to re-fit as residential. They’ll be gone in minutes

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730

The are State Government clusters who are actively trying to reduce overheads by evaluating the use of office space, and working towards phasing out current leases which is only possible if current hybrid working arrangements are continued.

Be it public or private sector… Going back to the status quo, when its been proved that things can function in a different way is pretty shitty. As Drunkfly put it, women and people with young families are the ones who get shafted, and this is on top of a long list of things theyre already getting shafted on.

You cant move out to the regions because youll have to be in the office 3 days a week, you cant afford to live in the city because housing affordability and rent is a bin fire.

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731

What about all the people who want to be in the office collaborating with their peers - graduates especially, who need face to face time but can’t get it because everyone is at home?

They also go elsewhere, and you’re left with an ineffective public sector filled with old out of touch people taking the piss doing nothing.

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732

And as much as Barnaby is a drunk and as ham fisted as the move was, the idea to move PS jobs out of Canberra to the regions was a good one.

733

I dunno. They will lose a lot of good people who don’t want to move out of the big smoke

734

I understood that the department they moved to his electorate had struggled to get there skills they need to move out there so have been ineffective as a result. * This info is a few years old so may be no longer valid.

735

Now all the new grads get to come into the office, just to sit in a teams call with others WFH.

736

Eventually, there’s a tipping point.

Complain about the traffic in Sydney? People in Bathurst complain about 1 minute traffic jam. lol.

Complain about the housing prices in Sydney? It’s cheaper off the coast.

All those wineries people like to visit on the weekend? You can go there and get home without the traffic jam starting at Mt Boyce at 2pm Sunday afternoon on your way back to Sydney.

Sydney is overpopulated, it’s public transport infrastructure is underfunded, it’s too reliant on low density housing and is scared shitless of medium and high density housing.

And all the things I can think of that make Sydney attractive are due to the population in Sydney.

Take 500,000 people out of Sydney successfully and into 5 separate population centres and those things will start becoming available too.

Even with populations under 50,000 Bathurst and Orange have great food and music options, some good galleries etc.

Build a desal plant at Newcastle and pipe the water to Dubbo. Move Parliment and the top law courts there.

Utilise Eden as a deep water port.

I’ve lived in the Mountains, Newcastle, the inner west, the eastern suburbs and Bathurst. It will be a fucking weird thing if I ever go back to Sydney. The traffic jams are fucked. The inability to move around the city freely and easily outweigh, to me, the benefits of the food and culture available there.

At the moment, it’s hard to get out of Sydney because all the fucking work is there. Move the jobs and you will see people follow them.

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737

I cant speak for all of the public service but i know that in many clusters the priviledge of working from home is not lost on staff. Organisations have developed projects and opportunities to increase engagement for a hybrid workforce including better onboarding processes, mentoring and leadership programs.

IMHO mandated face to face time can never replace open, collaborative and deliberate management… whether it be in person or remotely.

Also, not to say it doesnt happen but the notion of boomers counting down the clock in the public sector hasnt been my experience at all.

738

No one can, just like we can’t generalise for the entire public service but we seem to be doing a bang up job of it.

My issue is not being present in an office with your entire team is 100% detrimental to productivity, collaboration and learning. This may not apply to all roles obviously, but being able to turn around, discuss something and progress it rather than waiting for Shirley to get back online because she has been hanging her washing out is literally a productivity killer.

No one is demanding they are there 5 days a week either which makes the overreaction glorious, as is the posturing around refusing to support CBD businesses - it’s incredibly petty which is what I find so funny. Usually when people react in such a manner it tells me everything I need to know about who they are.

740

Yes there are positives to that, conversely though how many minutes can you lose in a week over idle chitchat that has nothing to do with work? Or is it actually more efficient to save up all those work questions into a daily huddle or Teams call. It could potentially lead to some initiative or self lead learning on behalf of the person needing the answer. It can go both ways.

…yet.

Of course the boycotts and pearl clutching are going to get the headlines but its still a step backwards and also totally tone deaf in a cost of living crisis.

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741

Likewise you can lose minutes to a number of things when you’re at home. It all comes out in the wash. What you can’t do is get immediate access to your colleagues from home.

Flexible arrangements and WFH existed before covid. Let me know when 5 day per week mandates are rolled out globally and we can discuss that. We might as well get into some proper whataboutism!

742

It really depends on a case by case basis - when you’re looking at wholesale department level shit. In the end his push of that was really poor because they had a lot of staff who have to travel around the country. Basically any time they had to go anywhere they had to go to Brisbane or Sydney to get flights. Ham fisted pork barrelling certainly isn’t the way to go.

De-centralising where they can is a good idea though.

743

And that’s a symptom of our highly centralised population reducing the air network access in regional centres because they don’t have the critical mass to justify air routes.

I wonder how we fix that? :stuck_out_tongue:

744

High speed rail.

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