Moral panic of WFH fizzled out in collective boredom
The moral panic of working from home has officially fizzled out through our collective boredom.
Te Kawa Mataaho (The Public Service Commission) recently released a second set of data about the amount of days the public service is working from home.
What did we find out?
Nothing interesting at all, is the short answer. The hand wringing has ceased and we’re all getting on with our lives.
What was that about?
The New Zealand government, in September 2024, began to push against working from home, but it didn’t end up scoring many political points. They quietly dropped their stance, especially after April 2025 when Peter Dutton, during Australia’s election campaign, experienced a heavy backfire against his ‘return to the office’ policy.
Te Kawa Mataaho has said they won’t collect this data anymore, but they expect agencies to monitor working from home to make sure it doesn’t do any harm. More specifically, the guidance says:
“Working from home arrangements should only be agreed to where they will not compromise the performance of employees, their teams or their agencies.”
This has to be the least aspirational use of flexible work I’ve ever seen.
What could it be about?
We could do so much better than ‘do no harm’. Flexible work and working from home could be used to drive any or all of these goodies:
Stronger performance for public services
Higher productivity for public services
A workforce and decision makers that better reflect Aotearoa
Cost savings through reduced employee turnover
Cost savings through reduced wage inflation
Stronger employee wellbeing
Higher employee engagement, which leads to higher satisfaction for ‘customers’
Lower levels of sickness absence
Lower employee stress and burnout risk
Support net zero strategy
… the list goes on
What about the frontline?
If those benefits aren’t enough, there’s another reason to bring this topic back into the light. Most of the public service (55%) doesn’t work from home at all, mostly because a large proportion of them are in frontline roles, serving the public every day. What about these people? In our moral panic about working from home have we inadvertently prevented a sensible conversation about what flexible work options might be possible for our frontline public servants too? According to the data, 35% of the public service have no flexibility, not in their hours, days or place of work. We have to be careful that in bashing the idea of working from home we’re not shutting down other forms of flexibility that could be really valuable for our frontline workforce.
Aspiration for flexibility
I’d love to see a conversation and action for a flexible future across our entire public service with aspiration and challenge at the heart. The condition to ‘do no harm’ wastes a big opportunity to drive a public service that performs even better with great people, doing great work in sustainable ways for a healthy and well served New Zealand. Now that’s not boring at all, is it?!
If you’re interested in joining this conversation, get in touch!