Issuing a demand to end working from home, shadow finance minister Jane Hume cited research that actually supports one or two days a week of remote work.
The Coalition has promised if it wins the federal election it will order public servants to return to the office five days a week, saying remote work has harmed productivity.
Senator Hume on Monday night announced it will be an expectation of a Dutton Liberal government that all members of the APS work from the office five days a week — though exceptions could and would be made where they work for both employees and the department.
At the heart of the return-to-office demand are rights written into the latest Australian Public Service bargaining agreement, which the Coalition argues prevent managers from being able to negotiate sensible flexible working arrangements.
The EBA allows any public servant to request work from home arrangements that must be considered with a bias towards yes, and prohibits managers from requiring a minimum number of days in the office.
Report cited by Hume found some WFH improves productivity
Addressing Liberal-aligned think tank The Menzies Research Centre on Monday night, Senator Hume told the crowd a Stanford report had found working from home had caused a significant loss of productivity.
A recent report from Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research consolidated research on working from home and its impact on productivity, Senator Hume began.
One paper [cited in that report] found that after work-from-home arrangements were put in place, productivity fell by about 20 per cent, Senator Hume said.
While work-from-home arrangements can work, in the case of the APS, it has become a right that is creating inefficiency.
However, the same working paper Senator Hume cited concluded that hybrid working actually had benefits over fully face-to-face work.
Studies of hybrid working arrangements often find productivity gains (relative to traditional arrangements) or no discernible effect, the Stanford researchers wrote.
These studies suggest that working from home one or two days a week improves productivity and leads to happier employees.
In the study cited by Senator Hume, researchers studied 10,000 professionals at an Asian IT company during the COVID pandemic, where they found total hours worked increased by 30 per cent with no measurable change in output — an effective productivity loss of 20 per cent.
The researchers found communication and coordination costs increased substantially during work-from-home periods — and that productivity losses were worse for parents, whose children were stuck at home with them due to the pandemic.
While the Stanford researchers noted several papers had found fully remote work hurt productivity variously by 4 to 20 per cent, depending on the study, they caveated that by warning those studies did not consider that the commute time-savings from remote work can offset sizeable drops in productivity.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher on Tuesday rubbished the Coalition's half-baked policy.
Not only is the Coalition's half-baked policy at odds with modern Australian workplaces, it's also at odds with the research paper Jane Hume is actually citing, Senator Gallagher told the ABC.
This is a typical Peter Dutton distraction to hide the fact he wants to cut frontline services, sack 36,000 workers, and spend $600 billion on nuclear reactors.
Hybrid work cut employee turnover by a third
The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research paper also cited one of their own studies, published in academic journal Nature, whichfound hybrid work resulted in significant improvement in employee satisfaction and lower turnover rates.
The researchers ran a six-month randomised control trial investigating the effects of hybrid working from home on 1,612 employees at a Chinese technology company over 2021 and 2022.
They found hybrid working reduced quit rates by a third, in particular among non-managers, female employees and those with long commutes.
While the Coalition slammed public servants who it said had taken advantage of flexible work arrangements, the party says it does not want to end remote work entirely.
Senator Hume told the ABC sensible arrangements were agreed between department bosses and the public service commissioner in 2023 to allow flexible work in the public service where it suited, employees, their team and the wider department, and the APS should return to those.
These arrangements have been ignored by the current government who have instead made it a right for one, not an agreement for all, she said.
This is common sense policy that will instil a culture that focuses on the dignity of serving the public, a service that relies on the public to fund it, and a service that respects that funding by ensuring they are as productive as possible.
The future of working from home arrangements has been debated since the COVID-19 pandemic forced a rapid acceleration of people working remotely.
While the Coalition argues it has been a factor in Australia's ongoing productivity woes, the federal government has endorsed flexible work, saying it has allowed more women in particular to work full-time.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-05/jane-hume-work-from-home-research-support-hybrid/105009118
