HMRC - Working From Home In The Future

 


The news that PWC will be allowing its staff to work flexibly and have Friday afternoons off in the Summer is what you might call "cautiously positive".  Especially the comment from UK chairman Kevin Ellis that, "We want to help enshrine new working patterns so they outlast the Pandemic. Without conscious planning now , there's a risk that we lose the best bits of these new ways of working when the economy opens up again." As I said last week, HMRC has spent years trying to emulate the private sector. And as we all know, the social distancing rules mean that it is currently impossible to fully occupy office buildings the way we used to. 

Earlier this week, I said that the Covid crisis hit while HMRC was in the middle of its "Building Our Future" programme. This meant closing a number of regional offices so that the entire HMRC workforce could be squeezed into a handful of city offices where they could "bounce off each other."

Due to Covid and the lockdown, HMRC suddenly found itself obliged to send the majority of its staff home. Some sections (mainly processing and helplines) had always maintained that Working From Home was not possible. Some cynics thought this was more to do with wanting to keep their foot on the staff's throats than anything else. We suddenly found out that the technology could be tweaked, and it became possible for more (but not all ) staff to Work From Home.

The other unintended consequence of COVID was that HR paused the redundancy programme so that they could evaluate HMRC's policy on Working From Home. Again, some cynics thought this may have something to do with the fact that HMRC was going to have to take on new staff to deal with Brexit and it might have looked careless to be dumping experienced staff (admittedly in the regions, where only idiots would live) and the same time taking on inexperienced staff.

The evaluation programme would enable HMRC to look at the effects of Working From Home. Some sections of HMRC were fine with the concept. Others said they could not function effectively if staff were not in the office. 

Whatever the outcome - Working From Home had a positive benefit for the geographically challenged. Of course, in the long run flexible working doesn't really help if you're expected to spend two days of week reporting to an office that's outside daily travel and the PCS Union seemed to win a victory (albeit one at the cost of existing rights) when it recently negotiated five day Working From Home as a "redundancy mitigation measure". Nevertheless, for those staff located in a city region, the trend towards  greater work-life balance can only be good.

NB: I wrote this on 31st March, and of course on 1st April the other shoe dropped with the report that Civil Service staff would be encouraged back to the office from September.

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