Glancing at an old diary over the weekend, I realised that if I'd still been working for HMRC, today would have been a Mortise-and-Tenon Monday. Named after the old sliding games that preceded Rubik's Cube, and challenged line managers to squeeze a United Nations level of co-ordination into the working day. This was one of the many benefits of "Working in the Office." There was always re-organisation - especially in a processing unit. Every year a new strategy would be drawn up, new initiatives championed. Teams would be broken up, with their functions assigned to new managers. And since everyone was sitting at a desk with a computer, that would often mean people moving with their computers to a new desk. In the pre-Surface Pro days that meant picking up the base unit, keyboard and screen (together with desk drawers and contents) and wheeling them on a chair to the new base. But that was just the planned re-organisation. Sometime during the year, managers would reali...

 Coming back from my world cruise on the S.S. Happy Wanderer, I told myself that my knowledge of HM Revenue and Customs was now far too time-expired (our "out of date" as we used to say). But setting foot on English shores once more, I soon found that the likes of Jacob Rees Mogg were still trotting out the same old prejudices about civil servants, productivity and working from home. That's one good thing about starting from a base of no knowledge. It can never go out of date.  According to The Times of 10 January, MP's such as Harriet Baldwin of the Treasury committee have written to Jim Harra ( head of HMRC) after helplines were shut down last month due to IT problems. Despite being told that the shutdown was due to "a botched upgrade", the MP's still want to know , "if its working from home policy has caused a decline in its customer service helpline." Of course, Jim Harra will give them an answer. And they probably won't be satisfied wi...

  Mogg, following in the soggy footsteps of the shoe-chewing Francis Maude, wants to cut civil service jobs. Like most of his ilk, he doesn’t know what those civil servants do, or what the effect of cutting them would be. He just wants them gone. Mogg also thinks everyone should be working in the office. Give him his due – it’s not just the oiks that he wants back in the office – as Father of the House, he ordered MP’s back to Parliament and vetoed online debates, in 2020 when the Pandemic was at its height. The reasons Mogg gave were to  “restore the cut and thrust of debate” and to “set an example to the rest of the country.”  You might ask what kind of example the Commons sets for the country with their “cut and thrust” – or Bash Street Kids barracking – but you can at least see that Mogg is consistent. As a Conservative, he wants things to stay like they’ve always been. So, no surprise that at the end of April, he crept round Civil Service offices leaving “Sorry I Mis...

  With the end of ‘Working from Home’ announced, I reckon it will mark the return of one of the biggest hidden sources of work-based stress – staff toilets. Homeworkers have had months, sometimes years, being able to go when they want, in the comfort of their own surroundings. And now they’ll have to readjust to fitting in with the patterns of their management and colleagues in an alien environment. There are three main Toilet problems: engineering, intrapersonal and managerial. Engineering: Architects and engineers always underestimate the demands of the great British public. Think of the magnificent art galleries and museums you’ve visited. The toilets never match up. They used to be just scruffy and inadequate, but since the millennium they’ve been ‘cool’ and inadequate (e.g. wash basins shaped like a clam shell that spray water all over you as soon as you trigger the high powered faucet). HMRC used to have a large estate made up of a hodgepodge of buildings, built in different ...

  I had to wait til Mid-day to check if the story was true. Appropriately, it was April 1st 2021 when the "i" Newspaper reported that Ministers are looking to "start bringing some civil servants back into the workplace under a phased return to the office from 12 April." We were assured this will only apply to "those whose roles are unsuited to working from home." As I said when talking about the early days of the lockdown  here   the definition of not being able to do your job remotely was always a bit ambiguous. It turned out that the technology allowed more people to work from home than we'd previously been led to believe. But some sections of HMRC doubted how effective that work from home was. Perhaps that was what the  Prime Minister was thinking of when he said "people have had quite a few days off" and should make a stab at going back to the office. "Fair play, we've given you that time off so you didn't spread Covid, but l...