Will the federal government set the gold standard for telecommuting? Private employers will have their eyes on the conclusions of the ongoing negotiations.
If it decides to formalize telework in the next collective agreements of its civil servants, as demanded by their union representatives, the federal government could find itself at odds with what is happening among comparable workplaces in the private sector.
“The federal government is aware that any action it takes will impact both its own workforce and the message it sends to all employers and employees. across Canada,” said France Dufresne, national director of employee experience at human resources consulting firm WTW (Willis Towers Watson).
“In terms of telework, among the large employers in the public sector, including Crown corporations, many are monitoring what the federal government will do in the next employment contracts of its civil servants”, analyzes Ms. Dufresne in an interview with La Presse.
“In the private sector, returning employees [to the workplace] is seen as an overall productivity issue. After three years of teleworking, often isolated at home, there is a growing desire to rekindle the productivity gains that come from teamwork, the transmission of knowledge between employees, and inclusion. new employees,” said Michel Leblanc, President and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal, during a telephone interview with La Presse.
An observation partly shared by Ms. Dufresne. “Among employers in non-governmental sectors, what we observe most is the hybridity of return-to-work policies: that is, neither completely flexible towards telework, nor completely rigid with the full return to the office for all.
“The other thing that we also see is the segmentation of return-to-work and telecommuting policies based on the needs of business lines or tasks to be performed in the same company or organization. »
In the opinion of Glenn Castanheira, Executive Director of Montreal centre-ville, “the main reasons why people come back to the office these days are to maintain their competitiveness as a work team, their sense of belonging and their corporate culture.
“What businesses [downtown] are telling us is that they no longer want their employees to come back to the office to be more productive in, for example, data entry. What they want is for their employees to return to the office in order to be more productive working together, with the emphasis on collective productivity rather than individual productivity.
“That is very important. The private sector sees it, but if the government sector doesn’t see it, it will catch up with us later,” Castanheira said in an interview with La Presse, on the sidelines of Thursday’s disclosure of a survey on the appreciation of downtown Montreal among its workers, visitors and residents.
In this context, considers Michel Leblanc, of the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal, “if the federal government decided that it would keep its civil servants teleworking in their place of residence, there would be productivity issues [des services au public] and that would go in the opposite direction of what is happening in other sectors of the labor market”.
In the meantime, he points out, “we can say that the federal government, for the past year or two, has not shone with the efficiency of its services, whether in immigration, with passports, the management of pensions to the elderly”.
