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Working ✍️ Remote work and planning offices

M

MacheteJames

Cyburbian
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Hey everyone,

I'd be curious to hear about any public-sector planning offices that have implemented permanent remote work policies now that we're entering what seems to be a post-covid phase. Like many of you, my office was remote for the majority of 2020, but is now back full time. Given that planning work is often quite public facing, and that we work for local government employers that are often averse to taking risks on new workplace policies like flex or hybrid schedules, I can understand the perceived need to have staff back at desks full time despite the concerns around acquisition/retention of planning talent who may see this as a dealbreaker. Nonetheless, if any of you have seen or implemented changes in office policies to facilitate hybrid or full time remote work, I would love to hear about it, about how it has worked out for you so far, and how your employer navigated the politics of implementing this given the pressure on public sector employees to be visible and available.
 
We're back in the office 2-3 days a week, depending on you your position. Probably stay that way for the foreseeable future. We've always had the option to work sporadically from home and covid has opened that door more than pre-covid.
 
We are back full-time. Working on a policy that will probably let each staff member have a day of the week at home, probably not until September. We had no work-from-home policy at all pre-COVID.
 
We had a "you can work from home on a rare, case-by-case basis for a few hours here or there if you don't have an in-person meeting and aren't working the counter and your supervisor trusts you and you have a valid reason like child care or contractors at your house or something" policy before COVID. We actually lost a good employee about two months before COVID hit because he moved a couple of counties away for family reasons, but would have happily made it work to stay if our department had let him work from home.

Anyway, now they are letting those of us who don't NEED to be in the office work from home indefinitely, and they are figuring out how to restructure the office to give social distancing space to those who need or want to be in the office, and set up "hotel desk spaces" for those who will primarily be working from home, to make it more permanent.

We don't have an official telework policy or plan yet, but management is working on it.
 
We're a little different in that we're a county planning and economic development office and we were in the process of phasing out our public counter before the pandemic shut everything down and re-purposing that space for another work group. For the past few years we'd have maybe only a handful of walk-in customers a month. Most of those services had migrated online.

Prior to the pandemic, we had a strict no remote work policy. We were flexible with scheduling so if you needed to be home for a bit to wait for a contractor or something you could easily make up the time elsewhere in the week but if you needed to be home all day, you had to take personal/vacation hours. Starting the week of March 16th, 2020 we were 100% work from home until the middle of the summer and then people started trickling in once or twice a month. After the New Year, people started coming in maybe once a week or so. Starting this week we officially implemented our new permanent hybrid system that HR and corporation counsel announced last month which allows people to work from home 2 or 3 days a week (if their position allows it) and managers have the option to allow people to work from home even more if needed. When HR presented the plan to the managers and supervisors they made it clear that this is permanent and needed for us to help attract and retain workers who now have these options so frequently in the private-sector (though we are government, we take a lot of our cues from Ford/GM/Chrysler FCA Stellantis and their white collar and engineering teams are now going to have remote work options going forward).

Facilities and Maintenance has already jumped in whole-hog in redesigning the workspaces in the buildings to accommodate our new spatial needs: Those of us with private offices will largely be retaining them and some folks will be retaining their private cubicles (the cubicles in our office are very large with nice private high walls) but many of the cubicles will be removed and reconfigured to allow shared "hotel space" and other areas will be reconfigured to have nicer open workspace areas. We haven't been given a timeframe for when they'll get to our building but considering that we share space with the county executive and all of his deputies, I'm hoping we'll be one of the first buildings to be redesigned (the Facilities and Parks building got first crack since Facilities is using that as a test space).
 
WSU MUP Student said:
When HR presented the plan to the managers and supervisors they made it clear that this is permanent and needed for us to help attract and retain workers who now have these options so frequently in the private-sector (though we are government, we take a lot of our cues from Ford/GM/Chrysler FCA Stellantis and their white collar and engineering teams are now going to have remote work options going forward).
Click to expand...

This is what worries me most - that our office (and, by extension, public sector planning in general) are going to lose the smartest grads and professionals to the private sector because we're afraid of what the optics of remote work by civil servants will look like to the public that expects us walk-in accessibility to us eight hours a day, every day. When we came back full time, there were definitely rumblings of resentment by staff that we had to work through (and are still working through), but the rationale given by TPTB was "we are all local government employees, police/fire/DPW never stopped coming in every day throughout COVID, so suck it up".
 
MacheteJames said:
This is what worries me most - that our office (and, by extension, public sector planning in general) are going to lose the smartest grads and professionals to the private sector because we're afraid of what the optics of remote work by civil servants will look like to the public that expects us walk-in accessibility to us eight hours a day, every day. When we came back full time, there were definitely rumblings of resentment by staff that we had to work through (and are still working through), but the rationale given by TPTB was "we are all local government employees, police/fire/DPW never stopped coming in every day throughout COVID, so suck it up".
Click to expand...

That was our worry here that the administration would basically say, "This is the way we've always done it. The sheriff's office and public health, etc. have to come in everyday. So do you." Thankfully they realized that we were just as productive working from home as we are in the office and they decided to allow remote work to continue. I think if they had brought us back into the office earlier (like back last summer when the numbers were relatively low) that we'd probably be stuck back here 40 hours a week now with no hope for remote work.

Those areas of the county offices that have public counters will still continue to have normal business hours M-F and the plan requires that any work group generally have at least 40% of their people physically in the office on any given day.

Our Facilities department worked with our IT and a few other departments to come up with some cost savings estimates as well based on consumption, IT equipment leases, possibility of freeing up rented space (though we own most of our office space, but there is now the option to lease out freed-up space to other agencies), etc. Being able to point to actual cost savings probably went a long way in convincing the administration to adopt the policy.

On the personnel front - We've had a hard time attracting/retaining folks for critical positions in IT or engineers in Facilities and Water Resources for a long time now. They get snapped up by the Big 3 or Quicken/Rock Financial or a few other big companies here in Metro Detroit and now that they are largely remote, it would make attracting and retaining those workers even more difficult.



Now that we've got remote work tackled, I'd love to see some changes made to the dress code, especially in our office where most of us almost never deal directly with the public. Our dress code is already pretty relaxed but I'd love to see something more akin to the "dress for your day" philosophy that would allow me to wear jeans and sneakers any day if I wanted if I wasn't going into a meeting or conference or something. Or better yet, if they allowed me to wear gasp shorts! gasp when it's like 90º!
 
We are "transitioning" back to the office between now and August, with a current policy that gives individual managers a lot of discretion in terms of whether and how to incorporate remote work. I'm fairly certain there has been a lot of internal push-back against earlier plans to bring everyone back in, but I would also guess our approach will create friction once it is apparent some divisions are being more generous allowing remote work than others. While I don't think the hybrid approach of 1-2 days at home and 3-4 days in the office is great since it will be a one size fits all solution, I suspect that may be where we eventually land with a few outliers that are fully remote.

I think in general the right approach to remote work is to offer it up for department heads or managers to consider as another tool in the toolbox (e.g. don't tell them how to do their jobs, just expect quality work and let them figure out how to get it done). Seeing that agencies might be more worried about the political optics of remote work than they are concerned about taking care of their employees and attracting new talent is beyond discouraging. I realize I get on the remote work soap box a lot, but I think this is going to be a huge problem for the public sector. It used to be that employees were drawn to public sector work in part because of having greater flexibility and work-life balance than they could find in the private sector. Budgets are already tight (i.e. less competitive salaries) and many boomers are near retirement (i.e. new vacancies). Something's going to have to give..
 
HomerJ said:
Seeing that agencies might be more worried about the political optics of remote work than they are concerned about taking care of their employees and attracting new talent is beyond discouraging.
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It doesn't help that the public at large generally has a negative view of public employees - they just don't care.
 
Speak of the devil, and he shall appear. Just had one of my reports poached by a consulting firm because they offered him a pay bump and hybrid work. I expect this to be a major source of talent drain for inflexible public sector planning offices going forward. :grimace:
 
If "police have to come in" is an excuse, no one is forced to work as a cop, or maintenance man, etc. Sounds like circular reasoning to me.

My place went full-time remote for those who want it. In fact, all surveyors lost their offices and all mandated to be full-time remote.
 
The latest for us, 3 days on 2 days work at home. We also get flex schedule so every other week it's 2 and 2.
 
We have a flexible work schedule as of this summer and probably for sometime. Basically for non-counter staff, 2 days at the office min. My current summer hours have me working from the home office M, T, Thursday in the morning. Thursday afternoon (counter) and Wed, and Friday at the office. I purposely chose Friday to work at the office because we are closed to the public :rofl: .

Also I think budgets are really on the revenue stream for the municipality. Mine has a very conservative budget approach. Our revenues have increased significantly over the last 5 years due to increasing sales tax, property tax, and cannabis revenues. We received a pretty solid cola and pay increase, along with a one time bonus this fiscal year. Attracting talent is hard across the board.
 
Although Forbes magazine focuses on the private and/or publicly-traded sectors,
did Forbes' opinion article get it right for the public sector, and particularly for planners?

March 2022
8 Things Companies Get Wrong About Hybrid Work—And How To Get It Right
www.forbes.com

8 Things Companies Get Wrong About Hybrid Work—And How To Get It Right

Hybrid is here, and it can be hard. But it's not hopeless. It can be the best of both worlds for work which engages and inspires people—if companies can overcome their misperceptions and mistakes.
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com

First, what they (have been known to) "get wrong":
  1. "Hybrid is an Either-Or"
  2. "Compensation and Remote Work Are Enough [for employee satisfaction]"
  3. "People Don’t Want to Come Back to the Office"
  4. "The Office Doesn’t Need to Change"
  5. "The Office Is (Only) for Socializing [and collaborating]"
  6. "Total Choice Is the Best Approach"
  7. "[Transitioning is} Not that Hard"
  8. "[Organizations] Have to Get It Totally Right"
 
Our HR hasn't figured out #2 yet. We have no problem telling people that we allow work from home and flex schedules, but HR doesn't list that as a benefit. Granted it depends on your city job. Cops can't exactly work from home. No one is talking compensation. That's our biggest problem. Why can't we hire good IT people. We don't pay them. Why do planners leave us? We don't pay them.

We're also working on the switch from someone in every day to just having the whole team in once a week. We don't have any counter duties so it's more valuable for us to actually work together in person once a week. Plus we can socialize.
 
Our administration said it's not ever going to happen. They think it looks bad for government work. Most of our employees are in Police, Fire, Utility, Trash, and Parks. Probably around 80%. Most of those employees work out of their vehicles or in the field.

We're currently practicing the method "if you don't tell me, it isn't happening" for everyone else. Department heads and managers can allow it in the right circumstances. A few people are working primarily from home due to health reasons. I'm pretty flexible with my staff, but eventually someone is going to complain to HR and they'll adopt a formal policy or just kill the flexibility.
 
MacheteJames said:
This is what worries me most - that our office (and, by extension, public sector planning in general) are going to lose the smartest grads and professionals to the private sector because we're afraid of what the optics of remote work by civil servants will look like to the public that expects us walk-in accessibility to us eight hours a day, every day. When we came back full time, there were definitely rumblings of resentment by staff that we had to work through (and are still working through), but the rationale given by TPTB was "we are all local government employees, police/fire/DPW never stopped coming in every day throughout COVID, so suck it up".
Click to expand...

This is a real concern. Not seeing any planning offices offering remote work, but there are great opportunities in allied fields like grant writing, community development, and design work being offered remote.

My planning board in which I live, but don't work, is meeting remotely with no plans for a return for in-person meetings. Staff Zoom in from their offices but the commissioners and the public are at home. The online meetings are working very well as there is more public engagement on topics and it's not dominated by the same old angry citizen as before. To my surprise, no one is asking for a return to in-person meetings. Even the resident NIMBY likes the online format since she doesn't have to pay for downtown parking anymore. :D
 
We currently solidified our remote work plan this past summer and is now officially in place. Up to 40% of the week remote, agreed by the department director. I haven't really stuck to my days of WFH due to some staff members sick, counter coverage, and planned vacations, but generally our department sticks to the schedules (well at least 1 planner in the office does). I think it is an added benefit to tout when recrutting, especially since our housing market is just ridiculous so its like we are cycling through local planners.
 
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