What the research does (and doesn’t) say about hybrid work for public servants

The question of how the government is making decisions on hybrid work hangs over rumours of a potential full-time return-to-office.

In recent comments, Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated his government would soon release a “sharper” picture of its plan.

And while the details remain unclear, the underlying rationale for potentially sending public servants back to the office five days a week may be even murkier.

Last year, the Treasury Board said it did not undertake any studies on productivity before implementing the current mandate requiring three days per week in office for most public servants, though it did announce a task force on the topic.

That task force dropped its report on Dec. 12. Hybrid work was not included in the scope of what the task force looked at, but among the report’s 19 recommendations was a call for the government do a better job of collecting data to help measure productivity.

Treasury Board, however, said it doesn’t intend to follow that advice, drawing condemnation from some observers.

So, the question remains: What can the research actually tell us about the affects of hybrid work for public servants?

Public sector flying blind 

Linda Duxbury, a management professor at Carleton University, said private sector giants, such as Microsoft, have produced reams of internal research about the differences between working from home and working from the office. 

The public service, on the other hand, has not.

“The public sector is taking all kinds of actions, with no data,” she said. “The private sector is collecting all kinds of data, all over the place.”

Étienne Charbonneau, a professor at the National School of Public Administration, said “performance indicators” come built in for most private enterprises. In government, however, the goal is to “do as much as possible with the money they have,” he said.

For the private sector, Charbonneau said plenty of quality research exists that compares worker output at home versus in the office for tasks such as making phone calls and writing code.

Those studies often — though not always — have found productivity to be similar in both settings. A recent study in the journal Nature, for example, found hybrid work did not affect employee performance grades or the number of lines of code written by software engineers in a Chinese tech company.

“So, the question is, can you get the same out of people when they don’t have to commute?” Charbonneau said.

Measuring productivity 

In the public sector, nearly all studies on productivity for hybrid workers are based on self-reported data, such as surveys and questionnaires. 

In most of those studies, public servants report increased personal productivity when they work remotely.

Maria Gintova, a political science professor at McMaster University, said most public servants she’s interviewed prefer some type of hybrid work arrangement, though there is “no magic number” for the ideal number of days in office.

“It’s kind of a best of both worlds for them,” Gintova said.

Some public servants will report performing specific tasks better at home, and people with certain personality types will express a preference for working where they won’t be distracted by co-workers, she said.

But employers — and taxpayers — can only learn so much from self-reported data.

Charbonneau said most studies simply ask public servants how they feel about their work performance.

“That’s not a good way to evaluate people,” he said. “That’s why they have supervisors. That’s why they have annual reports. And that’s why, in my classroom, students don’t give themselves their own grades.”

Duxbury, as well, called self-reported productivity a “lousy measure.”

“The government of Canada is remiss as an employer if they’re not collecting information on productivity,” she said, adding such information would be indispensable for an administration looking to streamline its operations with the use of artificial intelligence.

“They’re never gonna get this hybrid (arrangement) right if they don’t look at what jobs can be done better at home.”

If the government hopes to boost productivity, Charbonneau said, hybrid work is one of the first places it should be looking.

“(It’s) one of the biggest, most obvious changes that has been done in decades, (and) they don’t — with few exceptions — bother to evaluate themselves,” he said.

Charbonneau submitted more than 150 access-to-information requests to various government departments, including the federal government and five provinces, and found that less than 15 per cent analyzed employee productivity, effectiveness or equity before implementing their post-pandemic telework policies.

‘Makes their life better’  

One area where self-reported statistics shine is measuring quality of life — and on that score, hybrid work shines as well. 

Charbonneau said the research is clear: most public servants are less stressed when they don’t have to commute to the office.

In 2022, 80 per cent of respondents to the federal government’s Public Service Employee Survey agreed that having the flexibility to choose where they work allows them to have a better work-life balance. Treasury Board later dropped questions on hybrid work from the 2024 iteration of the survey.

“It helps their family lives immensely,” Charbonneau said. “It helps them take care of their aging parents. It helps them to pick up their kids earlier, to drive them to their classes. It makes their life better as individuals.”

Of course, that’s not true for everyone.

According to Charbonneau, a minority of workers find they are more stressed when working from home, because they feel as though they can never disconnect from their job.

But because most prefer some mix of time spent at home and in the office, Gintova said employee morale is at risk if all workers are forced back, all the time.

Based on her analysis of online comments, she said a common refrain among workers is that they don’t understand why they’re being ordered back at all.

“Folks were just not getting to the rationale behind (the decision),” she said. “Other than that the downtown core needs to be more busy, everyone needs to buy lunches.”

‘It’s noisy. It’s smelly’ 

Another key consideration, Charbonneau said, is the state of the office buildings employees are being ordered back to.

Amid rumours of a looming return-to-office, public servants have raised concerns about the availability and suitability of the office workspaces to accommodate them.

Where there is space, Charbonneau warned it may be in worse shape than it was when workers were sent home in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The conditions that are waiting for you are not the same conditions that you left in early 2020. They’re not. It can be miserable,” he said.

And the combination of workforce growth and efforts to offload federal office space could make things crowded for some departments.

“You go to the office, there’s still some people working from home. It’s noisy. It’s smelly. It’s not like the amenities are there anymore,” he said.

Creativity, conflict, culture 

But Duxbury said research also finds several drawbacks to hybrid work.

“Anything that requires creativity, anything there’s conflict about, anything designed to improve culture, coaching, mentoring: Those have to be done in person,” she said.

Many private-sector hybrid workers report lower feelings of camaraderie, loss of contact with their colleagues and a siloed workplace, where they have limited knowledge of the work being done around them, Duxbury said.

And hybrid setups can be damaging for the career prospects of young people, who may be less likely to be considered for a promotion if they aren’t routinely interacting with bosses, she added.

Gintova said a tendency to promote workers who are more often on-site does appear to be a side-effect of hybrid work arrangements, but it’s just one among several inequalities.

She said research finds Black and Indigenous workers are less likely to benefit from a hybrid work arrangement in the first place.

“People who are privileged will have access to hybrid work opportunities much more than those who are not,” she said.

Duxbury cautioned decision-makers in the federal government about drawing firm conclusions from research being done by corporations due to fundamental differences between the public and private sectors.

“They have to take care not extrapolating,” Duxbury said.

Ultimately, she said plenty remains unknown about how hybrid work affects the public service, even as the government makes sweeping decisions about how its workplaces are arranged.

But the research makes at least one thing clear.

“We know it’s pretty complicated,” she said.

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