Making workers return to the office might not make them any more productive
Announcing the directive to work "primarily in an approved office," NSW Premier Chris Minns said overseas studies showed people were less productive when working from home.
"There is a drop in mentorship. There is less of a sense of joint mission," he said. "This is about building up a culture in the public service."
Having examined the impacts of working from home since the pandemic started, I am not convinced.
With colleagues from the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at The University of Sydney Business School, I have been monitoring the changing incidence of working from home and its relationship to performance since the start of the pandemic.
Working from home means working more
We have found that workers who take up working from home devote about one third of the time they save by not commuting to extra unpaid work.
When we asked workers who took up working from home what the new arrangement had done to their productivity, more said it had improved it than made it worse.
About one in five said it had made them "a lot more productive." Only one in 30 said it had made them "a lot less productive."
Interestingly, when employers were asked the same question about whether their workers who took up working from home had become more or less productive, the answers were about the same.