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Governor Albert Bryan says he wants all government employees back at government offices once restrictions are eased to levels established prior to the Omicron surge, the governor's contention being he has been fielding too many complaints from community members regarding non-responses from gov't offices.
"I'm essentially ready to just take it back to how it was before the Omicron surge," the governor said during an interview with the Consortium Sunday, referring to Covid-induced restrictions. "I want all the government employees back to work so we're going to definitely do that. I want everybody, everybody — I don't care what it is, you got to come into work."
Mr. Bryan said the plan is to get everyone back into the office, and thereafter decisions can be made on incorporating a plan that includes both remote and in-person employment.
"Once we regroup and we get everybody back into work, then we could look at sending people out to do remote work again because I'm getting too many complaints about phones not being answered and it's really annoying me now," the governor said. "So I need to know who we really have on board and get that functioning, get people back up to speed again."
Numerous surveys have found that workers in both the private and public sectors want more flexibility. In a survey across 30,000 Americans, 30 percent said they never want to return to the office, according to data from the Working From Home Research Project (via the Wall Street Journal).
WSJ further reported that a global Microsoft survey showed more than 40 percent of respondents were considering leaving their employer in 2021. A widely cited Prudential Financial survey from March found 1 in 3 U.S. workers wouldn’t want to work for an employer that requires them to be on site full time.
But work-from-home, though loved by employees, comes with downsides, including a steep drop in communication according to a survey in a report called the Future Work of Work Report.
There's also potential for productivity to suffer. A paper published by the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at The University of Chicago, showed productivity fell by about 20 percent at a large Asian IT services company during the work-from-home period of the pandemic, according to WSJ. The report shows total hours worked increased by roughly 30 percent, however average output didn’t significantly change, according to the report.
"I think we've had two years of [Covid-19], we really need to figure out some real good systems to manage remote work to make sure we're getting the people efficiency," Governor Bryan said.
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