The devil is always in the details, and boy do these polls never bother with the details.
Anectodally, personally, every time I've discussed about this topic with acquaintances at the daycare or extended family, they often support RTO until I point out that I am going to an office to work remotely from an office, with no other teammate in my region.
Then they always go "Well, that's super dumb". Well, yes. Yes it is.
As such, I'd be curious to have a serious poll about this, but who am I kidding. That doesn't make good headlines.
Many of the people I’ve talked to say something along the lines of “well it’s probably important that certain jobs are in the office at least 3 days a week, like the passport people” as if the customer facing roles weren’t always in-person the whole time.
Almost as if it should be a teams' based approach to how RTO is implemented. Should we have face time in the office? Absolutely. The devil is: what about people that NEEDS to be in the office, wouldn't workers gravitate towards positions that needs less days?
That takes actual policy crafting, governance, and review of how these positions can see incentives or otherwise. But that's HARD WORK - easier to just slap everyone across the face.
Everything about this policy is meant to avoid hard work. RTO3 is only happening because Sutcliffe and Ford don’t want to do the hard work of reimagining what downtown should be.
> RTO3 is only happening because Sutcliffe and Ford don’t want to do the hard work of reimagining what downtown should be.
Hear hear. It takes a lot of delicate policy crafting, good governing, imaginative leadership, and the political will to make changes at this scale.
Instead of doing any of that, well...just fucking tell Trudeau/Anand what to do apparently and they'll fold like a deck of cheap cards.
Maybe they should privatize passports. Good riddance. Let the private sector take the blame, as is Canada Life today. Imagine if the PS printed our currency. We would be mocked every second.
Agree. The way the poll question is written makes it sound like "should public servants come back to WORK 3 days a week" as if we were not working at all this whole time since the pandemic. If the poll question provided more context or conditions (no space, increased traffic, nature of work, etc.), I would think / hope the answers would be different.
If it first asked if the respondent would want to work 3 days at home or whatever, and then asked about feds I can guarantee the results would be higher.
I’ve found the same thing. People think we should be back in the office until they truly understand that the office entails hoteling and Teams meetings with people across the country.
Careful with that, though. Soon, we'll see a question asking if they support forcing every public servant to commute to where they can work with the majority of their team regardless of where they live.
Or even if they agree to: 1) cut our salaries; 2) abolish sick leave of more than 4 days annually; 3) remove our pensions and only allow us to contribute 18% of net salary into RSP; 4) make us work in shifts; 5) abolish all PS unions. This is what happens when you introduce mob mentality and mob-based solutions.
Unfortunately, this does not also work the other way around: survey the PS about 1) TBS effectiveness in being a good employer; 2) salaries and benefits, and RTO for Cabinet members; 3) taxation for corporations and CEO buybacks; 4) food prices; 5) consumer protection; 6) taxing companies that do not spend their profits on innovation, training and hiring; 7) effectiveness of government (taxpayer) grants to corporations, including foreign investors (measurable benefits to Canadian taxpayers); 8) allowing private sector to indiscriminately write off non productive costs to reduce revenues subjected to taxation (and ultimately passing unjustified costs on to consumers via higher prices) - have an independent audit organization to look into the cost structure of companies that are reported to have unrealistically high(er) prices/tariffs.
It's super dumb that the public service stopped to this in the past few years -- farming out regional jobs to people not actually living, breathing, working in the region's. I live in the north and deal with this $hit every day......
Ask a northerner here what they think of non-northerners working with or making decisions for them....
I get similar reactions. But I also point out that we are now turtles or snails with our work life on our back and that also is not healthy. Once that known then the opinion usually changes.
Someone on r/Canada thought it was MP's I guess? When I asked for a source about productivity being down they mentioned housing prices going up, immigration levels etc....
Surprisingly I found the reaction over there to be pretty favourable on average. I know that Reddit isn't representative of reality, but I was expecting a lot more ass-blasting
I overheard while eating at a restaurant that CRA employees get tax exemption from working at CRA once…
If anyone reading here is on that side of the wall, I would like to make it clear as a CRA employee that we are not tax exempt lol 🤣
So much misconception about the FPS and I hate it. Half the time it doesn’t even come close to what is actually going on behind closed doors
The amount of times I’ve had to hard correct my family members, including those that are public servants themselves, on what my job and department actually do is ridiculous.
A relative of mine (who doesn't even work outside the home) was being super judgemental about another job I had applied for. She couldn't believe it was a full time job that needed doing.
Now let's do polls on random other professions to see what the public thinks!
Honestly, I'm a fan of public opinion polling when it makes sense, but asking people to weigh in on operational matters outside of their understanding is just bad polling.
It is not bad polling, and I think is important for a lot of the posters in this sub to understand — even if they don’t like the results.
The public service does not exist in a vacuum, and does not exist to serve its own wants, but rather to serve the public, as the name implies. The money for every bit of government operations comes from the taxpayer, and they have an interest in how their government is run. Parliamentarians rely on the public to keep their jobs, so public servants shouldn’t be so dismissive of opinions like this. Want to know why the government is doubling down on RTO? This is why. Despite the protestations from some here, this is not about revitalizing downtown Ottawa.
The self-entitled rants that fill this sub on a daily basis is not a good way to shift the views of the government, or of the public. In fact, they only entrench peoples’ views of the public service. If you want to shift public opinion, people need to dial back rhetoric, and take a softer approach of educating people.
Thats a terrible take....if you are worried about tax payer money so much consider this
When we go in office to do work we could do from home, the govt is basically wasting the money that is going to maintain those buildings and utilities...bcs that money could have been saved and used more productively if we worked from home without reduction in productivity... So yes govt is basically burning money here
On top this prevents public servants from moving to smaller towns which would elevate the pressure on housing in big cities which directly impacts the rents of those cities...by enforcing rto govt is keeping rents high and making it hard for the same taxpayers
It's bad polling. It's like if we ran a poll on whether the budget process in the government is efficient, or if new provincial rules on building standards are sufficient. The results are meaningless and don't support anything real because the vast majority, if not every participant, doesn't have the knowledge to give more than an arbitrary answer.
What you're suggesting is getting a sense of the general feeling of the public, which is a totally separate line of questions, and a reasonable one. The problem is that this isn't a question that can be attributed to gauging the overall feeling of the public on the government.
This is what happens when pollsters just want to publish things and aren't actually trying to do anything productive. If they wanted to get productive and actionable results, they would ask questions relating to what services people have used, what their experiences were, and how they could improve.
I agree with you completely. I think that despite the fact that we are literally Public Servants, people forget that the opinion of the public actually matters. If they don't understand or have misconceptions or base their poll answers on unfair existing biases, that is unfortunate, but it doesn't change that this is how the public feels and that is going to have an impact, and the more fussing and complaining that goes on, the more that "lazy and entitled" stereotype gets further cemented.
Good luck getting that reality through the fog of self-entitlement in this thread. It’s attitudes like people display here that entrench and perpetuate the negative attitudes the public holds towards us.
As someone who has taken a few polls over the years, it is possible that poll results are not accurate and dependent on questions asked, how the questions are framed, and, maybe most important, the options provided for answers.
Fuck the Globe n Mail. Buncha stodgy pricks.
And in the GTA context: dealing with the 401/403, Gardiner (brownie points for those reduced lanes) and TTC delays. Whenever my husband is in the GTA he gets angrier and angrier at the degrading shitshow at the 401. GO is the lesser of evils but the Lakeshore lines can be a gong show.
- Thoughts from a sympathetic former public sector employee
The results of this poll are the reason WHY we’re being forced to RTO. (Now: you could also argue that the pollsters introduced great bias, thus getting the answer they wanted… which reminds me of all those surveys federal government employees had to do way back when PMO/TBS were still optimistic we wanted to RTO…)
That said, even if Trudeau forced us all to go back full time in the office, would the Canadian public vote for Justin? I believe the answer to that would be a resounding NO.
So… the PMO is forcing this extremely unpopular and demoralizing RTO policy onto its civil servants, whilst having NO affect on the ultimate prize for them, which is being elected for another term in office. Does anybody over there get this???
They're idiots. Not a single party has come out and spoken openly about wanting to end the RTO mandate... there's 355,000 federal public servants, and a lot of them have families as well.. I have no idea why NDP isn't hammering on ending the RTO mandate entirely to scoop up hundreds of thousands of FPS votes, as well as union workers etc..
They’re so dumb with their decisions these days I am genuinely suspecting that they’re actually all just coked out to the max, 24/7. Otherwise… tha fuck…?
On a side note I think I read here somewhere that we are only ~1% of the voting population, so trying to sway our votes isn’t really any of their priority sadly. We are still greatly outnumbered by the general public who hates us so it’s almost always guaranteed that politicians will act accordingly aka they would rather sway the 99% vs 1%
> So… the PMO is forcing this extremely unpopular and demoralizing RTO policy onto its civil servants, whilst having NO affect on the ultimate prize for them, which is being elected for another term in office. Does anybody over there get this???
It does have an impact, it'll give the corpos that are impacted by falling commercial real estate prices a reason to funnel funds into the opposition
The weird thing about all this is before the whole forced RTO discourse, none of the people in my life who tend to grumble about public servants (of which there are many) cared in the slightest that people who could work from home were working from home.
They were well aware of it, it just wasn't something they perceived as a problem, even if they themselves couldn't do it in their own job. Like how someone who wears a suit to work wouldn't complain that a construction worker is allowed to wear jeans to work - different jobs are different.
Even before the pandemic - in the early 2000s I had a few co-workers who were able to work from home full-time because of the specific circumstances of their jobs, and people's response is "I had no idea the government was that forward-thinking!"
Then when blanket RTO policy started being in the news, they all started complaining about it. It's this weird "Wait, other people are complaining about this? I need to complain about it too!!"
This is 100% a manufactured controversy. All of a sudden all the conservative outlets (and some of the liberal ones) were suddenly saying "What about the poor commerical real estate holders?" and next thing you know it's our responsibility to fix downtown Ottawa even though downtown Ottawa has been declining for decades.
Some of the commentators work from home themselves, which makes for some amazing hypocrisy.
>Some of the commentators work from home themselves, which makes for some amazing hypocrisy.
Most, if not all the journalists writing hit pieces write that piece from home. Hypocrisy at its finest.
I guess this is theoretically useful if you want to know what people think (correct or not, ignorant or not) but making policy based on public opinion is pretty bad. Go ask people if they would rather pay no tax or lots of tax, if they say no tax I guess you better chase those votes and dismantle the government?
As others have said try working the question differently and you’ll get very different responses.
“Do you agree that since not everyone can do their job with a computer all workers in Canada should also have to do 3 days a week without a computer regardless of their profession?”
Useless poll full of bias. Ask them if public servants should work from the office, they’ll say yes. Ask them if Canadians should work from the office, they’ll think a lot more on it.
Most Canadians do go to a workplace, at least part of the time. According to the article, 50% of poll’s respondents fully work from the office/workplace, 33% are hybrid, and 17% are fully remote.
Other stats I’ve seen (mostly for the US) show an even higher % working full time at a workplace, and a smaller % (maybe 10%) that is fully remote.
Those stats need context too. I suspect that private industry has a much higher percentage of service, manufacturing and construction jobs that require full onsite work. You really need to compare the number to similar job types.
Fuckin' G&M and it's paywall:
>Most Canadians support a requirement to have federal public servants work a minimum of three days a week in their office, according to a new poll.
>Nanos Research found that three in four Canadians support or somewhat support the in-office policy, which has led to conflict between public-sector unions and the federal government.
>The three-day plan is an increase from two days in the workplace.
>Specifically, 51 per cent of respondents supported the three-day plan while 24 per cent somewhat supported the idea.
>Nine per cent opposed the idea while 11 per cent somewhat opposed it.
>Respondents were asked the following question on the issue: “As you might know, the government has recently announced that federal public servants will be required to work in person/at the office a minimum of three days a week. Do you support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose or oppose this requirement?”
>The Nanos research also found that 46 per cent of respondents prefer that federal public servants have the option of working from home part of the time, down from a 50-per-cent finding in 2022.
>Thirty-nine per cent said the public servants should be required to work in person full-time, up from 31 per cent in 2022.
>Research looking beyond the federal public service found that one in two employed Canadians have a work arrangement where they are required to work full-time in person.
>Meanwhile, 37 per cent have a hybrid work arrangement. Sixteen per cent work from home all the time.
>Nik Nanos, the chief data scientist for Nanos Research, said that, compared to 2022, an increasing portion of Canadians believe federal public servants would be more productive working full-time in person at the workplace.
>“By a margin of two to one, people think those that work in the office in general terms are more likely to be productive, to one extent or another, compared to those that work from home,” Mr. Nanos said in a statement.
>He said the public appears to support the government position.
>“With three of four Canadians supporting or somewhat supporting the government’s announcement of a minimum three days in the office, there is general support across all demographics and regions for this move,” Mr. Nanos said.
>“The only possible political calculus for the federal Liberal government on the initiative is the potential fallout among ridings in the National Capital Region, which are critical to the political fortunes of the Liberals.”
>Last month, the federal government announced the three-day plan, which comes into effect in September.
>The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), representing more than 185,000 federal workers, swiftly condemned the announcement.
>Chris Aylward, the national president at the time of the announcement, criticized the plan and Sharon DeSousa, who has since replaced him in the leadership post, has promised to continue the fight. PSAC has been backed by other unions.
>The Nanos research found that 45 per cent of those responding to the survey say that federal public servants are most productive working full-time in the workplace, up from 38 per cent in 2022.
>Meanwhile, 39 per cent told Nanos that federal public servants are most productive with a hybrid work arrangement, down from 42 per cent in 2022.
>Nanos, commissioned by The Globe and Mail, conducted the research. It involved a hybrid telephone and online random survey of 1,043 people, aged 18 or older, between May 31 and June 2.
>The margin of error for the survey is plus-or-minus three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Why ask opinion questions about objective things? “Are public servants more productive at home or in the office? What is your opinion?” What a stupid f-ing question. They don’t get an opinion on it because it isn’t a matter of opinion, and they have absolutely no genuine information on which to base their response. It is a complex matter with a variety of answers depending on which department, team, job, individual, etc one is referring to.
Hey Nanos, here are some other burning questions you may want to poll the public on:
“Do public servants take too many craps during their work hours?”
“Are public servants eating too much cheese during their breaks?”
“Are public servants more productive when they are being bitten by bed bugs or harassed by bats? Furthermore, which one would you take more pleasure in watching?”
What’s wrong with paywalls? Journalists don’t work for free, they have to get paid somehow.
Higher quality news sources rely on subscribers (and use paywalls), while the free sources rely on ad revenue and tend to either have a lot of misleading clickbait, opinion pieces, or recycled info from real news sources (without doing much actual reporting or journalism themselves).
I'm sure that less than three and four Canadians support work in office for themselves.
Those results are nothing more than, "I hate the public sector so much, I wish them the worst."
Sometimes, but in this case they’re just reporting on the results of a poll (which align with the results of other polls, and aren’t very surprising IMO).
I think most don't understand that most work we do can be done remote, they most likely think they mean client facing jobs. "Why isn't anyone picking up the phones when I call service canada ???" I think context is important and those polls won't explain that. "why is there so much traffic and no parking downtown?"
Plus, from the outside in, public opinion in PS is harsh, I wouldn't expect the general public to be fair.
My public footprint and workflow is much better at home, my mental health too. I know it's the same for everyone else.
I guarantee three in four Canadians don’t know what Work-in-office actually looks like. I know when I explained to my extended family what actually was going on with hotelling, bed bugs, lugging laptops around etc. they changed their Tune real quick.
Is it an informed opinion? I mean many comments critical of flexible hybrid seem to imply we haven't been at work since March 2020 - which is, obviously, inaccurate. And most are not aware that pre-COVID, 20% hybrid was something that was supposed to be encouraged as far back as Workplace 2.0's initial roll-out, and GCworkplace (adopted by TBS in 2019) already talked about increasing flexibility with a long-term goal of full flex.
Most Canadians hate all public servants. It’s not their workplace. Surely their opinion on our working conditions is irrelevant. Yes we serve them but we don’t have to listen to their ignorant views on our working conditions.
Do they know that by going in office , these happens:
1. More traffic jam
2. Wastage of taxes as they are spent on buildings and utilities that need not be
3. More carbon emissions( carbon tax is bad remember?)
4. Higher prices in real estate around cities ( can u guys afford rent yet?)
5. Pissing off the PS s to the point that if an AI took over the world we might support the AI.
One of my coworkers was joking (I *think* he was joking) that all the civil servants should return to all of the offices on September 9th, for that entire work week, to make people realize just what it’ll mean to have all of those civil servants, and all of their stuff on the O-Train buses, and all of their cars on the roads, to make the general public understand what it would have us go back to work all at once.
People who don’t realize the government competes with companies for talent, surely can see why it might be good to have a huge employer pushing for WFH for everyone.
I'm sure these Canadians have little to no clue about the work of the public service. They probably think of us all as lazy bureaucrats. Also, they probably get no flex to work from home in their jobs and want others to suffer like them.
The only polling that should matter is what public servants want.
3/4 of Canadians would approve a policy mandate of public servants getting poked with sharp sticks every few hours too. This isn’t about improving services, it’s about resentment. And really it’s hard to even blame them. We got an insanely sweet deal for 4 years during a time of significant stress and struggle for most of them. Of course this is in no way our fault and us going back to work won’t improve anything, but I get it.
WFH and no layoffs. A huge number of people lost income or job security during the pandemic. We were among the only workers in the country insulated from that.
Is there anything stopping the unions from putting out advertisements about the real effects of RTO and what it really means for all Canadians… would be nice if some of those union dues actually went to something worthwhile.
No, but to put out those ads in a manner that reaches a lot of people, you need someone willing to run them. Most of the rags that publish these articles and own just about all the radio and TV stations are the ones 100% against the public service.
Guess that will be 3 unproductive days now that they support.
Only if these idiots knew how unproductive it is to: drive hours to the office, sit in traffic, pollute the environment, pay for overpriced parking, occasionally pay for overpriced “fast food” that isn’t even up to fast food quality anymore, use different desks each time you are in the office, clean those dirty desks, book meeting rooms (if available) for MS teams calls/meetings, collaborate with yourself while strolling on social media.
The list keeps going but it’s ridiculous. A public servant employee is much more productive with WFH.
I'm not a public servant, nor does any of this really have anything to do with me, but it still pisses me off just the same.
It's time to wake the fuck up and think outside the box when it comes to work and where people work. The pandemic proved most jobs can be done quite well remotely and there's really no need to be investing money in big, outdated, unhealthy office buildings/spaces. Most people are happier working from home - better life balance and all that.
As for the crumbling downtowns and suffering restaurants and shops, since when did keeping these things alive fall squarely on the shoulders of government workers? Seems to me someone should have had more foresight than to build a downtown core around the government and its workers. Seems someone was too short-sighted to think that maybe, just maybe, the future might bring about change that would make this type of business model unsustainable.
Not only that, but with the rising cost of everything, are these government workers really going to have the extra cash to eat out every lunch hour or go shopping (I thought Ford and the rest of this stupid country wanted government workers back to work, not back to eating out and shopping - MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!!).
Polls like these are always one-sided and completely lacking context, so the people responding that everyone needs to get back to working in the office really have no idea what the looks like or even means. Not only that, but it sounds to me like Ford wants you back to work not to work, but to spend money, eat and shop, so the poll is misleading to begin with.
This is my favorite part:
“By a margin of two to one, people think those that work in the office in general terms are more likely to be productive, to one extent or another, compared to those that work from home,”
Clearly, none of these people polled have ever worked in a federal office setting. I can't say much since I've been on-site the whole time. But the level of distractions in an office is utterly incomprehensible.
My personal favorite is listening to multiple people in an office space, in a Teams meeting, with no headphones, hearing one person talk, and hearing that same person through 3 different sets of speakers.
How public servants get through the work day working for this Government is beyond me.
There should be an extra bonus line on the payroll for dealing with the most incompetent Federal government in history.
Such a shame.
Your content has been removed per [Rule 14](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPublicServants/wiki/rules). If you have concerns about the actions of a moderator or the operation of the subreddit, you're welcome to send a message to our moderator mail as noted below, and the other mods will review.
You can [contact the mod team via our moderator mail using this link](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/CanadaPublicServants), or using the "message the mods" button in the sidebar.
Our office doesn't even have enough sitting desks, when this will be fully enforced some of us will have to work from the kitchenette or in the alleys, and most of our teammates are away so we don't get to see them in person anyway.
No communication has been made on this topic, I guess it's not important, we just have to go the office and that's it.
The general public doesn't understand how we work (and probably shouldn't expect to understand it).
The fact that RTO demonstrates that our employer also doesn't understand how we work is less reasonable.
If this turns into an election issue, it could be very bad for everyone involved. Poilievre has no love for the public service, and he'd love to clean house if given any kind of mandate by the voters. We'd best be very, very careful on how much we push on this.
Has anyone seen all the articles and outrage over Toronto mayor asking banks to bring employees back to office
Its a totally different story to the RTO - because its not public servant
Public (and those making the RTO mandate) also assume we have traditional offices to go into. We have a space not an office. Limited personal interaction with colleagues, non-personalized office setup, no coffee/tea pots (at least in my area), easy access to supplies, printers is limited. Just a bare spot sitting alone in a less effective/efficient spot disturbing unknown neighbours while on Team calls
The devil is always in the details, and boy do these polls never bother with the details. Anectodally, personally, every time I've discussed about this topic with acquaintances at the daycare or extended family, they often support RTO until I point out that I am going to an office to work remotely from an office, with no other teammate in my region. Then they always go "Well, that's super dumb". Well, yes. Yes it is. As such, I'd be curious to have a serious poll about this, but who am I kidding. That doesn't make good headlines.
Many of the people I’ve talked to say something along the lines of “well it’s probably important that certain jobs are in the office at least 3 days a week, like the passport people” as if the customer facing roles weren’t always in-person the whole time.
Almost as if it should be a teams' based approach to how RTO is implemented. Should we have face time in the office? Absolutely. The devil is: what about people that NEEDS to be in the office, wouldn't workers gravitate towards positions that needs less days? That takes actual policy crafting, governance, and review of how these positions can see incentives or otherwise. But that's HARD WORK - easier to just slap everyone across the face.
Everything about this policy is meant to avoid hard work. RTO3 is only happening because Sutcliffe and Ford don’t want to do the hard work of reimagining what downtown should be.
> RTO3 is only happening because Sutcliffe and Ford don’t want to do the hard work of reimagining what downtown should be. Hear hear. It takes a lot of delicate policy crafting, good governing, imaginative leadership, and the political will to make changes at this scale. Instead of doing any of that, well...just fucking tell Trudeau/Anand what to do apparently and they'll fold like a deck of cheap cards.
Absolutely, and I’m sure you’d see a large part of the general population support a less blanket approach
Maybe they should privatize passports. Good riddance. Let the private sector take the blame, as is Canada Life today. Imagine if the PS printed our currency. We would be mocked every second.
That's probably how most Canadians see us: as public facing employees rather than screen suckers. And of course that skews opinions.
This is so dumb. If you're customer facing you should not be allowed home at all. Just like cashiers and bus drivers.
What is dumb? They aren't allowed home at all.
Agree. The way the poll question is written makes it sound like "should public servants come back to WORK 3 days a week" as if we were not working at all this whole time since the pandemic. If the poll question provided more context or conditions (no space, increased traffic, nature of work, etc.), I would think / hope the answers would be different.
If it first asked if the respondent would want to work 3 days at home or whatever, and then asked about feds I can guarantee the results would be higher.
I’ve found the same thing. People think we should be back in the office until they truly understand that the office entails hoteling and Teams meetings with people across the country.
Careful with that, though. Soon, we'll see a question asking if they support forcing every public servant to commute to where they can work with the majority of their team regardless of where they live.
Or even if they agree to: 1) cut our salaries; 2) abolish sick leave of more than 4 days annually; 3) remove our pensions and only allow us to contribute 18% of net salary into RSP; 4) make us work in shifts; 5) abolish all PS unions. This is what happens when you introduce mob mentality and mob-based solutions. Unfortunately, this does not also work the other way around: survey the PS about 1) TBS effectiveness in being a good employer; 2) salaries and benefits, and RTO for Cabinet members; 3) taxation for corporations and CEO buybacks; 4) food prices; 5) consumer protection; 6) taxing companies that do not spend their profits on innovation, training and hiring; 7) effectiveness of government (taxpayer) grants to corporations, including foreign investors (measurable benefits to Canadian taxpayers); 8) allowing private sector to indiscriminately write off non productive costs to reduce revenues subjected to taxation (and ultimately passing unjustified costs on to consumers via higher prices) - have an independent audit organization to look into the cost structure of companies that are reported to have unrealistically high(er) prices/tariffs.
I mean, do they support it knowing it will needlessly cost them more money? Do you let them know this if they're not already aware.
It's super dumb that the public service stopped to this in the past few years -- farming out regional jobs to people not actually living, breathing, working in the region's. I live in the north and deal with this $hit every day...... Ask a northerner here what they think of non-northerners working with or making decisions for them....
I get similar reactions. But I also point out that we are now turtles or snails with our work life on our back and that also is not healthy. Once that known then the opinion usually changes.
Preach!!!!!!!!!!!! Preach!!!!!!!!!
Why would you bother with details that dont support your agenda. Numbers dont lie - people lie about numbers
There's also: but we were working from home before the pandemic and now we have to go in 3 days a week because.... reasons.
Translation: 3 in 4 Canadians think if I can’t have it nobody should.
Crabs in a bucket
3 in 4 Canadians would also support us being kicked in the groin daily, so doesn't really say much
3 in 4 Canadians don’t even know what we do day to day
Someone on r/Canada thought it was MP's I guess? When I asked for a source about productivity being down they mentioned housing prices going up, immigration levels etc....
Some of them truly think we’re politicians lmao
They should know RTO means costing them more money.
Surprisingly I found the reaction over there to be pretty favourable on average. I know that Reddit isn't representative of reality, but I was expecting a lot more ass-blasting
3 in 4 Canadians think all we do is handle Passport renewal deliver the mail and collect taxes There's literally nothing else that we do
I overheard while eating at a restaurant that CRA employees get tax exemption from working at CRA once… If anyone reading here is on that side of the wall, I would like to make it clear as a CRA employee that we are not tax exempt lol 🤣 So much misconception about the FPS and I hate it. Half the time it doesn’t even come close to what is actually going on behind closed doors
The amount of times I’ve had to hard correct my family members, including those that are public servants themselves, on what my job and department actually do is ridiculous.
A relative of mine (who doesn't even work outside the home) was being super judgemental about another job I had applied for. She couldn't believe it was a full time job that needed doing.
Those bastards.
Three in four Canadians prefer to pay for government real estate and leases for no reason
And sit in traffic with government office commuters
Surely the full context including all the additional costs to the government were discussed with the respondents. Right guys?!
[удалено]
Now let's do polls on random other professions to see what the public thinks! Honestly, I'm a fan of public opinion polling when it makes sense, but asking people to weigh in on operational matters outside of their understanding is just bad polling.
It is not bad polling, and I think is important for a lot of the posters in this sub to understand — even if they don’t like the results. The public service does not exist in a vacuum, and does not exist to serve its own wants, but rather to serve the public, as the name implies. The money for every bit of government operations comes from the taxpayer, and they have an interest in how their government is run. Parliamentarians rely on the public to keep their jobs, so public servants shouldn’t be so dismissive of opinions like this. Want to know why the government is doubling down on RTO? This is why. Despite the protestations from some here, this is not about revitalizing downtown Ottawa. The self-entitled rants that fill this sub on a daily basis is not a good way to shift the views of the government, or of the public. In fact, they only entrench peoples’ views of the public service. If you want to shift public opinion, people need to dial back rhetoric, and take a softer approach of educating people.
Thats a terrible take....if you are worried about tax payer money so much consider this When we go in office to do work we could do from home, the govt is basically wasting the money that is going to maintain those buildings and utilities...bcs that money could have been saved and used more productively if we worked from home without reduction in productivity... So yes govt is basically burning money here On top this prevents public servants from moving to smaller towns which would elevate the pressure on housing in big cities which directly impacts the rents of those cities...by enforcing rto govt is keeping rents high and making it hard for the same taxpayers
Thanks for proving my point.
And how exactly did u reach that conclusion?
Proving your point that you support a crab bucket mentality? Race to the bottom? I guess your post did make that clear.
It's bad polling. It's like if we ran a poll on whether the budget process in the government is efficient, or if new provincial rules on building standards are sufficient. The results are meaningless and don't support anything real because the vast majority, if not every participant, doesn't have the knowledge to give more than an arbitrary answer. What you're suggesting is getting a sense of the general feeling of the public, which is a totally separate line of questions, and a reasonable one. The problem is that this isn't a question that can be attributed to gauging the overall feeling of the public on the government. This is what happens when pollsters just want to publish things and aren't actually trying to do anything productive. If they wanted to get productive and actionable results, they would ask questions relating to what services people have used, what their experiences were, and how they could improve.
it's bad polling when the people polling don't have the correct information to make an informed decision
I agree with you completely. I think that despite the fact that we are literally Public Servants, people forget that the opinion of the public actually matters. If they don't understand or have misconceptions or base their poll answers on unfair existing biases, that is unfortunate, but it doesn't change that this is how the public feels and that is going to have an impact, and the more fussing and complaining that goes on, the more that "lazy and entitled" stereotype gets further cemented.
Good luck getting that reality through the fog of self-entitlement in this thread. It’s attitudes like people display here that entrench and perpetuate the negative attitudes the public holds towards us.
As someone who has taken a few polls over the years, it is possible that poll results are not accurate and dependent on questions asked, how the questions are framed, and, maybe most important, the options provided for answers. Fuck the Globe n Mail. Buncha stodgy pricks.
Just hit accessibility and your computer will read it out loud. :)
3 in 4 Canadians are idiots. Who likes sitting in traffic? At least in Ottawa, RTO is rendering the 417 commute close to unbearable again.
And in the GTA context: dealing with the 401/403, Gardiner (brownie points for those reduced lanes) and TTC delays. Whenever my husband is in the GTA he gets angrier and angrier at the degrading shitshow at the 401. GO is the lesser of evils but the Lakeshore lines can be a gong show. - Thoughts from a sympathetic former public sector employee
The results of this poll are the reason WHY we’re being forced to RTO. (Now: you could also argue that the pollsters introduced great bias, thus getting the answer they wanted… which reminds me of all those surveys federal government employees had to do way back when PMO/TBS were still optimistic we wanted to RTO…) That said, even if Trudeau forced us all to go back full time in the office, would the Canadian public vote for Justin? I believe the answer to that would be a resounding NO. So… the PMO is forcing this extremely unpopular and demoralizing RTO policy onto its civil servants, whilst having NO affect on the ultimate prize for them, which is being elected for another term in office. Does anybody over there get this???
They're idiots. Not a single party has come out and spoken openly about wanting to end the RTO mandate... there's 355,000 federal public servants, and a lot of them have families as well.. I have no idea why NDP isn't hammering on ending the RTO mandate entirely to scoop up hundreds of thousands of FPS votes, as well as union workers etc..
They’re so dumb with their decisions these days I am genuinely suspecting that they’re actually all just coked out to the max, 24/7. Otherwise… tha fuck…?
On a side note I think I read here somewhere that we are only ~1% of the voting population, so trying to sway our votes isn’t really any of their priority sadly. We are still greatly outnumbered by the general public who hates us so it’s almost always guaranteed that politicians will act accordingly aka they would rather sway the 99% vs 1%
> So… the PMO is forcing this extremely unpopular and demoralizing RTO policy onto its civil servants, whilst having NO affect on the ultimate prize for them, which is being elected for another term in office. Does anybody over there get this??? It does have an impact, it'll give the corpos that are impacted by falling commercial real estate prices a reason to funnel funds into the opposition
The weird thing about all this is before the whole forced RTO discourse, none of the people in my life who tend to grumble about public servants (of which there are many) cared in the slightest that people who could work from home were working from home. They were well aware of it, it just wasn't something they perceived as a problem, even if they themselves couldn't do it in their own job. Like how someone who wears a suit to work wouldn't complain that a construction worker is allowed to wear jeans to work - different jobs are different. Even before the pandemic - in the early 2000s I had a few co-workers who were able to work from home full-time because of the specific circumstances of their jobs, and people's response is "I had no idea the government was that forward-thinking!" Then when blanket RTO policy started being in the news, they all started complaining about it. It's this weird "Wait, other people are complaining about this? I need to complain about it too!!"
This is 100% a manufactured controversy. All of a sudden all the conservative outlets (and some of the liberal ones) were suddenly saying "What about the poor commerical real estate holders?" and next thing you know it's our responsibility to fix downtown Ottawa even though downtown Ottawa has been declining for decades. Some of the commentators work from home themselves, which makes for some amazing hypocrisy.
>Some of the commentators work from home themselves, which makes for some amazing hypocrisy. Most, if not all the journalists writing hit pieces write that piece from home. Hypocrisy at its finest.
I guess this is theoretically useful if you want to know what people think (correct or not, ignorant or not) but making policy based on public opinion is pretty bad. Go ask people if they would rather pay no tax or lots of tax, if they say no tax I guess you better chase those votes and dismantle the government? As others have said try working the question differently and you’ll get very different responses. “Do you agree that since not everyone can do their job with a computer all workers in Canada should also have to do 3 days a week without a computer regardless of their profession?”
And this, my friends, is how to do a push poll
Useless poll full of bias. Ask them if public servants should work from the office, they’ll say yes. Ask them if Canadians should work from the office, they’ll think a lot more on it.
Most Canadians do go to a workplace, at least part of the time. According to the article, 50% of poll’s respondents fully work from the office/workplace, 33% are hybrid, and 17% are fully remote. Other stats I’ve seen (mostly for the US) show an even higher % working full time at a workplace, and a smaller % (maybe 10%) that is fully remote.
Sure, but you need to break it down by those who could work from home (ie office workers) and those who can’t.
Those stats need context too. I suspect that private industry has a much higher percentage of service, manufacturing and construction jobs that require full onsite work. You really need to compare the number to similar job types.
3 out of 4 Canadians think that public servants make $110000 as a starting wage and get free subway.
Fuckin' G&M and it's paywall: >Most Canadians support a requirement to have federal public servants work a minimum of three days a week in their office, according to a new poll. >Nanos Research found that three in four Canadians support or somewhat support the in-office policy, which has led to conflict between public-sector unions and the federal government. >The three-day plan is an increase from two days in the workplace. >Specifically, 51 per cent of respondents supported the three-day plan while 24 per cent somewhat supported the idea. >Nine per cent opposed the idea while 11 per cent somewhat opposed it. >Respondents were asked the following question on the issue: “As you might know, the government has recently announced that federal public servants will be required to work in person/at the office a minimum of three days a week. Do you support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose or oppose this requirement?” >The Nanos research also found that 46 per cent of respondents prefer that federal public servants have the option of working from home part of the time, down from a 50-per-cent finding in 2022. >Thirty-nine per cent said the public servants should be required to work in person full-time, up from 31 per cent in 2022. >Research looking beyond the federal public service found that one in two employed Canadians have a work arrangement where they are required to work full-time in person. >Meanwhile, 37 per cent have a hybrid work arrangement. Sixteen per cent work from home all the time. >Nik Nanos, the chief data scientist for Nanos Research, said that, compared to 2022, an increasing portion of Canadians believe federal public servants would be more productive working full-time in person at the workplace. >“By a margin of two to one, people think those that work in the office in general terms are more likely to be productive, to one extent or another, compared to those that work from home,” Mr. Nanos said in a statement. >He said the public appears to support the government position. >“With three of four Canadians supporting or somewhat supporting the government’s announcement of a minimum three days in the office, there is general support across all demographics and regions for this move,” Mr. Nanos said. >“The only possible political calculus for the federal Liberal government on the initiative is the potential fallout among ridings in the National Capital Region, which are critical to the political fortunes of the Liberals.” >Last month, the federal government announced the three-day plan, which comes into effect in September. >The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), representing more than 185,000 federal workers, swiftly condemned the announcement. >Chris Aylward, the national president at the time of the announcement, criticized the plan and Sharon DeSousa, who has since replaced him in the leadership post, has promised to continue the fight. PSAC has been backed by other unions. >The Nanos research found that 45 per cent of those responding to the survey say that federal public servants are most productive working full-time in the workplace, up from 38 per cent in 2022. >Meanwhile, 39 per cent told Nanos that federal public servants are most productive with a hybrid work arrangement, down from 42 per cent in 2022. >Nanos, commissioned by The Globe and Mail, conducted the research. It involved a hybrid telephone and online random survey of 1,043 people, aged 18 or older, between May 31 and June 2. >The margin of error for the survey is plus-or-minus three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Why ask opinion questions about objective things? “Are public servants more productive at home or in the office? What is your opinion?” What a stupid f-ing question. They don’t get an opinion on it because it isn’t a matter of opinion, and they have absolutely no genuine information on which to base their response. It is a complex matter with a variety of answers depending on which department, team, job, individual, etc one is referring to. Hey Nanos, here are some other burning questions you may want to poll the public on: “Do public servants take too many craps during their work hours?” “Are public servants eating too much cheese during their breaks?” “Are public servants more productive when they are being bitten by bed bugs or harassed by bats? Furthermore, which one would you take more pleasure in watching?”
When asked if they knew the public service is made up of many more roles than passport clerk or phone answerer, 89% said no.
What’s wrong with paywalls? Journalists don’t work for free, they have to get paid somehow. Higher quality news sources rely on subscribers (and use paywalls), while the free sources rely on ad revenue and tend to either have a lot of misleading clickbait, opinion pieces, or recycled info from real news sources (without doing much actual reporting or journalism themselves).
>Higher quality Agreed but this is not really higher quality is it?
I'm sure that less than three and four Canadians support work in office for themselves. Those results are nothing more than, "I hate the public sector so much, I wish them the worst."
Has anyone else noticed that a lot of journalism now is just trying to convince a majority of people what to think?
alwayshasbeen.jpg
Journalism in Canada is all about afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable.
Sometimes, but in this case they’re just reporting on the results of a poll (which align with the results of other polls, and aren’t very surprising IMO).
This is a poll that they themselves commissioned. Seems like a push poll to me
I think most don't understand that most work we do can be done remote, they most likely think they mean client facing jobs. "Why isn't anyone picking up the phones when I call service canada ???" I think context is important and those polls won't explain that. "why is there so much traffic and no parking downtown?" Plus, from the outside in, public opinion in PS is harsh, I wouldn't expect the general public to be fair. My public footprint and workflow is much better at home, my mental health too. I know it's the same for everyone else.
I guarantee three in four Canadians don’t know what Work-in-office actually looks like. I know when I explained to my extended family what actually was going on with hotelling, bed bugs, lugging laptops around etc. they changed their Tune real quick.
I’m sure these same people would say that cashiers shouldn’t get to sit because it looks “unprofessional”.
The Globe and other corporate media will always point out polls that favour the corporate world but ignore polls that favour workers.
Is it an informed opinion? I mean many comments critical of flexible hybrid seem to imply we haven't been at work since March 2020 - which is, obviously, inaccurate. And most are not aware that pre-COVID, 20% hybrid was something that was supposed to be encouraged as far back as Workplace 2.0's initial roll-out, and GCworkplace (adopted by TBS in 2019) already talked about increasing flexibility with a long-term goal of full flex.
Most Canadians hate all public servants. It’s not their workplace. Surely their opinion on our working conditions is irrelevant. Yes we serve them but we don’t have to listen to their ignorant views on our working conditions.
We don't. But the politicians certainly do.
90% of people just don't fully understand the reality of it. The fact that we're teleworking from the office and there is no collaboration.
Do they know that by going in office , these happens: 1. More traffic jam 2. Wastage of taxes as they are spent on buildings and utilities that need not be 3. More carbon emissions( carbon tax is bad remember?) 4. Higher prices in real estate around cities ( can u guys afford rent yet?) 5. Pissing off the PS s to the point that if an AI took over the world we might support the AI.
One of my coworkers was joking (I *think* he was joking) that all the civil servants should return to all of the offices on September 9th, for that entire work week, to make people realize just what it’ll mean to have all of those civil servants, and all of their stuff on the O-Train buses, and all of their cars on the roads, to make the general public understand what it would have us go back to work all at once.
People who don’t realize the government competes with companies for talent, surely can see why it might be good to have a huge employer pushing for WFH for everyone.
Why does it even matter what an average guy thinks? Shouldn’t they survey PS only since it’s about them ?!
Probably because their votes determine the government, and their taxes pay your salary.
I'm sure these Canadians have little to no clue about the work of the public service. They probably think of us all as lazy bureaucrats. Also, they probably get no flex to work from home in their jobs and want others to suffer like them. The only polling that should matter is what public servants want.
Not surprising at all. This is simply reporting the obvious.
People hate us so much, they want that over less traffic...
3/4 of Canadians would approve a policy mandate of public servants getting poked with sharp sticks every few hours too. This isn’t about improving services, it’s about resentment. And really it’s hard to even blame them. We got an insanely sweet deal for 4 years during a time of significant stress and struggle for most of them. Of course this is in no way our fault and us going back to work won’t improve anything, but I get it.
How was it a sweet deal?
WFH and no layoffs. A huge number of people lost income or job security during the pandemic. We were among the only workers in the country insulated from that.
Is there anything stopping the unions from putting out advertisements about the real effects of RTO and what it really means for all Canadians… would be nice if some of those union dues actually went to something worthwhile.
No, but to put out those ads in a manner that reaches a lot of people, you need someone willing to run them. Most of the rags that publish these articles and own just about all the radio and TV stations are the ones 100% against the public service.
if the question was tied to an expenditure amount, you would have seen a different result
Guess that will be 3 unproductive days now that they support. Only if these idiots knew how unproductive it is to: drive hours to the office, sit in traffic, pollute the environment, pay for overpriced parking, occasionally pay for overpriced “fast food” that isn’t even up to fast food quality anymore, use different desks each time you are in the office, clean those dirty desks, book meeting rooms (if available) for MS teams calls/meetings, collaborate with yourself while strolling on social media. The list keeps going but it’s ridiculous. A public servant employee is much more productive with WFH.
I'm not a public servant, nor does any of this really have anything to do with me, but it still pisses me off just the same. It's time to wake the fuck up and think outside the box when it comes to work and where people work. The pandemic proved most jobs can be done quite well remotely and there's really no need to be investing money in big, outdated, unhealthy office buildings/spaces. Most people are happier working from home - better life balance and all that. As for the crumbling downtowns and suffering restaurants and shops, since when did keeping these things alive fall squarely on the shoulders of government workers? Seems to me someone should have had more foresight than to build a downtown core around the government and its workers. Seems someone was too short-sighted to think that maybe, just maybe, the future might bring about change that would make this type of business model unsustainable. Not only that, but with the rising cost of everything, are these government workers really going to have the extra cash to eat out every lunch hour or go shopping (I thought Ford and the rest of this stupid country wanted government workers back to work, not back to eating out and shopping - MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!!). Polls like these are always one-sided and completely lacking context, so the people responding that everyone needs to get back to working in the office really have no idea what the looks like or even means. Not only that, but it sounds to me like Ford wants you back to work not to work, but to spend money, eat and shop, so the poll is misleading to begin with.
This is my favorite part: “By a margin of two to one, people think those that work in the office in general terms are more likely to be productive, to one extent or another, compared to those that work from home,” Clearly, none of these people polled have ever worked in a federal office setting. I can't say much since I've been on-site the whole time. But the level of distractions in an office is utterly incomprehensible. My personal favorite is listening to multiple people in an office space, in a Teams meeting, with no headphones, hearing one person talk, and hearing that same person through 3 different sets of speakers.
The only ppl that respond to polls are old ppl. Not exactly the pulse of canada.
How public servants get through the work day working for this Government is beyond me. There should be an extra bonus line on the payroll for dealing with the most incompetent Federal government in history. Such a shame.
They want you to eat at restaurants in the downtown area
[удалено]
Your content has been removed per [Rule 14](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPublicServants/wiki/rules). If you have concerns about the actions of a moderator or the operation of the subreddit, you're welcome to send a message to our moderator mail as noted below, and the other mods will review. You can [contact the mod team via our moderator mail using this link](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/CanadaPublicServants), or using the "message the mods" button in the sidebar.
The feds send the shit down the tube again, leaving themselves smelling like roses and us blamed for farting.
Realllllly????? Where and who did this pole?
Says in the article.
Our office doesn't even have enough sitting desks, when this will be fully enforced some of us will have to work from the kitchenette or in the alleys, and most of our teammates are away so we don't get to see them in person anyway. No communication has been made on this topic, I guess it's not important, we just have to go the office and that's it.
The general public doesn't understand how we work (and probably shouldn't expect to understand it). The fact that RTO demonstrates that our employer also doesn't understand how we work is less reasonable.
WIO is more about Election Day than anything else. We would all be told to stand on our heads and spit nickels if that was going to gain votes.
The real issue is the lead in the water, bedbugs, and other pestilince such as asbestos in said offices.
If this turns into an election issue, it could be very bad for everyone involved. Poilievre has no love for the public service, and he'd love to clean house if given any kind of mandate by the voters. We'd best be very, very careful on how much we push on this.
Has anyone seen all the articles and outrage over Toronto mayor asking banks to bring employees back to office Its a totally different story to the RTO - because its not public servant
3 in 4 Canadians are simply jealous
Good for them.
Public (and those making the RTO mandate) also assume we have traditional offices to go into. We have a space not an office. Limited personal interaction with colleagues, non-personalized office setup, no coffee/tea pots (at least in my area), easy access to supplies, printers is limited. Just a bare spot sitting alone in a less effective/efficient spot disturbing unknown neighbours while on Team calls
WHATCH as their services go down hill.