Working from home: Why employees like it, and what the law says

A recruitment agency survey has found people who work from home are able to save more than $5000 a year, and often make decisions based on what jobs have more flexibility.

Despite this, the government has told department bosses to tighten up on the numbers and the reasons people work from home, citing concerns over productivity and struggling retail businesses.

It comes after more than 6500 public servants have lost their jobs under the current government, and as the cost of living continues to climb.

Viv Beck, boss of Auckland business group Heart of the City, is urging the council and other employers to follow Willis and direct their staff back into offices too.

Frog Recruitment managing director Shannon Barlow says its surveys show it was not always about the novelty of a working-from-home arrangement, but a money management essential.

"One third of workers reported that they were saving over $100 a week, so you know - more than $5000 each year, and that's on things like travel, parking, meal costs, if you're going into the office" she told RNZ's Midday Report.

"So definitely it's a big impact, and particularly when the cost-of-living crisis is still very much a thing, those extra costs can really add up and make a difference to people."

Barlow said there were "some little perks of coming into the office", such as not having to pay for heating in winter.

"But I think overall people are finding particularly those travel costs and parking can be a huge impact. So weighing it up, I think the benefits that people are finding in working from home are overruling that. And it's also things like saving time as well."

The cost of commuting was increasingly being cited as a reason for working from home, she said.

"We'd have people who were weighing up whether they take a job based on, is it going to be worth it having to travel into this role? … A lot of the time they'd get close to the final stages and then decide, 'No actually, it's not going to be worth it at this time. I can save more money working close to home or with the opportunity to work from home.'"

She said the government was "knocking public servants while they're down" by making those "that have the so-called privilege of retaining their jobs" hit the road every day.

"Dragging people back into the office is more likely to increase employee dissatisfaction and feelings of mistrust than increase productivity."

What the law says

Duncan Cotterill employment lawyer Jeremy Ansell told Checkpoint it could get messy.

"The starting point here is that there's no statutory right for employees to work from home. Those arrangements are usually discretionary, and they normally form part of an employer's policy or potentially directions to their staff.

"Now, employers can amend company policies and directives right if they have a good reason to do so. So in the case of a working from home policy, some of these government employees may be able to say 'we've been given a directive by the minister, we need to have a change of focus, we need to have more people back in the office because it's affecting productivity, workplace, culture, etc'. Those all seem to me to be quite valid reasons.

"However, the difficulty could come if there are employees who have, for whatever reason, a contractual right to work from home that's somehow built into their own individual employment agreement… or a collective agreement."

For those with a contractual right to work out of the office, it will be "very hard" for employers to make them return five days a week without consultation or the employee's agreement, Ansell said.

"You don't need to do a formal consultation if you're an employer and you're changing a workplace policy… All you have to do is make sure the changes are sufficiently brought to the attention of the employees concerned."

But changing a contractual arrangement would need renegotiation.

"I would caveat it by saying I'd be quite surprised if there are a lot of contracts or employment agreements that do have a contractual right to work from home. It's not normally something that's covered in an agreement."

If someone joined a workplace on the promise that working from home was an option, but it was not written into the contract, Ansell said the employer had the right to call them in.

"If somebody wants to have a guarantee that they're going to be able to work in a certain way or work from home for a certain number of days, it's safest that it's in the employment agreement."

Willis said working from home was a "temporary measure" to deal with Covid-19, and its continued use threatened "public sector performance" and put "future leadership" at risk.

Ansell noted Willis' evidence of this was largely anecdotal and there was "no sort of firm data for the government to work off".

"There may well be employees that take that line of argument. They say, 'Well, you know, I'm at home, I can concentrate on some deep work in my home office with no distractions. I'm not actually going to be more productive coming into an office environment where there's colleagues around who you know want to talk to you about the weather or whatever.'

"So if employers get that type of feedback, they'll have to genuinely take it on board and give consideration to it."

It was possible chief executives might just ignore Willis' directive, Ansell said, or different bosses will interpret it in different ways.