EDITORIAL: It’s time for state workers to get back to the office

About 5% of the work stations in the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction offices in Madison were used in 2023.

The space designated for the state’s education agency, covering several floors of the eight-story Tommy G. Thompson Center two blocks from the state Capitol, has been mostly empty since the pandemic. Most DPI employees work in their homes full time.

Meanwhile, in the UW Systems administration department, remote working is so prevalent that members of the workforce of 3,439 employees came to work in one of the agency’s four buildings an average of only 1.5 days a week.

The numbers above, indicative of the extraordinary reliance by the state government on remote-working employees, are findings of an analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau. They are clear signs of a problem that needs to be solved either by directives from the executive branch headed by Gov. Tony Evers or the Legislature.

While the private sector is phasing out remote work, the state bureaucracy is carrying it on as though it were still unsafe to gather in workplaces, as it was during the Covid onslaught.

Working from home was a pandemic expedient that functioned well during the emergency, thanks in part to technology like the ubiquitous Zoom that enabled face-to-face meetings. For that reason, and also because it had enthusiastic support from workers, many employers stuck with it after the infectious virus threat waned.

That is changing. Last year, according to the job marketplace ZipRecruiter, nearly half of the companies that allowed remote work set more restrictive limits on it or mandated a full-time return to the office.

Among them are some of the smartest companies in America, the likes of Meta, Amazon, AT&T, JP Morgan Chase, Walmart, Disney and, ironically, Zoom.

Various studies using standard measures of efficiency have found remote workers to be 10% to 20% less efficient than employees on company premises.

Recent surveys have also found that what employers view as the biggest disadvantage of remote work is the obvious one—the difficulty of supervising workers. Employers also cited the effects of remote work on training, collaboration and employee engagement.

Remote work conflicts with a fundamental element of the work ethic, the understanding that work is a culture that exists in a workplace with its own society, relationships and rewards and that, beyond its monetary benefits, can be an enriching part of life.

Nevertheless, because remote work can provide what workers seem to value most these days—flexibility—some employers are using a hybrid schedule, with most work on site and some remote.

That sort of compromise could help resolve the political impasse that is keeping state workers out of their offices.

Republican lawmakers are working on a bill that, with only a few exceptions, would require all state employees to work full-time in state offices starting July 1. Before the bill even had a hearing, Evers announced he would veto it.

Evers said, “We want to get the best people working for the state of Wisconsin as possible, and that sometimes means they will work from home.”

The problem is, state remote work is not a matter of “sometimes.” According to the Legislative Audit Bureau, it’s something close to all the time.

Legislators are right to make an issue of the fact that the state government is persisting in remote work when the trend in private administrative organizations is going the other way. This means the taxpayers, the ultimate employers and salary payers of state workers, have a workforce that is less productive than it could be.

The Legislature and the governor should get over their usual loggerheads approach to running state business, give a little bit on the office-versus-home work scheduling details and get state employees back in the office buildings the taxpayers built for them.