As the winter chill sets in, civil servants bundling up for their commutes might be casting their minds back two years to November 2023, when then-prime minister Rishi Sunak began pushing perm secs to “set and implement an expectation of increased office-based working”. While it wasn’t the first back-to-office drive ministers had tried since the Covid lockdowns began, it is the one that has stuck.
When CSW first broke the news that civil servants were to be told they would have to spend 60% of their working week in the office (or out and about on official business), the response was mixed. Sunak said the move was driven by a consideration of the “significant benefits” arising from working in-person with colleagues – but unions urged flexibility and questioned the lack of published evidence for the threshold.
Within weeks, a poll of more than 13,000 PCS union members showed that two in five were considering leaving the civil service as a result of the mandate. Eighteen months later, the FDA carried out a survey of 7,000 officials, in which 78% said they believed the office mandate had been a failure. And staff in some departments, including the Office for National Statistics, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and HM Land Registry, have gone as far as taking industrial action in protest against the policy.
Beneath the dissatisfaction and protest, there is a more nuanced picture to be found. Research carried out in 2023 by the University of Bath found that while 80% of civil servants were happy with hybrid working, 50% also reported challenges: blurred boundaries between home and work; longer working hours; back-to-back virtual meetings.
Two years on from the introduction of that mandate, CSW has been speaking to officials about where we are now. How has the 60% requirement affected their motivation, their productivity, their career progression? Have “significant benefits” arisen from working in-person with colleagues? And if they would like things to be different, what would the alternative look like? So that people could speak openly, officials’ names have been changed throughout.
“Pre-Covid, I liked working in the office,” says Jo, a grade 6 official at a central department. “I genuinely didn’t mind it. I like bouncing ideas off people. I’m a proper collaborative worker.”
Today, Jo feels differently. “The only time I can genuinely see a benefit to being in the office is when we’re having some kind of team workshop,” she says. “And I understand that if you’re new to the civil service or you’re new into a department or you’re just younger and you’re starting off your career, there are benefits to being in the office. But at the same time, some of those benefits are tapered because working in the office is not what it used to be.”
Jo’s perspective is a familiar one among the officials who spoke to CSW. Office-based working was an accepted norm before the Covid lockdowns forced teams to go remote. But norms have since shifted and the requirement to go into the office, for many officials, seems unreasonable. Why is that? “We’ve seen the light,” Jo says. “People have seen how much happier they are.” She gives the examples of being able to pick children up from school or to care for loved ones at home, alongside the “reduction in stress from the daily commute, the ability to log on earlier and finish later”. And, she insists: “I can do my job from home.” Going into the office takes hours out of her day, costs money and rarely benefits her productivity.
Is it the mandate that people are resisting, rather than the experience of office working itself? Mark, a grade 6 official at the Ministry of Defence, thinks so. “I do genuinely feel that 60% was just an arbitrary number they picked out of their arse,” he says. He considers himself lucky that his manager doesn’t enforce the mandate, and is happy for Mark to go into the office twice a week, provided he gets the job done. What would he do if his manager were to enforce the mandate more strictly? “We’d probably have an argument and then I’d probably end up finding another job, to be quite honest,” he says. “I’m not going to go and sit in an office for three days if I don’t need to. We did that pre-Covid. I look at my outputs then versus now and I was nowhere near as efficient, and nor were the team.”
Prior to the introduction of the 60% mandate, the civil service had a strong reputation as a flexible employer, blazing a trail in its approach to part-time working and job-shares, alongside attractive packages for maternity and joint parental leave. These benefits allowed officials to achieve a healthy work-life balance and attracted people who might otherwise have chosen a higher salary in the private sector. Anecdotally, the civil service is now losing people who need to work flexibly.
Becky, a working parent, is one of them – she had reached SCS level at a central department when the 60% mandate came in. She feels the change – at least in her department – was “implemented pretty poorly”. Becky had been working four days a week, but was discussing the possibility of increasing her hours with her manager – she was hoping to return to full-time working, with the majority of her week being home-based. “For me personally, the announcement meant that I stayed working part time rather than increasing back to full time,” she says. “Largely because I couldn’t make the practicalities work with commuting three days each week.” Becky left the civil service earlier this year. “I was fortunate. I got a new role, which paid more and gave me a home-working contract,” she says, adding that the 60% in-office requirement “felt to me like a distinct step backwards and a change in ethos” for the civil service she had worked in for 15 years.
“I genuinely feel 60% was an arbitrary number they picked out of their arse” Mark, MoD
According to the Hybrid Work Commission, women who work from home are much more likely to work full time, and enforcing in-office working therefore disproportionately affects women.
Meanwhile, the Institute of Employment Studies has found that the benefits of home and hybrid working are especially pronounced for disabled workers. The IES also points out that “remote and hybrid working allows employers to recruit from wider talent pools, without being limited to their local area”. These findings are reinforced by the officials who got in touch to contribute to this piece, with several saying they feel the mandate’s rigidity implies a lack of appreciation for the diversity of the civil service workforce.
The ability to work from home was a game-changer not just for women but for many neurodivergent people, says John, whose office in Wales has recently been converted into a large, open-plan space. He didn’t fully appreciate how much more productive he could be in a quieter environment until he had the chance to work from home. “If there’s lots of conversations going around me, I find that difficult,” he says.
One argument that is often made to support on-site working is the need for younger employees to integrate and build networks, and to learn organically from their colleagues. But in a report on flexible and hybrid working practices in July, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that of the 1.1 million employees who left a job last year due to a lack of flexibility, the majority were younger people. Does the older generation have rose-tinted glasses about office working?
Roger, who has recently retired after a 30-year civil service career, certainly does not. He also belies the myth that more senior staff are automatically happier to enforce the mandate. He believes government is “losing the goodwill” of its employees. “I think it’s dumbing down the civil service,” Roger says. “You’re not allowing that leadership and creativity to flourish.” In his experience, the best people leave when they aren’t given trust and autonomy. “It’s almost like the lights go out in people’s eyes – people who were previously passionate start thinking: ‘Do you know what? This isn’t fun any more.’” The next thing, he says, is “the old ‘quiet quitting’: doing the bare minimum to keep my job rather than thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got an idea about how this can be better.’”
Becky was equally uncomfortable about enforcing quotas before she left: “As a manager, you ended up having less flexibility than you did pre-pandemic to do the right thing for the individual and your team. People’s attendance was being tracked and sometimes called out in meetings with colleagues.”
Meanwhile, Jo, who has disabilities and a chronic health condition, feels under pressure to go into the office, despite having reasonable adjustments in place that let her work from home. “My peers and my team don’t care – they know they can reach me whenever they need to,” she says. “It’s my managers, my seniors. It’s the backhanded remarks, the passive-aggressive emails.”
“I think what really annoys people is that the 60% requirement is evidence-free,” says Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA union. “And there’s just not a discussion to be had about it, which is why it feels like a very top-down decision.” He argues that the mandate “is not delivering what it was set up to deliver – it’s a fallacy that people are more productive in the office. It’s having a negative effect on productivity.” Penman agrees that “people working together and interacting in person is better”, but says a mandate is too blunt a tool for achieving this – it needs to be applied with sensitivity and nuance. The failure to recognise this “builds resentment”.
Does he believe the back-to-office drive was a political move? “Of course it was. We’ve challenged the government to produce the evidence of why the answer is 60%, or why there is a single answer for the entire civil service. Why is there one answer to all of this complexity? It’s become a thing driven by political ideology.”
The FDA’s 2025 survey found civil servants are not opposed to office work, “where it is purposeful and fosters collaboration”. Officials we spoke to also stressed this point: most are happy to work on a hybrid basis, but they despair of having to go into the office only to find that everyone is on Teams calls, or that no desk space is available near where their colleagues are sitting.
“If I haven’t been in the office for a while, I do start to miss it. I want to be there,” says Mark. “I like having those off-the-cuff chats – speaking to that guy over there, speaking to this person over here. A lot of the relationships I’ve built have been developed through those almost-pointless discussions.” He schedules his office attendance for days when he can afford to lose a bit of productivity.
“I think my job as a senior civil servant is creating opportunities for people to come together” Tara, MoJ
“I was missing the buzz of the office,” says Ben, who left his grade 7 role at the Department for Education earlier this year. “My productivity was down as a result. I found it hard to focus at home – the office environment used to help me to lock in, but it changed after Covid.” He found himself disengaging, and says he found another job before he was pushed.
Ben’s experience is concerning, and not unusual: those who thrive on being in the office are finding work isn’t giving them what they need. Even more concerning is the fact that when someone is struggling, it can be harder to identify the problem and solve it than it used to be.
“You can’t read someone’s body language in quite the same way on a Teams call,” says Tara, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Justice. She is currently dealing with a “very difficult situation”, where a member of her team is “disappearing for periods of time and then claiming that they are online but their tech isn’t working properly”. She doesn’t want to suggest that the answer is to monitor people more closely. “It’s extremely difficult to manage… It’s not just a performance issue. What is your responsibility towards somebody in terms of pastoral care, if you can’t identify where they are?”
Tara describes another subtle benefit to in-office working: people can stop by and ask for a few minutes of her time when she is at her desk – whereas online interactions need to be scheduled into her busy diary. “Someone might say, ‘Sorry to bother you, but can I just ask you about this little thing?’ I think some bits of work get done more quickly as a result.” She says putting pressure on people to come into the office isn’t the solution, and is far too one-size-fits-all. “If you’re based in a tiny office in Plymouth where you literally don’t know anybody, all those corporate messages about the networking benefits ring really hollow, you know?”
The Cabinet Office confirmed its support for the 60% mandate in October, saying a “consistent approach to in-office working” is the best way for the civil service to deliver for the people it serves.
But what might a better approach look like? And how could we get there?
“We need to make the new way work,” Tara says. “I think my job as a senior civil servant is creating opportunities for people to come together.” She suggests an investment in “proper collaborative spaces where people can come together as a team”. She says national teams like hers that are based around the country might not see a benefit in going to their local office, but “still really want to get together face-to-face when there’s a purpose to it”. Office spaces might need to be redesigned to suit this new use, she says.
In an interview with CSW this autumn, Simon Hayes, the departing head of HM Land Registry, spoke about the challenges around deciding how prescriptive to be about in-office working, and the need to balance the requirements of the organisation and its employees. Industrial action by HMLR staff ended in July after managers agreed to greater flexibility, including measuring office attendance over three-month periods instead of weekly. Hayes told CSW he didn’t expect that to be “the end of the story”, adding: “We are all learning about what the best way forward is.”
Jo suggests a similar approach could work in other areas of government. “Or maybe there should be a quota over the year,” she adds. She makes the point that the mandate is inconsistently applied by different managers, and argues that more flexibility would remove some of this absurdity.
Mark thinks flexible hybrid working is the way forward. “If I was at the top, I’d say, ‘Do what works for your team and focus on the outputs,’” he says. He would like to get away from the back-to-back meeting culture that Teams has fostered, which often doesn’t allow him time in the day to eat or go to the loo. Like many officials, Mark feels he works incredibly hard, and sees the office mandate as infantilising and a waste of precious time: “We’re all too busy to worry about whether someone’s in the office three days a week, quite frankly.”
Roger agrees: a mandate is not an appropriate way to deal with grown-ups, he says. “It’s a bit like telling a child, ‘You’ve got to go to school.’ If you’re being controlled in that way, it shapes your behaviour.”
Penman resists offering up a single solution. “It’s complex and it’s not easy but we have to figure it out,” he says. And the most important thing, which he says we are sorely missing, is “a reasoned discussion and debate about what is the future of work. What works? What doesn’t work? How can we make this work?”
This article first appeared in CSW's winter 2026 magazine. View the full issue here