The scarce evidence behind hybrid and telework policies in government
研究通过加拿大联邦和省级政府的166份信息获取请求，发现仅14.3%的部门在制定远程办公政策前进行了员工生产力分析，约10%使用了数字监控工具，且两者无关联，表明政策缺乏证据基础。
The global pandemic forced all government bureaucracies to shift rapidly and nearly exclusively to remote work, yet governments post-pandemic opted for various work mode paths, from a full return to in-person work, hybrid, or fully embracing remote. This research seeks to answer: What information did public organizations rely on to assess the productivity of telework when formulating telework and hybrid work policies for their workforce? To what extent are digital work surveillance tools used? We examined conditions across departments in Canada’s federal and provincial governments, as revealed by 166 Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) requests. Our findings indicate that only 14.3% of the sampled Canadian departments conducted thorough analyses of employee productivity, effectiveness, efficiency, or equity with telework prior to implementing their post-pandemic telework policies. Additionally, around 10% of Canadian departments utilized some form of digital surveillance tools on their employees. We did not find a relationship between departments that conducted comprehensive evaluations of remote and hybrid work effectiveness, efficiency, and equity, and their use of digital work surveillance. Taken together, we find little evidence that telework and hybrid work policies have been devised through an evidence-based approach.