Work from home found its stride during the first years of the current global Covid-19 pandemic. Many workplaces still do not mandate a full return to the office. Some used that time to downsize their leases and therefore can no longer house a full employee cohort anyway. The smart ones realised that the airborne virus would still linger unabated and made changes to keep their operations running.

Australia’s private sector industry associations, however, are reeling from sudden plans announced last week by the Labor government of Victoria to codify work from home as an employment right two days a week.

The typical Central Business District property crowd laments an alleged impact on CRE values. Traditional executive suites protest the loss of staff control. Others claim a social impact through the loss onsite collaboration.

Well, I have a degree in this stuff and an HR industry award for it. And I say that the Work From Home debate requires more nuance than a typical ambit claim.

So, here’s a reply I gave to the management of a professional services team.

Their company feared its employees, especially graduates, were showing psychological trauma from workplace isolation.

Setting the background

When Australia’s fast internet (the National Broadband Network) was first announced, one of its touted benefits was to bring flexibility into the workplace by allowing remote work.

Remote work while greatly improving quality of life and bringing opportunity to suburban businesses, also exudes equal employment opportunity merit: access to work for those who aren’t ambulatory, access to work for parents unable to afford child care, access to employment for carers, and with Covid still a pandemic—access to employment for the vulnerable.

That said, quality of life definitely ranks high among its foremost benefits too. Why not?

In 2025 with stable real time online communications and productivity measurement tools, good businesses will be those with the managerial skills to lead remote workforces.

That’s what offshoring is all about after all.

There’s no reason then why it can’t be achieved locally where employees are no longer asked to waste two to three hours of their day in transit and finance lunch breaks at inflated prices.

Work-life balance, as the Equity Theory of Motivation goes, makes for more loyal and enthusiastic workforces.

And now the nuance

There are three issues here: 1) induction probation, 2) leadership skills, and 3) recruitment.

New employees must be carefully inducted into their roles and workplaces. Working from home cannot apply to them during their induction and I’d be surprised if the new legislation will allow for it. The white collar induction programs I used to write spanned 3-6 months depending on role and type of candidate. The graduate programs I used to write spanned 12 months.

Management and leadership nonetheless need to keep up with the online world. There is no reason why candidates can’t be hired and employed from regional areas or overseas while working remotely and receiving truncated onsite initiations.

Precise Job Descriptions—the document outlining a role’s duties and their execution, and Job Specifications—the document outlining skills and personalities are key here: marketing versus accounting for example brings different opportunities and pitfalls in that regard. Customer service versus front line customer care of course does too. Mentorship as opposed to instruction should be the management skill this century. The government here is talking just two days a week. When it also legislates a four-day working week we should revisit this.

All this touches on recruitment. The graduate and professional services recruitment I ran at the coal face used to focus on corporate brand awareness, skills and stability.

This century though, recruiting should be targeted towards flexibility, innovation and loyalty. Today’s Gen Z is an employment cohort we never envisaged decades ago because my former HR Institute and others never monitored the social media world and its impact on thinking, expectations and psychology.

Facebook is barely 20 years old. Yet we now have empirical evidence of social’s narcissistic impact on employment and job performance. Recruitment needs to be better targeted.

In that regard, there are two leadership paradigms of relevance today: the military and entrepreneurialism.

The first’s training model spans: bootcamp, advanced skilling, leadership skilling, and improvisation. The second model spans: flexibility, opportunity, risk, and improvisation too.

Different workplace roles benefit more from one or the other, or a blend of both. A business that targets its grads well in bootcamp will do well running either option depending on where it wishes to steer each individual’s career development.

Still it’s two days a week. My advice for all businesses, is to capitalise on it based on each employee’s development while also recruiting contemporary traits and skills.

We must also remember that working from home is not physically or emotionally safe for everyone: particularly in abusive settings.

So some sensitivity awareness will be required in whatever the law becomes.

© 2025 Adam Parker.
Picture credit: “Cube Space” by Asa Wilson. Filter and crop by Adam Parker. Free use under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0, CC BY-SA 2.0.