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The gossip. The suck-up. The bully.
Only a half of staff at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are in the office “on any one day”, its minister has revealed.
Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, told LBC he is not happy about the fact that, on average, just 50 per cent of civil servants are at their desks on average.
He said he is pushing for staff to stop working from home.
Ministers have struggled to get staff back to the office since the Covid pandemic broke out three years ago.
Asked what the percentage was for staff who are in the office at the DWP, Mr Stride said: “It is around 50 per cent on any one day.”
Asked if he was happy with that, the Cabinet minister said: “No. I am working to have that figure increase and it has actually increased from where it was when I first joined the department.”
Mr Stride said office attendance was “down at nearer 40 per cent” when he took on the job in October 2022.
Asked if he had a target, he said: “I don’t know that I have an over-the-organisation goal because we have got 90,000 people and some people have to be in work, of course, every single day, work coaches are there to have face-to-face meetings in job centres with clients, there are other areas where working from home works much more effectively.
“But I do want to see that number go up and that is something that I, and I know fellow ministers, are also working on.”
Breakdown in services
Earlier this month, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg said grieving families are being stung by inheritance tax penalties because of probate delays caused by incompetent civil servants working from home.
The former business secretary said it was wrong that families were penalised for being unable to pay tax bills on time because they were forced to wait months for probate.
He said: “It is clearly wrong for the state to impose penalties on taxpayers when the reason for the delays is the incompetence of a government department.
“There are very high levels of working from home and this has created the backlog. The civil servants need to get back into the office to deal with it.
“The Government should be paying compensation for these delays rather than the HMRC penalising people who are unable to pay on time.”
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Albanian women spend 25 years of their life raising children and carrying out unpaid work such as caring for family members and carrying out domestic chores, according to new data from the World Bank.
This high level of burden leads to women being less engaged in the labour market, which in turn hurts family income and the level of poverty. If this burden were shared equally between other family members, in particular the husband, family income would be higher due to salary and higher pensions, the recently published report found.
Women are left carrying the lion’s share of domestic duties, particularly in rural areas where more than 40% of Albania’s population lives and where poverty is higher.
Data processed by Exit in 2020 found that Albanian women spend around 22% of their day carrying out unpaid work, compared to just 3.47%, or 43 minutes for men.
If we consider that the average employed Albanian works a 47-hour week, this corresponds to women working at least 40 hours a month – almost an entire working week – for free.
In EU countries, women spend around 4.5 hours daily on unpaid work against 2.5 hours for men. In Albania, this rises to over 6.5 hours for women and falls to less than an hour for their male family members.
While there are no gender gaps in educational attainment in Albania, with women often outperforming men academically, women have a lower labour force participation rate. Data from the UN office in Albania found that 72.1% of women participate in work, compared to 88.3% of men – a discrepancy of 16.2%, which is considered significant.
As per the findings of the Global Gender Gap Report 2020, it will take just shy of 100 years for equality to be attained at the current pace.
But there is another prominent issue caused by the imbalance in gender roles and opportunities.
Albania ranks first in the world for the percentage of women ministers in government, as 12 of 18 are women ministers and 42nd regarding women deputies in the assembly.
But representation at the local level is concerning. In the 2019 local elections, women won 44% of municipal council seats and only eight out of 61 municipalities, just 13%.
UN Permanent Coordinator for Albania Fiona McCluney called on political parties to continue promoting the representation of women at the local level and strictly implement the gender quota of 50% for candidate lists for members of municipal councils.
In particular, the UN called for an increase in the number of women candidates for the post of mayor. However, only 15 of the 144 candidates for the post of mayor (10.4%) are women[3], a lower figure compared to the percentage of women candidates in the local elections of 2019.
Prime Minister Edi Rama said during a recent podcast that attempts at implementing gender quotas at the local level had been made, but in some areas, there are simply not enough women willing, or able, to stand for public office.
(Alice Taylor | Exit.al)
Read more with EURACTIV
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Rumour spreading, excessive flattery toward bosses most common upsetting behaviours workers witnessed
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Workplaces have been home to these toxic personalities since the beginning of work, and a new survey has found the problem persists in the hybrid world in which employees can be in-person or virtual. About half the 800 United States workers surveyed say the negative effects of office politics have stayed the same in the COVID era, while another 25 per cent say they expect the disruptive behaviour to get worse before it gets better.
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“Work is different today, so office politics is emerging in different ways,” said Dana Sumpter, an associate professor of organization theory and management at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School, who co-authored the research. “When you’re working remotely, it’s more difficult to get quality time with managers. So people might resort to sucking up to get that attention.”
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More than one-third of the surveyed workers said rumour spreading and excessive flattery toward bosses were the most common upsetting behaviours they witnessed, followed by blame-gaming, backstabbing and credit snatching. Rounding out the list were bullying and sabotaging. Half of those polled said they felt pressured to engage in such behaviours, and one in four has quit a job over it.
While it’s not entirely clear how the shift to more hybrid workplaces will affect the prevalence and impact of office politics for the long term, it’s obvious that one doesn’t need to be in an office to engage in office politics.
Office suck-ups, popularized by television characters like Dwight Schrute in The Office and Tom Wambsgans in Succession, typically take their cues from those in charge. And in a virtual setting, they may be even more inclined to engage in the behaviour to make sure they’re getting noticed by bosses, according to Sumpter.
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“When one person does it and gets rewarded, others see that’s what they have to do to get ahead,” Sumpter said. “It’s contagious, and organizations suffer.” Some employees won’t put up with it. Two in five workers said office politics caused them to consider leaving their organization, and 25 per cent actually left because of it — with women more likely than men to have quit. That’s because women and under-represented groups benefit less from office politics, as they typically have less authority. “This is about power,” Sumpter said. “You are more subject to these games if you have less power.”
Managers need to call this stuff out
Dana Sumpter
But not everyone sees office politics as inherently bad, the survey found. Spreading rumours could be reframed as making sure everyone is aware of what’s going on behind the scenes. Sucking up is just a social convention to smooth all the complex interactions that are part of any workday.
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The research from Sumpter and her colleague Kurt Motamedi is the latest in a long line of scholarly looks at office politics. Organizations are inherently political arenas, academics have found, so the use of persuasion, manipulation and negotiation can be just as important as intelligence, ambition and hard work. Those skilled in office politics tend to get ahead in organizations, but that individual success can come at a cost to colleagues and to the reputation of the firm. More than nine out of ten workers polled by the Pepperdine researchers said too much office politics can cause ethical issues and a toxic workplace, along with potential legal problems.
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Still, gossip mongers and suck-ups won’t go away unless managers remove the incentives to such behaviour, while rewarding positive actions like collaboration. “Managers need to call this stuff out,” Sumpter said. “But we all have to work together to encourage the right social behaviours.”
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It has been three years since workers started telecommuting in vast numbers, but state tax laws still haven’t adapted to the new remote-work paradigm and individual taxpayers are paying the price with exasperating state tax-filing procedures.
Many taxpayers who work remotely in a different state than their employer’s must prepare multiple state 2022 tax returns and account for precisely how many days they worked in the company office versus locales in other states—whether at home, at a vacation house, at the in-laws, or elsewhere.
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ALBANY – State lawmakers are already the highest-paid legislators in the country at $142,000 per year – and now they can work from home, too.
Under new legislative rules approved Thursday, Democratic leaders can now determine what qualifies as “extraordinary circumstances” that would let state Senators and Assembly members attend sessions by video rather than showing up in the state Capitol.
The move left Republican state senators crying foul because state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers) will get to decide who gets the remote-work permission slips among GOP and Democratic members alike.
“I think its really quite petty that they treat us like children,” state Sen. Anthony Palumbo (R-Brentwood) told The Post.
The situation is much different in the lower house where Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) and Minority Leader William Barclay (R-Fulton) will respectively call the shots for their own conference members, according to their plans for implementing the new rules.
Palumbo said he worried how a Democratic state senator could hypothetically head on an “emergency vacation to Hawaii” while Republican senators struggle to get approval to attend sessions remotely.
“It’s quite petty and outrageous to not just allow the leaders from each party to make the calls,” Palumbo said.
A quorum of members in both houses will have to be physically present in the state Senate and Assembly chambers to allow vote-by-video attendance for others “in extraordinary circumstances or any other significant or unexpected factor or event,” according to the legislative language.
Some Republicans find the change particularly ill-timed considering how colleagues made themselves the highest-paid legislators in the nation after giving themselves a $32,000 pay raise in a December special session.
“It’s horrible,” state Sen. George Borello (R-Jamestown) said. “They want this elected position to become a $142,000 no-show job.”
But Democrats argue Stewart-Cousins – a spokesman did not provide comment Thursday – will be judicious in making decisions on what situations are extraordinary enough for her to allow a senator to attend sessions by video.
“Each house has its own procedures. The majority leader always has final say, even on excusals currently. That’s always the way it’s been going back to before we held the majority,” State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris (D-Queens) said.
Republicans are needlessly fretting about Stewart-Cousins favoring fellow Democrats in the future, according to Gianaris.
“In practice, there’s deference to the minority leader for their conference so it’s unlikely this will ever be an issue,” he added.
Democrats note that other public bodies allow members to attend by video following the passage of a state law last year – an idea backed by the good government group Reinvent Albany at a legislative hearing last week.
Still, some Republican senators remain suspicious that Democrats will leverage the situation to their advantage considering the vagueness of the rule language – as well as past power plays from across the aisle that include packing a key committee with opponents of centrist court nominee Hector LaSalle.
“Democrats get to define what “extraordinary circumstances” are and have a history of using remote session to literally mute Republican voices,” state Sen. Mark Walczyk (R-North Country) said.
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Pedestrians are sparse on downtown Washington’s once-bustling sidewalks. Storefronts are papered over with for-lease signs and light streams through vacant floors of glass office towers.
The capital city’s main business district has long relied on the steady work of governing to survive economic downturns. Now it remains strangely desolate and depopulated long after pandemic lockdowns ended.
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