State’s return-to- office order ignores benefits of remote work
Isaiah Stennes
By Isaiah Stennes, North News Intern
“Are you going to lose your job?” I said, breaking a longer-than-average silence on the car ride back from karate practice. It was 2016, and I was 8. Donald Trump had just been elected president of the United States.
My mom, at the time a 10-year employee of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, went on to explain she worked for the state and not the federal government, and that she believed Minnesota’s government valued her and her colleagues' work.
She also mentioned that the federal government funded the state, which in turn funded the federal government, and that if Trump cuts the programs her team worked on, the state may have to downsize her team.
For years, we didn’t talk about her job much, and the uncertainty passed. The massive cuts never materialized, and in 2018, an anti-Trump trifecta took control of the Minnesota State government, including a charismatic governor from the state’s southern prairies named Tim Walz.
On March 25, the governor issued a return-to-office memo for all state workers. This was around the same time, Donald Trump, president once again, and his administration, were rushing federal workers back into the office en masse.
Minnesota’s order was at least a lot nicer, mostly reasonable-sounding words like “balance, flexibility, workplace advantages, organizational culture, and, more importantly, one number - 50%”.
Fifty percent. The working days that all state employees living within 50 miles of their workplace would now have to spend at the office.
The spring of 2020 sent my mom and the majority of her fellow state employees into full-time remote work, along with millions of workers worldwide.
There was no reason for me to expect she’d be at home any longer than a couple of months. In my mind, I had a parent who had always worked and a parent who had been at home. My dad was well into the second decade since he had unexpectedly suffered a seizure and been diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor.
The seizure disorder, along with the effects of multiple surgeries, made working outside the home very difficult, and eventually, he seemed to decide that he would stay at home with me as long as he was able or needed.
Spring turned to summer in quarantine, and as the world fought to contain COVID-19, my dad’s more personal battle was coming to an end. My parents had known for several months, but it wasn’t until June that they told me the tumor was again growing out of control, and the time my dad had left could likely be measured in weeks.
It was by pure chance that my mom was working from home when my dad passed, but it was how I was able to cope with the loss of my dad without also having to deal with the loneliness of being the only person in the house for the first time in my life.
It shouldn’t have taken a global pandemic for my family to have the flexibility we needed, and other families before, during and after the pandemic shouldn’t have been denied it.
The return-to-office policy refers to that flexibility, but provides little of it. The policy could offer more flexible options for employees to continue performing the critical functions they administer.
It has been five years since my dad passed, and my mom is capable of managing the transition back to in-office work without sacrificing either the productivity of her work or the functioning of our family. Not all state employees can maintain that balance without the flexibility of remote work.