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Sukulwenkosi Dube-Matutu, Chronicle Reporter
HEADS of Ministries have been urged to capacitate their staff members working from home to ensure they deliver to expectations.

In a circular, Public Service Commission (PSC) Permanent Secretary Ambassador Jonathan Wutawunashe urged Government workers to ensure that they report to work whenever they are supposed to.

Workers have often been forced to frequent offices even when they are working from home because of the unavailability of resources such as airtime and internet.

“Heads of Ministries to continue ensuring that staff members working from home are capacitated with ICT equipment and adequate internet facilities for them to work efficiently and productively. Those coming to workplaces must also be well supported with efficient and sufficient bandwidth to facilitate the holding of virtual meetings and other e-enable communication.

“There shall be strict monitoring and enforcement of staff attendance at workplaces. Daily staff attendance records should continue to be submitted to the PSC before 1pm and any variation should be supported by a clear justification,” he said.

A worker under the Department of Social Welfare who preferred anonymity said it was impossible to work from home if the resources were not there.

He said his work required him to keep in touch with officers from various districts in order to have an update on what was happening. The source said not all interactions could be done through the cheapest virtual platform, WhatsApp.

“My job requires me to keep in touch with district officers and have updates on their work. The prevailing pandemic has seen an increase in the number of deportees being received by the country and as such there is a lot of work to do. We can’t finalise all the communication on WhatsApp which forces me to go to the office in order to make phone calls.

“Meetings are now held online and in order to attend the meetings I have to go to the office in order to access internet. Working from home can only be effective if we have enough resources. Some of my counterparts don’t even have laptops for them to do their work and this forces them to go back to the office. If people constantly go back to the offices, then this leads to crowding and eventually spread the pandemic,” said the worker.

Another worker who also preferred anonymity said they were expected to be equally productive while working from home as at work yet they did not have the resources.

She said relevant authorities had to invest towards capacitating employees to work from home to ensure that they deliver to expectations.

“This pandemic is not going away anytime soon which means that working from home and decongesting offices is going to be our new working system for a long time. The relevant authorities have to ensure that we are able to do the work we do in the offices at home without any limitations that may require us to go to the offices. In order for us as workers to be as efficient at home as in the office we need to be capacitated. We are now living in a digital world where we can surely do all our work digitally,” she said.

Government has further decongested its workforce to 10 percent from 40 percent which means 90 percent of the civil servant are expected to work from home.

Ambassador Mutawunashe also directed that social distancing be observed in PSC buses and that they carry a maximum of 35 passengers. — @DubeMatutu.