Top mandarin’s spin on home working: ‘It means I can spend more time on my Peloton’

A top mandarin has revealed how she enjoys working from home as she can spend more time on her Peloton exercise bike.

Sarah Healey, the permanent secretary for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said that her civil servants would only be expected to work two days a week in the office so they could also enjoy the benefits of flexible working.

She also said she intended to keep holding meetings over Zoom, even for workers in the office, to prevent men from domineering over their female colleagues.

The senior civil servant’s comments come as more than 100 government buildings have been earmarked to be sold as public sector workers resist returning to the office.

Speaking at the London Tech Week conference on Thursday, Ms Healey said she had found working from home during the pandemic to be a “very, very good thing”.

She said: “I have a Peloton and I can just get on my bike whenever I have a teeny bit of time. That has been a huge benefit to my well-being - the lack of travelling time eating into my day.”

Ms Healey told the conference she was working “at least three days a week” in the office, but that schedule was partly due to the disruption of her home being renovated.

The mother-of-three also said she preferred working from home as she could spend more time with her teenage children.

She added: “From my own experience I have never spent too much time being around when my children come back from school. That is something that has never been part of their lives and that is something they have really appreciated.”

Civil servants slow to return to the office

While millions of workers returned back to their offices earlier this month as school holidays ended and Covid-19 restrictions lifted, civil servants have been much slower to make the switch back.

Most departments currently have rotas seeing staff come in two or three times a week, with it emerging earlier this month that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy only has staff coming in for one day a week.

Ms Healey confirmed on Thursday that her department would be asking workers to spend two days a week in the office, adding she understood how important the return is for younger colleagues who had spent the pandemic working “in the corner of their bedroom”.

However, the DCMS head also signalled that she intends to retain some aspects of remote working such as making at-home and in-office staff attend large meetings via video conference.

She said: “I find big meetings with lots of people are most effectively done online because you can see better who wants to speak.

“In fact I have noticed this as well, as a woman sometimes struggling with that. ‘Can I get my word in?’”

Rapid rise through the ranks

Ms Healey took over as head of DCMS in 2019 after a rapid rise through the Civil Service ranks.

Educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, she joined Tony Blair’s Number 10 Strategy Unit in 2001 after university.

Since then she has held senior positions at the Department of Education, Department of Work and Pensions and Cabinet Office before being seconded to a key role in the Brexit negotiations in 2016.

The mandarin’s intervention comes as the Government is considering proposals to give workers the right to request home working from day one of a new job, rather than having to wait six months.

The plans came under fire from a City boss on Thursday, who warned that working from home meant “people think they can do part-time work but on full-time salaries”

Andrew Monk, the chief executive of VSA Capital, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, he had found that work takes longer to do and costs businesses more with employees working from home.

He said: “Actually, although they are all working from home and say it’s all fine, it’s not fine.”