Work from home rules in Victoria aim to protect employees’ right to work remotely for two days a week to save time and money, but the change looks likely to unsettle big employers who argue it could hurt productivity, culture and their expensive office investments.
Right now, major organisations across Australia are loudly opposing a Victorian plan that would give eligible staff a legal right to work from home for part of the week even though the proposal only covers roles that can reasonably be done remotely and still requires people to come in when their presence is genuinely needed. During the pandemic many of these same companies relied heavily on remote work to keep operations running and even expanded in states such as Victoria while offices sat mostly empty, so the new anger over a modest two day a week entitlement seems less about feasibility and more about who gets to decide where white collar work happens.
In the current debate large employers say working from home should be a private arrangement between employer and employee, not something set in law, but that argument glosses over the power imbalance where one side controls wages, job security and workloads while the other is simply trying to avoid rising fuel costs and wasted hours in traffic. Remote work surged during lockdowns and proved workable for thousands of office based roles, helping Victorian workforce participation climb by about 4.4% as parents, carers and people with disabilities joined or re joined the labour market thanks to flexible arrangements that did not exist at scale before 2020. At the same time everyday workers discovered that skipping the commute could save around $110 a week and reclaim roughly three hours of their time, adding up to more than six full days a year not spent stuck on congested roads.
Executives now warn that putting a two day work from home option into law is a threat to productivity, calling it heavy handed or even harmful to the state’s economy, while others insist it will damage collaboration and workplace culture that supposedly depends on constant in person presence. Yet these concerns sit awkwardly beside the experience of organisations that successfully grew headcount in Victoria under fully or mostly remote models and the reality that many corporate cultures survived two years of video calls without collapsing. Some leaders still demand five days a week in the office for knowledge based roles, citing mentoring and fast decision making, but with surveys indicating that around 74% of Victorian workers see the ability to work from home as extremely important, companies taking a hard line approach seem to be shrinking their talent pool just as competitors use flexibility as a recruitment edge.
Looking ahead, the Victorian proposal appears to be less a radical overhaul and more a formal safeguard. If a role can reasonably be done from home, employees would have the right to do it remotely for two days each week, while employers could still require office attendance when there is a legitimate business need. This kind of baseline protection seems likely to lock in some of the pandemic era gains in participation and inclusion, though it may also force organisations to rethink expensive office footprints and long standing management habits that rely on seeing people at their desks. The outcome looks set to shape not only how often workers commute but also how employers compete for talent in a labour market where flexibility has shifted from a perk to a basic expectation and where blanket refusals to allow remote work may start to look less like strategy and more like stubbornness.
