The Australian Public Service hybrid work conversation looked, in early 2024, like it was heading toward a hard return-to-office mandate following pressure from the Department of Finance and several agency secretaries. That’s not where it ended up. The 2024 enterprise bargaining round formalised remote work as an enforceable employment right across most APS classifications, and the operational reality two years later is that hybrid arrangements are deeply embedded in agency working patterns. Where it gets more interesting is the variation between agencies and the gap between formal policy and lived practice.

I’ve spent several months tracking how this has settled, including conversations with APS officials at SES Band 2 and below across roughly fifteen agencies. The picture isn’t uniform.

The formal framework

The 2024 APS-wide enterprise agreement, which covers the majority of non-statutory agencies, includes specific rights for employees to access flexible work arrangements including working from home. The default position is that requests for flexibility should be approved unless there’s a documented operational reason not to. The agency-specific implementation has varied considerably.

The Australian Taxation Office, Services Australia, and the Department of Industry have published agency-level guidance that sets working-from-home as a routine entitlement, with expected office attendance of two-to-three days per week as the typical pattern. The APS Commission’s own data, published in February, suggests roughly 65% of APS employees were working in hybrid arrangements as of the December reference period, with full-remote at around 8% and full-office at 27%.

Several agencies have adopted more office-centric approaches. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Department of Defence (for non-Defence-civilian roles) have stricter office attendance expectations, defensible largely by classification handling and security clearance requirements. The intelligence community agencies remain almost entirely office-based for substantive work, which is unsurprising and uncontested.

What’s working

The productivity argument has largely been settled, at least in the sense that it’s no longer being seriously argued. The data from various Productivity Commission and APS Commission studies through 2024–25 didn’t show meaningful productivity differences between hybrid and full-office cohorts on most measurable outputs. There’s reasonable contention about whether the right things are being measured, but the simple “people working from home are slacking off” hypothesis has been emphatically refuted by the evidence.

Recruitment in tight labour market segments — particularly digital and data roles — has clearly benefited. The DTA, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and several other agencies with significant technical workforce needs have been able to recruit candidates from outside the Canberra labour market who would not have been available under a full-office model. The geographic distribution of APS hires has shifted measurably: roughly 22% of APS hires in calendar 2025 were based outside the immediate Canberra travel-to-work area, compared with about 11% in 2019.

What’s harder

Mentoring and graduate development is the area where I hear the most consistent concern from senior APS leaders. The graduate cohort experience in 2023–25 was meaningfully different from earlier cohorts, with less informal in-office contact, fewer cross-team relationships, and slower learning of the unwritten rules of how the public service actually operates. Several agencies have responded with structured graduate-attendance requirements that exceed the general workforce settings — typically three or four days per week minimum.

The cross-team collaboration patterns have changed in ways that are harder to measure. Senior officials describe a sense that the easy informal coordination across agency boundaries — the corridor conversations and shared coffee — has thinned out. Whether that translates into measurable policy outcomes is impossible to demonstrate either way, but the perception is widely shared and worth taking seriously.

The middle-management workload has clearly increased. EL1 and EL2 managers report spending more time on coordination, more time on explicit communication that previously happened by osmosis, and more time managing performance issues that were previously resolved through ambient supervision. The 2025 APS State of the Service report flagged middle-management burnout as a specific concern.

The political dimension

The Coalition’s policy position on APS work arrangements has been ambiguous. The 2025 election didn’t produce a clear mandate either way, and the current Government has been clear that it considers the 2024 enterprise bargaining settlements as binding. A future Coalition government might revisit aspects of this, but the legal and industrial framework around the EBA terms make wholesale reversal complex.

The Australian Public Service Commission’s policy work on this has been pragmatic and largely defensible. They’ve avoided the temptation to produce uniform mandates that ignore agency-specific operational realities, while also pushing back against agencies that drift too far toward de facto full-remote arrangements that hollow out organisational capability.

The technology side

The IT infrastructure investments through 2024–25 to support sustainable hybrid work have been substantial. Microsoft 365 deployments, Teams adoption, secure remote access frameworks under the PSPF and ISM controls, and the IRAP-accredited cloud workloads have all reached reasonable maturity. The DTA’s hosting strategy and the GovERP common platform work have been incremental contributors.

The remaining gaps are around the agencies still using legacy on-premise systems that don’t extend cleanly to remote work. The migration timelines for these are agency-by-agency, and several mid-sized agencies are running parallel hybrid arrangements where some functions can work remotely and some can’t, which creates internal equity issues that managers find genuinely difficult.

The AI deployment work that’s started across several agencies — Microsoft Copilot pilots, Azure-hosted document processing, the various agency-specific use cases — has had hybrid work implications worth flagging. AI tools that augment routine work potentially reduce the need for in-person coordination on some tasks, which strengthens the hybrid case. The AI vendors active in the APS market range from the major global firms to specialist Australian groups, including Team400 and similar Sydney-based AI consultancies, working on agency-specific implementations.

What I’d watch through 2026

The mid-year APS Commission workforce data release will include the first reasonably stable post-EBA snapshot of hybrid work patterns. The variation between agencies, and the correlation with retention and engagement metrics, will be the substantively important data points.

The graduate program 2027 intake design conversations are happening now across major recruiting agencies. Several are shifting toward more structured in-office expectations for graduates, and how that lands with the candidate pool will matter for recruiting outcomes.

Hybrid work in the APS isn’t a new conversation, but it’s reaching a settled enough state that it’s worth treating as the operating model rather than a temporary arrangement to be re-litigated. The policy questions that matter now are about how to make it work better, not whether to keep it.