Ottawa's return-to-office debate has been running hot for more than a year, but local consultant Wayne Liko, who has spent years working alongside the federal public service, says the conversation is missing something fundamental.
Liko, who has built a career advising government departments on workplace culture and organizational change, believes that the loudest voices in the RTO debate are talking past each other. Employers want bodies in seats. Employees want flexibility. But Liko argues that both sides are skipping a harder question: what do we actually want Ottawa's downtown, and its public service, to look like?
The Context Behind the Mandate
Ottawa is unlike any other Canadian city when it comes to return-to-office dynamics. With approximately 120,000 federal public servants in the National Capital Region, the federal government's RTO policies don't just affect productivity metrics. They reshape transit ridership, downtown foot traffic, coffee shop survival rates, and the character of neighbourhoods like Centretown, the ByWard Market, and Glebe.
When the federal government announced its directive requiring most public servants to be in-office at least three days a week, reaction was swift and polarized. Unions pushed back, citing worker well-being, caregiving responsibilities, and the productivity gains many employees reported working remotely. Management pointed to collaboration, culture, and the need for public institutions to be physically present in the communities they serve.
What's Being Left Out
According to Liko, the debate has become transactional, focused on compliance, days in office, and surveillance of hybrid arrangements, when it should be about purpose and design.
"Nobody is asking what the office should actually do," Liko has argued. "If we're dragging people back to sit on Teams calls all day in an open-concept floor, we've missed the point."
He sees a need for federal departments to reimagine what in-person work is actually for: collaboration that genuinely can't happen on video, mentorship of junior employees, community building, and the kind of spontaneous problem-solving that still happens better in a hallway than over chat.
Ottawa's Stake in Getting This Right
For Ottawa's economy, the stakes couldn't be higher. Downtown vacancy rates soared during the pandemic and have been slow to recover. Restaurants and cafés in the core depend on the lunch-hour surge that federal workers provide. The LRT system was built in part around the assumption of a robust downtown workforce.
Getting the RTO model right matters beyond morale surveys. A poorly designed mandate that breeds resentment and quiet quitting helps no one, not workers, not departments, and not the city.
What Comes Next
Liko's call to action is ultimately about design thinking applied to workplace policy. What works for a Statistics Canada analyst may be entirely different from what a frontline immigration officer needs. Blanket mandates miss that nuance.
As more departments roll out their RTO plans and the federal government assesses compliance, Ottawa's public service finds itself at a crossroads. The debate doesn't have to stay stuck in days-per-week arithmetic, but getting to a better conversation will require exactly the kind of leadership Wayne Liko says is currently missing.
Source: Ottawa Business Journal
