Flemish Minister Crevits announced last week that all Flemish civil servants must return to the office 50 percent of the time. Her stated reason: different teams had settled into different arrangements, and that inconsistency needed fixing.

She had the diagnosis right, but to me, the remedy was backward.

The Variation Was the Point

Different teams working differently is governance at work, not a failure. A back-office permit team processing digital files has different co-location needs than a social services unit conducting citizen intake. A policy analyst coordinates differently from a frontline inspector.

Forcing both into the same attendance formula does not improve public service delivery. It just makes the spreadsheet tidier.

Presence Is Not a Performance Metric

Here is what I find most revealing about this decision: it treats attendance as an output rather than an input. The question is not how many days a civil servant sits in a government building, but whether the team is delivering on objectives and key results, coordinating effectively, and developing capacity to continue doing so.

For roles that require physical presence, the job already makes that clear. No ministerial memo is needed for public counter employees. For digital knowledge-work teams, you define deliverables and let the team organize their time accordingly.

That is not a radical idea. It is how organizations manage performance in virtually every other dimension. For some reason, the question of where people sit on Tuesdays is treated differently.

What Good Governance Actually Looks Like

A well-designed policy would start with objectives. Each team, in consultation with its management, defines its key results and the coordination model required to achieve them. Teams running iterative delivery cycles, whether in two-week sprints or longer planning horizons, already know instinctively when they need to be in the same room: at the start of a cycle to align, at the end to review, and at the moments in between where a problem is genuinely too complex to resolve asynchronously. That knowledge should drive the attendance decision, not a percentage set in a memo.

What Minister Crevits announced is the inverse of this. She observed that teams were behaving differently, read that as a problem, and imposed a uniform number to eliminate the variation. But that’s where we go off the rails: the variation is not the problem. The absence of a shared accountability framework might have been. Those are very different diagnoses, and they lead to very different interventions.

The Real Cost

The irony is that the minister cited social cohesion while demonstrating the kind of top-down decision-making that erodes it. Cohesion comes from shared purpose, clear expectations, and organizational integrity, not just proximity.

A unilateral reversal of existing arrangements, announced without evaluation and justified in terms of balance, sends a different message entirely. It tells every team in the Flemish government that the arrangements they built around their work can be overridden at any time by a policy not designed with their work in mind.

That lesson will outlast any attendance percentage.

My 2 cents on what to do

To improve outcomes, provide teams with a clear accountability framework. Each unit should define its objectives, specify key results, describe the required coordination model, and report progress regularly. Teams using sprints already follow this system: they set plans, deliver on them, review results, and adapt. The location of work should be determined by what the work demands, not by a set policy.

Lean thinking makes the same point from a different angle. Waste, in any delivery system, is an activity that consumes resources without producing value. Requiring a knowledge worker to commute to a building in order to spend the day on tasks she would have completed equally well at home is a waste in the most literal sense. It costs time, it costs money, and it produces nothing that the citizen receiving her team’s output will ever notice or benefit from.

Instead of standardizing attendance, focus on empowering teams to organize around their work’s needs. Encourage flexible structures that promote accountability and continuous improvement aligned with each team’s objectives and tasks.

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