'Trend that's going to continue': APS increasingly looking beyond Canberra for staff

Speaking at the National Portrait Gallery for an Institute of Public Administration Australia event, Mr Comley talked of the challenges facing the APS, including managing changing expectations around flexible working conditions.

"Before COVID, flexibility ... was I can get away one Thursday a week to pick up the kids or do something I really value. Now we have a conversation [about] whether it's too inflexible to ask someone to come in one meeting a week in the office because we've really had this massive transformation," the Health and Aged Care secretary told the audience.

"But now we have this massive hybrid working environment. And I think that's a big change. And I think we're still in the transition point..."

While Mr Comley came up working in organisations where everyone was largely located in the same office or city, he said his department had upped the number of staff based outside Canberra by around 10 per cent in one year.

"Why did we do it? We did it because we said that's where the work force is. Canberra is a tight labour market. And I think that's a trend that's going to continue," he said.

The Health boss said that he "fundamentally believe[s]" the public service will become more spread across the country in the coming years, and will have to figure out how to ensure staff are integrated within the organisation despite this.

The Department of Health leads the 18 main federal government agencies when it comes to staff working remotely or working from home.

The 2023 APS Census found that 80 per cent of Health Department staff work away from the office - the highest figure reported. Across the APS, almost two-thirds of public servants on average work away from the office or from home according to census data.

Analysis of the results by The Canberra Times reveals that around 80 per cent of public servants either work part-time, work away from the office, or have flexible hours, a compressed work week or a job-sharing arrangement.

In his wide-ranging address on Thursday, the Health and Aged Care boss spoke about the learnings from his department's capability review, the importance of a 30-word limit on sentences in policy briefings, and the impact of artificial intelligence on the workplace.

While Mr Comley said he believed artificial intelligence could change the way we work in a "genuinely profound" way, he feared the public sector would be slow to take up these technologies compared with other industries.

"My gut instinct is regulation and caution will hold back the development of AI particularly in the public sector, because we'll be risk-averse.

"And we'll be risk-averse because we will hold AI up to a standard that's kind of well above humans," he said, adding that he thinks other parts of the private sector will adopt these technologies much more quickly.