The Real Problem With Your WFH Policy

Last year, during the federal election campaign, Peter Dutton made the mandatory return of public sector workers to the office a centrepiece of his platform. He abandoned it before polling day. His opponents made flexibility a near-sacred principle. The debate ran hot for months and generated an enormous amount of heat without producing much light.

I am not going to add to that debate here. Whether companies should offer flexible work arrangements is a legitimate question, but it is largely the wrong one for hiring managers to be fixating on. The more practical and more costly question is a different one entirely: is your organisation being honest and specific about what it actually expects?

The policy is rarely the problem

In the course of placing finance and accounting professionals, the WFH question generates more friction than almost any other single topic in the hiring process. But the friction is rarely about the policy itself. It is almost always about when and how the information is communicated, and more often than not, it is not communicated clearly until it is too late.

A candidate who accepts a role expecting two days from home, then discovers in their first week that the unwritten expectation is four days in the office, is not merely disappointed. They feel misled. And a finance leader who assumes a strong candidate is comfortable with full-time office attendance, without ever asking directly, should not be surprised when that person is back on the market within six months.

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Don’t bury the conversation

There is an understandable logic behind why hiring managers avoid being direct. If your policy is more restrictive than what the market is currently offering, you worry that leading with it will narrow your candidate pool before you have had a chance to sell the role. If your policy is genuinely flexible, you assume candidates who care about it will ask. Neither approach works well.

Candidates will eventually find out what the real expectation is. The only question is whether they find out early enough to make an informed decision, or late enough to cause disruption for everyone. And candidates who do not ask directly are frequently making assumptions that turn out to be wrong, in both directions.

Finance professionals who prefer to be in the office most of the time are not difficult to find. Finance professionals who require some degree of flexibility for personal reasons also exist in significant numbers. Neither group is more or less committed to delivering quality work. They have different preferences, and matching those preferences to the right environment produces better outcomes for everyone.

The hiring processes that consistently go wrong on this are not the ones with strict policies or flexible ones. They are the ones where the expectation is hedged with phrases like ‘it varies by team’ or ‘we are fairly flexible depending on the role’, leaving candidates to fill the gap with their own assumptions.

The Bottom Line

State your WFH expectation clearly in the first substantive conversation, not the offer call. Frame it as information rather than a negotiating position. That single adjustment removes one of the most common contributors to early attrition in finance teams. The debate about whether people should work from home is interesting. The question of whether your hiring process is being straight about what you expect is more useful. What is your organisation’s approach to this conversation?