Elon Musk is right to question what public sector workers are doing with their time - we should try it here: Jayne Dowle

However, anyone who has ever actually engaged with the world of work will be intrigued by the blanket email Musk sent last weekend to all Federal employees – so the US equivalent of our civil service, covering departments from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – on behalf of the Office of Personnel Management, with the subject line ‘What did you do last week?’.

Staff were given just over 48 hours to reply. Failure to do so would be “taken as resignation” Musk tweeted on his social media platform X. He later said that his ultimatum was simply a test to see if they “had a pulse.”

Whatever you think of his methods, you can’t deny Musk is only asking what the rest of us are thinking. Whilst there are some outstanding, kind and helpful public servants here in the UK - thank you Carol, from the Department of Work and Pensions for your recent exemplary support when I was sorting out the finance arrangements for my mother’s care - there are also many others, who to put it in Yorkshire parlance, are swinging t’lead.

And not just amongst those who work from home, although its advent, deemed a necessity during the Covid lockdowns, has certainly led to some sharp practices.

I can speak with some level of understanding here. I have worked more or less from home for 20 years now; the difference is, I’ve long been fully self-employed, so if I don’t actually produce pieces of work, I don’t get paid. On bad days, I feel like my linen weaving ancestors, also renumerated by piece work; thankfully, I’m not labouring in a damp cellar, just a chilly house because I’m not putting the heating on all day.

However, working conditions aside, if Elon Musk sent me an email asking me to list what I did last week, I reckon his eyes would pop.

After all, there’s nothing like a list of monthly direct debits to sharpen the work ethic. Like many self-employed people, I totally focus during my working day (usually 8am to 6pm, short break for lunch at 1pm). I don’t trot back and forth between the washing machine and the kettle, catch up on ironing whilst pretending to be on a Teams call, phone friends or take the dog for a walk.

In work mode, I’m so boring and methodical, I’d make a Trappist monk look sociable. So when friends who work from home for public services brag that they’re skiving and just press the return key on their laptop every now and again to make it look like they’re busy, I actually take it as a personal insult.

It's a privilege to work under your own steam without a boss breathing directly down your neck; it shouldn’t be abused. And in a number of professions, it’s pretty standard for staff to account for their hours.

Fee-earning lawyers for instance, are obliged to keep precise records of how much time they spend on client work, down to the minute. If they can’t submit the requisite number of ‘billable’ hours to their firm, they are judged as unproductive and will likely face the sack.

When I taught in a university part-time, we had an officious system which required us to share data on how we filled our hours, all our hours. These included travel to work time, and marking and lesson preparation at weekends (unavoidable). I did draw a line then, and made my feelings known regularly to the Dean, because this time was mine. Not so for working hours however, when full and frank disclosure should be the norm in any well-run department.

This is especially true for any grade of public or civil servant, as we, as taxpayers, pay their wages and contribute towards their generous pensions.

Understandably, there has been uproar in America. Managers at the FBI, Pentagon, State Department, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Energy instructed staff not to reply with the request to send a list of five accomplishments from the past week.

Others, including at the Department of Health and Human Services, instructed employees to comply, only to later rescind the instruction. You can only wonder why. What do they have to hide?

And wonder too what would happen in this country if all those public services employees who leave us hanging on the phone for hours, take months to reply to simple requests and don’t know anything much because they only ‘work’ two days a week, were asked to account for their time? It’s one trend that we might welcome across the Atlantic. Although perhaps leave the chainsaw where it is.