Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Public servants are being asked how productive their office is, how much they use AI, and whether they're overloaded with meetings as part of a "census".
The Public Service Commission is running the voluntary survey over the three weeks to 21 March.
It is a follow-up to the Te Taunaki Public Service Census held in 2021 - but differences in the question lines has government critics asking just how involved ministers were when the Commission was designing it.
The biggest section in the 2021 was "Why we work in the public service", which largely asked for ratings of different reasons to work in such a job.
The 2025 version's biggest section, however, is focused on "productivity in the public sector".
It asks for ratings of how well the worker's manager "provides helpful feedback to improve performance" or "cares about delivering good value for taxpayers"; and how much "inefficient decision making", "appetite for risk", "too many meetings" or "limited use of AI" prevents their team performing at its best.
And things like: "When suggestions to improve workplace efficiency or productivity are made, they are taken seriously and acted upon".
Both surveys also asked about how much government workers were using "flexible working arrangements", but the questions were framed quite differently.
The 2021 version - surveyed in the middle of the Covid pandemic - asked about a range of different arrangements including flexible start and finish times, job sharing, trading salary for leave, and working from home. It followed up with questions about whether the worker wanted access to more such arrangements, and what the reasons for them were.
In 2025 however, only five options were presented: 'Work from home', 'Another type of flexible work', 'no flexible work arrangements', 'don't know', or 'prefer not to answer'.
It had no follow-up question, and noted that "regularly work from home means working at least one day at home in a typical week. Don't count working extra hours outside of your normal work day, such as answering a work call at home. Home could include your own home, the home of a family member, or a holiday home."
Despite being longer, the 2025 version was also missing some aspects covered in the previous survey. The second-biggest section in the 2021 survey were "about you" and asked things like age, ethnicity, languages, religion and gender.
The new one asks many of those questions too - but not about whether the worker's colleagues use the correct gender when speaking to them, whether they are trans or have intersex characteristics, and while it asks if the person is a member of rainbow communities, it does not ask which one.
The newer version also has a section about health and wellbeing, which asks whether participants have been harassed or bullied in the past 12 months, the type of harassment, how often this happened (broken down by category, including racial hostility or sexual harassment), who was responsible, whether it was reported, and whether the person is satisfied with how it was handled.
In a statement, the Commission said it designed all the questions with engagement from all the participating agencies and system leads.
It said Public Service Minister Judith Collins and her predecessor Nicola Willis were also "consulted and provided feedback".
Collins said the survey was an important tool to help lift the public sector's performance, and "some questions in the 2021 Census have been replaced with topics that better reflect the government's priorities and the focus of the public service today".
She said the survey would provide her, the government and taxpayers with critical information about the sector's performance.
However, the Green Party MP Francisco Hernandez said the apparent level of involvement from the ministers was concerning.
"Obviously as responsible ministers some level of sign off is acceptable," he said. "I think the real concern here is that some of the questions seem incredibly loaded, and ... some of the changes from the previous survey.
"The watering down of the questions around rainbow identities and people with disabilities - I think if the ministers were involved in watering these down or adding in the loaded questions I think they would have some questions to answer."
Collins said the government could not ask every question.
"The survey covers many topics and therefore doesn't go into great detail on any one area. We've tried to strike a balance between delving too much into the lives of public servants or gathering information that would be difficult for agencies, and the public service, to use in a practical or meaningful way."
RNZ also approached the former Public Service Minister Willis who did not respond.
Questions to Collins and Willis about whether the feedback provided was in keeping with the Public Service Commission's statutory duty to act independently of Ministerial direction went unanswered.
On the Commission's website, Commissioner Sir Brian Roche said public servants came to work every day to make a difference to people's lives.
"But we can always do better. It's important that we hear directly from public servants so we can improve how our organisations perform for the citizens we serve. The Public Service Census is their opportunity to do this."
The surveys were limited to Public Service departments or agencies, and to permanent staff rather than contractors. The survey carried out in 2021 was the first of its kind in New Zealand.
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