Working from home monitoring and policy: FOI release

Information requested

1. Current Scottish Government internal policy on its employees working remotely.

2. An account of the means by which, if any, the Scottish Government monitors or tracks how much its employees are working remotely versus working in Scottish Government facilities.

3. An account of the means by which, if any, the Scottish Government monitors or tracks its employees’ activity while working remotely.

Response

Response to Question 1

Please see attached the latest hybrid working and working from home policies/guidance for Scottish Government employees. They consist of:

• Q1 – Doc 1 – Hybrid Working
• Q1 – Doc 2 – Hybrid Working Terms and Conditions
• Q1 – Doc 3 – Working from home

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, some of the information within the documents has been redacted:

• An exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA applies to Document 1 (titled ‘Q1 – Doc 1 – Hybrid Working’). This is because it contains the personal data of a third party (i.e. names/contact details of individuals) and disclosure would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exemption is not subject to the 'public interest test', so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.
• An exemption under section 30(c) of FOISA (prejudice to effective conduct of public affairs) applies to all three documents. Disclosing this information would substantially prejudice our ability to carry out the effective conduct of public affairs. Providing details about the information you have requested into the public domain could, for example, subsequently be used by threat actors, building a picture of our security capability, to evade any controls we might or might not have in place. This could therefore enable them to target specific types of attack or data exfiltration methods and would constitute substantial prejudice to the effective conduct of public affairs.

Response to Questions 2 & 3

The Scottish Government (SG) has implemented a hybrid working policy which applies to the majority of our employees. Hybrid working arrangements ensure that colleagues combine working from home with a presence in a workplace (and for some roles, with stakeholders and in communities) each week and may vary from week to week depending on business need.

As agreements on hybrid working are reached locally between the employee and their manager they are not recorded centrally and we therefore do not have ways to monitor or track how many of our employees are working remotely versus working in Scottish Government facilities nor do we have ways to monitor or track our employees’ activity whilst working remotely, as this would be managed by line managers locally. We do have security monitoring in place but that is with regards to the security of the endpoint and information and not the user’s activity.

Therefore, whilst our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not hold the data that you have requested on the means by which, if any, the Scottish Government monitors or tracks how many of its employees are working remotely versus working in Scottish Government facilities or the means by which, if any, the Scottish Government monitors or tracks its employees’ activity while working remotely. This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI 202500458420 - Information released - Documents

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