Despite offering the 250 workers at his office the best deal seen so far in the Australian Public Service's present bargaining round, the man dubbed "J-Lo" by rank-and-file bureaucrats has warned critics not to think he is going soft.

Eyebrows were raised across the 160,000- federal public service a week ago when The Canberra Times revealed what had been put on the table for the commissioner's staff.

Pay rises of 1.5 per cent per year, no requirements for working extra hours or loss of time-off work are the envy of public servants at other departments who are facing pay rise offers as low as 0.5 per cent and the loss of conditions and entitlements.

But Mr Lloyd told his workers that persistent efforts to prune staff numbers and cut costs at the agency over the past year had enabled the relatively generous offer to be made.

Unions jumped on the comment, saying Mr Lloyd had paid for his bargaining offer using past spending cuts as "offsets" in a way that had been forbidden to other Canberra mandarins.

But the commissioner's spokeswoman had no time for those claims, saying the agency's "offer is not unique or unusual" and did not represent a turning point for the deadlocked bargaining process in about 87 federal government agencies.

"There has been no shift in the government's bargaining policy," the spokeswoman said.

"The policy states that 'Genuine productivity gains are demonstrable, permanent improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness and/or output of employees, based on reform of work practices or conditions, resulting in measurable savings. Enterprise agreements must be funded from within agencies' existing budgets.' "

The spokeswoman conceded that the definition of "productivity initiatives" had been broadened, but those provisions were not new and had been in place for some time.

"The commissioner has advised agencies that he is prepared to consider a broader range of productivity initiatives than had previously been the case, particularly where those initiatives have not been able to be precisely quantified but would clearly result in a productivity gain," she said.

"These would include, for example, removing restrictive working arrangements from agreements which, once implemented, would lead to cost savings, or initiatives to reduce unscheduled absences."

"Workforce re-profiling and business re-engineering or restructuring have been available as productivity offsets for bargaining since the introduction of the Bargaining Policy in March 2014."

Mr Lloyd is asking his workforce to agree that "restrictive work practices" be stripped from their agreement but has yet to say what practices he is targeting.

That has the Community and Public Sector Union worried with its leader, Nadine Flood, fearing it might be an attempt to strip entitlements by stealth.

"Public servants are not going to trust this government won't seek to change these rights if it is successful in removing their enterprise agreement protection," she said.