Telework Lessons From the Feds

The United States Office of Personnel Management has released their annual report to Congress on the Status of Telework in the Federal Government. Based on surveying a variety of federal agencies, it paints a fairly rosy picture of the state of web work in government employment – and provides some interesting insights for those trying to promote telework in the private sector as well.

It’s clear that the Feds are doing a better job than most private sector employers at promoting telework. As of 2005, 119,248 federal employees were teleworking at least once a month – 6.61% of the federal workforce. 25% of those teleworked at least three days a week, and 35% one or two days a week. Given that 30% of federal employees were ineligible for telework, mainly due to jobs requiring on-site presence (food inspector, mechanic, animal caretaker, forest ranger, and so on), that’s a pretty decent number of employees.

Looking at some of the more detailed responses, you can see that federal agencies have the same concerns as your average private employer. The #1 barrier to telework remains office coverage: the problem of having enough warm bodies in chairs for people to interact with. Organizational culture, management resistance, IT security, and IT funding are all up there.

This is excellent ammunition if you’re pushing for increased telework at your own company, of course. The argument you can make goes roughly, “Look, the US government has all these same problems you keep bringing up to me, and yet they still have 10% of their eligible workers teleworking. Why can’t we do the same?”

And why should your company go into telework? We’ve been over all the reasons before, but here’s what the government agencies report as benefits: improved morale, better recruitment and retention, productivity improvements, and savings on transportation and leave costs. However, this data is a bit fuzzy, as over half the agencies in the report aren’t tracking benefits at all (they don’t have to, since they’ve been told by Congress that they have to implement telework plans in any case).

There’s also another lesson lurking in the detailed tables, though you have to flip back and forth between several appendices to the report to find it. Some agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with over 40% of the eligible employees teleworking, are doing better than the government as a whole at promoting web work. While the correlation is not perfect, these agencies also tend to be the ones where the agency purchases and provides the necessary equipment and services, rather than making the employee do so or splitting the costs. If a company is serious about seeing the benefits of teleworking, there’s no better way to show it than to invest the money.

As a closing note, we at WWD would like to congratulate the National Archives and Records administration for their outstanding record of telework. In responding to the survey, that agency reported 85 workers eligible to telework and 129 employees teleworking: a participation rate of 151.76%!

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