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Telework: from bricks to clicks
Every day, more employees are leaving their desks and taking their laptops home, where they are setting up office. The International Telework Association and Council estimates that within the next two years, the number of U.S. employees teleworking will increase from the current 26 million to 100 million.
“Home should be the 21st-century workplace,” said Prince William Rep. Frank Wolf (R.-10th), who has been advocating telework for the last 20 years.
Regionally, working from home is not only for federal employees, but for government contractors and private firms.
“Every home buyer I have worked with over the past several years wants a home in which there is an extra room that can be converted into an office,” said James Carter, broker and owner of Carter Realty in Gainesville. “The home office is their link to the main office.”
Carter said he knows many people who are working from home. “Most of my real estate agents work from home,” he said. “I also have a home office.”
David Fall of Gainesville works for a firm in Arlington that does business with the public and private sector, and he works from a home office three days a week.
On the two days he drives in, the commute takes an hour and 30 minutes to two hours.
Fall said that each division in the company sets its own rules about teleworking, but he estimates that 60 percent of employees are working from home two or three days a week.
John Bullock lives in Gainesville and works for a government contractor. He said his commute isn’t too bad because it only takes him an hour and 15 minutes to get to his office in Crystal City.
Bullock looked around his neighborhood and counted four on his street who work at home and others who work close to home. He recounted one neighbor who had a terrible commute and finally moved in closer to D.C.
That's not unusual, according to Carter.
“Those who are still commuting long distances are moving into new communities closer to the VRE stations in Alexandria and Lorton,” he said. “The last three home buyers I have had were looking for homes near the VRE.”
“Work is something you do, not where you do it,” said Wolf, “There is nothing magical about driving up to an hour and a half to sit in front of a computer. We can access the same information that is in the office from a computer in our living room.”
Thomas Burke of Warrenton is looking forward to teleworking. “If I couldn’t work from home, I would just sell the house and retire in Florida,” he said. “I cannot tell you how relieved I am that the government has accelerated its efforts to give us the opportunity to telework.”
Moving into the fast lane
Working at home instead of at the office was first tried successfully in 1934 by the Federal Credit Union Bureau examiners. The examiners would conduct their examinations at a credit union, then complete their reports at home.
Fast-forward 65 years. Although numerous efforts had been made in the intervening years to speed up telework initiatives, the federal government just didn’t want to switch to the fast lane.
Over the past 17 years, Wolf has introduced a number of measures in Congress to encourage federal agencies to move faster. As chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee, Wolf set down a provision to withhold $5 million from each department’s budget until those agencies ensured that all their eligible workers are permitted to telecommute.
One by one, the agencies began shifting gears and each one now provides Congress with annual reports on how they have finally turned into lean, green,non- driving machines.
Accelerating telework
Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration, announced last week that at the rate employees are signing up for telework, GSA expects to have 40 percent of all employees working from home at least one day a week by January 2009.
“We already are a full eight months ahead of schedule,” reported Doan, anticipating that GSA will reach the 50 percent mark by 2010.
Every agency that has embraced telework reports employee productivity level is up, costs are down, employee morale is up, and recruitment and retention are at an all-time high.
But not every agency is reporting momentum in its telework program. Roadblocks have emerged, and though the potholes have been repaired, the barriers have not been removed.
IT security concerns
Government managers have begun applying the brakes and calling teleworkers back to the office because of concerns of potential security breaches. Alternate work arrangements, whether at home or at a telework center, had to conform to agency IT security policy.
John Leonard, the IT crisis management lead for Cisco IT, told participants at the recent Telework Exchange conference in D.C. that “It is not difficult to adhere to IT security policy for the federal government...but the agency must create the procedures and train teleworkers on proper mobile telework security.”
Technical problems in management
“Work is something you do, it is not someplace you go,” said Wolf. “Managers are managing the work, not the people.”
Managers who believe employees must be on site to supervise are living and working in the past, in a 20th-century culture, according to panelists at last week’s Telework Exchange conference.
The same sentiments were repeated at an IT trade show this week. Attendees at the annual Federal Open Source Expo conference were told by Joseph Hungate of the Treasury Department that “the greatest barriers to telework in the federal government are ignorance and middle managers.”
Home alone
A federal telework survey revealed that 13 percent of employees do not want to go home to work. The reason most often cited is that that they do not like the isolation of working alone at home.
Telework can mean working in a local telecenter, however there is little social interaction since telecenter users do not know each other, primarily because they work for different companies or agencies.
The closest telecenter to Gainesville is in the Lockheed Martin complex on Godwin Drive in Manassas.
There is enough space for at least two dozen workers. Most work areas are in cubicles or “personal harbors” also called “superman booths” according to Darryl Dobberfuhl, telecenter manager.
The booths are about the size of half a walk-in closet and are not for people who are claustrophobic.
Between the tight spaces and the social isolation, standard telecenters don't serve everyone's needs.
“That is where telecentres come in,” said Kathlene Buchanan, owner of Metro Offices telecentres. “Our government clients set up a satellite office with us. By using our telecentres, employees are close to home, and yet are able to interact and meet with employees from their agency.”
Metro Offices telecentres, spelled slightly differently than the alternative, are located in Dulles, Fairfax and Reston but more are on the way.
Wolf and Buchanan recently announced plans for new telecentres in Gainesville and possibly Warrenton.
The government-sponsored telecenters have not experienced the same demand as Metro Offices Telecentres.
Dobberfuhl, who manages the Manassas telework center, said the Lockheed site telecenter will be closing down in late summer because of lack of use. “Hopefully, it will reopen at the George Mason University Prince William campus,” he said.
Awareness
Eight weeks ago the Telework Exchange published a research report that found 42 percent of government employees surveyed were not aware that they are eligible to telework. The vast majority of those were eligible, however.
“This is going to change,” said Dobberfuhl, explaining that agencies have started a new public relations effort to encourage government employees to consider teleworking. “They are advertising it everywhere, putting up posters all over.”
“I’ve seen the posters,” said Burke. “It’s way overdue.”
Federal workers who want to know if they are allowed to telework can visit www.telework.gov.
I've been teleworking 2-3 days a week for the past few years and recently changed jobs after an employer revoked their telework program.
My employer and I enjoy a number of advantages from my teleworking. Not having to commute is big for me (cost, stress, time). I don't have to take half a day off for a half-hour medical appointment. Before-after school daycare savings was big and I've found that interruptions from children are less frequent and disruptive than those from some co-workers! I frequently work through parts of my commuting time (i.e. on my telework days I'm frequently working 9-10 hours). I'm much more productive when teleworking and can focus more intensely on my work. I can easily provide after-hours support, especially during "rush hour" when my co-workers are unavailable due to commuting.
My biggest obstacle over the years has been supervisors who feel they lose control when I'm not in the office and that somehow I'm not being as productive as when I'm in the office (when the opposite has always been the case). I've had supervisors who I would see only a few times a month when working full-time in the office - who would communicate with me primarily by phone and email even when I was physically 50 feet away from them. When I started teleworking they would send me emails asking if I was in the office or not, and soon discovered that it was usually easier to get ahold of me when I was teleworking and that I could often respond more quickly to their requests from home than from the office!
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