Nextgov

With the signing late last year of new telework legislation, federal agencies must expand telework opportunities for federal employees across government.

So how can agencies go the extra mile to achieve that goal? The Partnership for Public Service on Thursday held an event to discuss how public and private sector companies are using telework and other workplace flexibilities to manage for better results.

Sharon Wall, performance management officer at the General Services Administration, said that after the telework legislation was signed into law, GSA created its own project management office for telework and hired employees in a number of different areas, such as policy, technology and skills enhancement training. The office has since led a telework week initiative in which 25 percent of GSA employees nationwide teleworked, and has created a telework forum on GSA's intranet that enables employees to collaborate and solve problems, she said.

Don Bathurst, chief administration officer at the Homeland Security Department, said the first changes in moving to a mobile workforce came with the technology. The department issued laptops to employees and then began having telework exercises to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the efforts. "We're really trying to reject the term telework," he said. "It's just work, and I'm trying to get folks to be where they need to be, when they need to be there."

Naomi Leventhal, director of Deloitte's federal human capital practice, said Deloitte's flexible workplace efforts stemmed from its desire to recruit and retain the best people. Deloitte employees now spend most of their work time outside of the office, and that has caused Deloitte to have to create a culture that emphasizes performance over presence, she said. It also was about saving money, both on real estate and employee retention, she added. "Like the government, we want the money to go where it really needs to be," she said. "And that means it needs to go to the mission, not the cubicle."

Still, while the new telework law has several strengths, there is one potential weakness - it does not change the telework reporting requirements, said Justin Johnson, deputy chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management. The law, for example, defines telework as employees working at a site where they traditionally do not work, he said. But in some areas, OPM has simply closed locations, meaning employees' new duty stations have become their homes. "That exacerbates the problem for us because they're not counted in the telework statistics," he said. "They're mobile workers."

Wall said GSA is working to overcome that shortfall by creating a dashboard on its intranet that captures the number of people who are connected through a VPN at any given time. "We are trying to bring measures that demonstrate the amount of mobile work that's happening and forecasting the actual benefits it's bringing," she said. "Remote work gives access to the best and brightest people wherever they may be."