Telework Exchange

The U.S. State Department has had a successful telework program in place since 2004. However, in using a paper-based telework agreement to manage more than 1,000 regular and situational teleworkers spread across different bureaus and parts of the country, the agency found itself struggling to successfully track its teleworking population. So much so, in fact, that telework officials recently had to amend their previously reported teleworker numbers to the Office of Personnel Management.

"We had stagnant data," says Judy Ikels, division chief for Employee Programs in the Office of Employee Relations at the State Department. "We found that agreements were not being reviewed on an annual basis, and it was hard to extract all of the data we needed for reporting purposes."

Now they think they have come up with a solution – an eTelework application that automatically routes a telework agreement from employee to supervisor to executive director. The automated system also creates an electronic record of the agreement and provides notifications to the employee when decisions on the application are made and again when the annual agreement is set to expire.

"It takes less than five minutes for employees to complete the application," says Heather Stokes, a program analyst within the Office of Employee Relations. "The employee stays informed throughout the process, and we have accurate data. It is just a lot more user-friendly."

The eTelework process was introduced as a pilot project in December 2007. Currently, the application is available to domestic direct hire Foreign Service and Civil Service employees.

State officials continue to test the application to ensure it is performing as designed and meets agency needs. Although there have been a few glitches and some tweaking required, "this is an application that is here to stay," says Ikels. "We are basically happy with the way things are going."

She is, however, constantly on the lookout for ways to improve administration and raise the profile of effective telework arrangements. As such, she and her team currently are planning an awareness campaign that includes collaboration with the agency's Office of Emergency Management. A pilot project, planned for fall 2009, will drill the agency's Continuity of Operations planning (COOP) capabilities using telework. "We are hoping this exercise will increase telework participation in alternate work arrangements and highlight more reasons for management and employees to be interested in telework," Ikels says.

Implementing the eTelework application initially was challenging, Stokes admits. One of the biggest obstacles was convincing existing employees to re-apply using the automated system. "So many employees are used to the previous way of working and already have been issued a fob (a device that allows them to access the agency network remotely), so they did not see a need to re-apply through eTelework."

In the effort to refine their own program, the State Department officials noted several recommended best practices that may be valuable to other agencies implementing similar initiatives:

• Ask agencies with automated systems to demonstrate their application and see if it is possible to reconfigure what they have tested to fit the needs of your agency
• Make sure you have management involvement at all levels
• Collaborate with natural allies, such as managers focused on agency IT and emergency management
• Think of an incentive that will motivate current teleworkers to reapply through the automated system
• Be sure to build enough flexibility into the system to account for future changes to the program and/or telework regulations
• Have an administrative user functionality built in from Day One
• Show results of the application by providing clear, concise reporting and updates to senior management

"We took a year to get eTelework up and running at State because we realized that if we did not have this system in place, we were never going to have decent statistics," Ikels says. "Now that we have this functionality, we really can turn our attention to expanding the telework population across the organization, thus increasing the number of people who will be able to continue working during an emergency."