Telework Exchange

Those who attended the second track, "Managing Telework," received a treatise on how people and culture can be an advantage and a hurdle to successful telework implementation and operation. The sessions, "Managing Today's Workforce" and "Effective Strategies for Labor Relations," provided practical approaches to overcoming common challenges to telework, as well as proven tips on how program officials can help teleworkers thrive in their remote environments and gain more internal and external support for the telework model.

Managing Teleworkers

Patricia Niehaus, President of the Federal Managers Association, moderated the first session, "Managing Today's Workforce." She opened by informing the audience that her organization is pushing hard through its members to increase telework in government agencies.

Arleas Upton Kea, Director of the Division of Administration at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), led the discussion by highlighting the best practices her agency has employed in creating and managing what is believed to be one of the most successful telework programs in the Federal government.

"In implementing, we took everything back to ‘Management 101' and took baby steps with our managers," Kea stated.

• Make sure there is a good means of communication between the teleworker and their manager
• Determine what tools teleworkers need to be successful and provide them, no matter the cost
• Offer training on an upfront and ongoing basis
• Recognize that good performance is intrinsically tied to a manager's ability to set clear expectations to the employee and the employee's understanding of those expectations
• Foster a sense of team among managers and employees, no matter where they do their work
• Reward teleworkers for a job well done and encourage and support them in their daily work
• Measure results

"All these things are the same ones you would normally employ when you're managing an employee who's in the office and down the hall from you," Kea explained, adding that it is important to continually emphasize the application of these basic principles to telework managers.

To ensure that telework is a fundamental part of the work culture at FDIC and to overcome management resistance, agency officials took a radical but highly effective step: include its use as one of the agency's corporate performance objectives and tie telework adoption to a manager's compensation.

"Through the performance appraisal process, we were able to determine whether a manager had been supportive of telework, and we had a feedback process where employees were able to tell us this information," Kea explained. "We were able to mandate that in a way that had a direct and very important correlation to pay and bonus."

Enabling employees with disabilities to telework was the topic of remarks for the next panelist, Dinah F.B. Cohen, Executive Director of the Computer Accommodation Program (CAP). This Department of Defense (DoD) program pays for the reasonable accommodations and assistive technology that people with disabilities require to work effectively in their jobs, whether they are in a traditional office or at home. CAP pays to equip Federal employees with disabilities within all agencies – not just those in DoD.

"When it comes to the telework model, we provide that technology at home as a form of reasonable accommodation," she said, explaining that qualifying Federal employees who go through CAP can obtain at no cost to their agency a workstation, computer, fax machine, printer, and other assistive technologies required by each teleworker's functional limitations.

Cohen stated that the Federal government's employment of people with disabilities has been dropping ominously over the last decade, from 1.2 percent in the late 1990s to .88 percent in 2009. Given the accommodations and technologies available today, that trend is unacceptable, Cohen stated.

Telework, she says, if utilized effectively, can be a key tool in the government's recruitment and retention strategy regarding the employment of people with disabilities. It also can help cut an agency's worker's compensation costs by providing a way for injured employees to remain productive during their recovery period.

Cohen told the story of a survivor of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon who had lost her hands and feet in the explosion. When the accounting specialist came to CAP, officials conducted a free needs assessment and provided her with a computer, voice recognition technology, a telephone headset, and voice-activated telephone, as well as a pillow switch for those times when she wasn't feeling well enough to work at a desk.

"This telework model cost me, the government, a little more than $5,000 – much cheaper than worker's compensation costs," Cohen stated, noting that with the home-based setup, the employee was able to thrive in her job with the U.S. Army. "You don't throw away people, you accommodate."

Enabling more employees with disabilities to telework also could help agencies fulfill at one time two key government personnel initiatives: increase the hiring of people with disabilities and increase their telework adoption.

Justin Johnson, Deputy Chief of Staff for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), provided the audience with details on the latest OPM telework mandate – boost the number of government teleworkers by 50 percent. That means the number of regular and ad hoc teleworkers needs to be racheted up from 102,900 in 2008 (the latest numbers) to 155,000 by the end of FY2011.

"That sounds like a big number, but it doesn't when you consider that we have two million Federal employees," Johnson noted.

To meet its ambitious goal, OPM is implementing an asymmetrical strategy. One step will be to emphasize the business case for telework, so it is not seen primarily as an employee perk. "Rather than just needling people about ‘How are your numbers?' we want to get everyone to integrate telework as part of their continuity of operations planning," Johnson explained. "That will make a big difference."

OPM also has included specific telework questions on the Employee Viewpoint Survey (formerly the Federal Human Capital Survey), which was administered earlier this year and will be released in the summer. Those questions will augment OPM's Annual Telework Report and provide further insight.

"A lot of times, agencies report numbers in different ways…and if things are going poorly, we haven't been able to get into the details of why are they being done poorly, and where are the pockets of resistance?" Johnson said. "By having this second-layer check, we're asking 500,000 Federal employees directly: ‘Do you telework? If you don't telework, why not? Is it your own choice? Things of that nature. We'll have kind of a backup to check those numbers a little bit better."

The Union Role

Having a solid, negotiated agreement in place can be critical when changing a work culture to include telework. This premise was explored in the session about "Effective Strategies on Labor Relations," as organized labor and agency representatives discussed the role that unions can play in promoting effective telework policies and practices. The panel also discussed case studies where the stakeholders have formed strong working relationships to the satisfaction of agency management and labor organizations.

Kathy Kadilak, session moderator and President of Strategic Worklife Solutions, noted that the union role in fostering telework opportunities for Federal workers goes back to the beginning of the telework movement. While working as the manager of the Worklife and Telework Program at the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the 1990s, for example, she saw a case where non-unionized attorneys complained to Janet Reno about their inability to access the program's alternative work arrangements with little success, while, at the same time, DOJ attorneys who also were union members not only received permission to work flexible hours, but the management response to their requests was extremely quick.

"Now, why do you suppose that was the case?" Kadilak asked. "I'm going to guess that many of you are accurately assuming that it was because the unionized attorneys had a good negotiated agreement in place, and that agreement defined what flexible work arrangements were available to them, how they would access those flexible work arrangements, and what the responsibilities of the attorneys and their supervisors were in implementing flexibility."

Working through the negotiations to develop those types of effective agreements is not easy, but panelists offered plenty of advice.

The first panelist, Bev Sherman, Vice President of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403, provided a cautionary tale when relaying the details of the telework agreement that her union negotiated on behalf of its members at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2004. She explained that the agreement gave employees the right to telework, but in gaining that privilege they gave up their right to file grievances regarding telework. As a result, the agreement did not help employees overcome front-line resistance to the work arrangement.

The reality of telework at NSF is that it "unfortunately is administered differently by different supervisors," Sherman stated. "They all have different requirements. They all have different rules. In some cases, the supervisors will telework, but they don't allow anyone working for them to telework. And then in other cases, the division head will say, "No supervisors can telework. You have to be here.' But they allow the workers to telework. So there's no rhyme or reason."

The union is now working to update the current telework agreement and also trying to get all NSF employees to sign at least a situational telework agreement with the same rules across the agency so they can continue to be productive during COOP events or if they have to take personal days.

On the other end of the spectrum, Tim Hannapel, National Counsel of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), handed out copies of a recent telework agreement between NTEU and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that achieves what he described as "maximum telework."

The agreement "allows employees to designate their home address as their official duty station," he explained. "What that means is that they are no longer required to come into that office one or twice a week just to fulfill that requirement…. It is state of the art. We wish everyone else could get there."

Hannapel noted that the NTEU often experiences some of the same resistance described by Sherman, including supervisors who themselves telework but shut out their subordinates. "That's where it really requires not just pushing by the union and enforcing the rights," he stated, explaining that NTEU has filed many grievances against individual managers who block telework without good cause. "That's only half the battle – (an agreement) is only as good as the paper it's written on. The union, employees, and management have to breathe life into that agreement."

Peer pressure and a sense of fair play needs to be brought to bear within an agency culture to advance telework, said Jeri Buchholz, Associate Director for Human Resource Policy and Operations for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). After negotiating a telework agreement with unionized employees, the agency extended it to all NRC employees. "We took the exact same wording and made that rule and procedure apply to our non-bargaining unit as well," she explained. "So we have a single telework agreement for the whole agency."

This holistic approach works well in breaking down resistance to telework and other worklife programs, she noted. At NRC, for example, telework is integrated with a work schedule known as NewFlex, which allows employees to fulfill their required hours within an extended workweek, and covers everyone in the agency. Everyone is allowed to telework at least occasionally, and even the most senior managers are expected to telework. "Otherwise, there's going to be the appearance of this unwritten rule that if you participate in these programs, somehow it's going to be detrimental to your career," Buchholz said, noting that this also puts pressure on middle managers to fully support and enable telework.

Buchholz provided a few other tidbits of advice for agencies negotiating a collective bargaining agreement related to telework and other flexible work arrangements:

• Fully understand what you are trying to accomplish and be very clear upfront what commitments you are willing to make; and
• Do not be afraid when expressions of opinion become passionate

"You really have to be willing to have hard conversations that sometimes get a little loud in order for everyone to really feel like they've been heard and the issues have been put on the table and discussed and an agreement reached," she said. "I don't think that's something people should fear or walk away from. In fact, I think that would actually be a big mistake."