While the coronavirus pandemic is the immediate driver of the sudden shift to working from home in governments across the country, the foundation for the transition to distance work actually began more than a decade ago. Here’s the backstory.
[Note: This column also appears in Washington Technology. It is the third in a series on how the COVID-19 crisis has changed how government works.]
The federal government had been seen as the leader in the use of distance work arrangements largely because of a 2010 law that codifies a federal commitment to the adoption of telework. The law requires all federal agencies to allow telework, designate a telework managing officer, and provide training to both employees and managers. It also requires agencies to incorporate telework into their continuity of operations plans. At the time, the rationale for adoption was to improve employee work-life balance.
Lessons from the 2010 Legislation on Telework. A 2011 IBM Center report by Dr. Scott Overmeyer looked at several federal agencies that were pioneers in the broad adoption of telework before the Telework Act was passed.
He describes four hurdles to telework their managers faced in implementing a telework strategy, which are still relevant today:
Dr. Overmeyer then describes how agencies, such as the Patent and Trademark Office and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), addressed these issues and successfully implemented a telework initiative. He found initial resistance among managers around moving to telework because they could not see their employees. DISA, however, overcame this obstacle when the Washington, D.C. area was paralyzed by a snowstorm but the agency was able to continue operations without a hitch. DISA’s Aaron Glover said at the time: “Telework is a key enable of the Continuity of Operations (COOP) program.”
Prior to the coronavirus, the federal government had not widely embraced telework. The Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM’s) latest annual report on the implementation of the Telework Act reports that 42 percent of federal employees were classified as eligible to participate in a telework program, but only 22 percent actually participated.
Why the low participation rate? Interestingly, a 2010 article in Washington Technology identified four reasons federal managers resist the use of telework – and those reasons remained fresh right up until the coronavirus pandemic forced the shift: technological issues such as connectivity, an inability to be immediately available for impromptu meetings, the inability to convey intangible information or priorities, and distrust of some employees’ work ethics.
Telework Guidance Updated. Since 2010, OPM and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have issued a series of guidance around the use of telework. OPM’s guidance focuses on “how to” topics via a one-stop website. OMB’s early guidance focused on IT purchasing requirements and security requirements; after the coronavirus, however, its guidance consisted of increasingly urgent demands that agencies shift to telework: “Maximize telework across the nation for the Federal workforce (including mandatory telework, if necessary) . . . “
However, not all federal jobs can easily convert to telework. For example, about 15 percent of the federal workforce is comprised of healthcare workers – doctors and nurses at veterans’ hospitals. Also, many governmental functions are legitimately concerned about security and privacy of the work they do and data they collect and use. These include: law enforcement, regulatory oversight, benefits determination, national security, homeland security, and intelligence agencies. The Government Accountability Office tracks the implementation of telework and found that the number of positions that might be appropriate were not well-documented. The urgency of the shift to distance work arrangements as a result of the coronavirus, however, has begun to challenge many of these assumptions as agencies struggle to find ways to continue operations. There may be lessons from some of the unconventional pioneers of distance work, such as the military.
Pioneers at Working from a Distance. Distance work has been around for a number of years in the military and intelligence community, even with the concerns of security. They have used electronic collaborative tools to orchestrate work across distributed work teams, often located around the globe in different time zones. A 2016 Center for Strategic & International Studies report by Greg Treverton describes the use of virtual teams, distance work, and collaborative tools in the intelligence community.
That report describes cross-agency team arrangements where “only a handful work together or have even met face-to-face.” These teams use MS SharePoint to host chats, share files, and organize social networks. They use various collaborative tools, many based on widely available commercial technology:
Similarly, the military is also an advocate of distance work tools, as noted by former general Stanley McChrystal, who has described how he led military special operations half-way across the globe via videoconferencing calls more than a decade ago.
Distance Work Is Changing How Work Gets Done. The rapid shift to distance work as a result of the coronavirus is changing how work gets done in federal, state, and local governments. For example, at the federal level:
The shift to distance work arrangements also is driving changes in how work gets done at the state and local levels. This is causing them to rethink previous barriers to change – even if these changes are currently seen as temporary. For example:
Interestingly the four reasons federal managers raised a decade ago to resist the transition to distance work arrangements are still alive today, but it seems increasingly unlikely that things will go back to the way they were before the coronavirus pandemic, in part because managers have been forced by necessity to learn to manage differently in order to achieve mission results.
Future columns will further explore the kinds of changes that the shift to distance work and distributed teams are having on work, and how different agencies are adapting.
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Note: This post is the third in a series on distance work. Here are links to the other posts:
Part 6: Distance Work: Home Alone?
Graphic Credit: Courtesy of silatip via FreeDigitalPhotos.net