Lesson 13: Telework Case Study Assignment. You are one of seven division chiefs in a large DoD directorate. Your division has five branches and a total of 138 employees, which is typical of all seven divisions in your directorate. The ops tempo throughout the Directorate has grown in recent months, with a constant barrage of tight deadlines and challenging issues. So far, the workforce has remained fairly stable, but overall morale is declining due to the long hours, heavy workload, and frequent travel between the main office and off-site work locations, and you and the other division chiefs are concerned about the inevitable decline in retention. To complicate the situation further, your agency has just been notified to expect an 8 percent across-the-board cut in funding, which will have a significant, but yet-to-be-determined, impact throughout the Directorate. Rumors are flying, but so far budgetary impacts haven't been finalized. Your Director has only been in her position for one month, but she has already initiated an aggressive effort to reduce overhead spending in all aspects of Directorate operations.

At last week's staff meeting, the Director announced her decision to implement a comprehensive telework policy, which would allow employees to work from home and significantly reduce overhead spending, with significant expected savings in energy, real estate, and travel costs. As she put it, "This new policy isn't open to debate. I expect everyone to work together to make it successful." She has assigned you to implement this sweeping change to the Directorate's work environment, and has set up a meeting with you in one week to discuss your telework plan.

Background

The signing of the Telework Enhancement Act in December 2010 set in motion a transformation of Federal telework that was expected to unleash its potential as a strategic intervention for supporting agency effectiveness. The Act provides a framework of requirements designed to ensure a more systematic implementation of telework in Federal agencies than previously existed. Prior to the Act, telework was implemented largely through case-by-case approval of requests from individual employees. Under the Act, telework is implemented as a strategic workplace initiative, and offers expanded opportunities for participation (to the extent that it doesn't diminish employee performance or agency operations). However, satisfying these requirements has meant a fundamental shift in how agency stakeholders view and implement teleworkfrom a strictly individual employee benefit to a strategic organizational change program.

Under the Act, Federal agencies stand to realize a number of benefits:

• When aligned with agency strategy and mission, telework supports achievement of objectives increasingly important for operation of an efficient and effective Federal Government, including cost savings, improved performance, and an increase in organizational productivity.
• Developed as a strategic program, telework is a powerful agency recruitment and retention tool with the capacity to improve the competitive position of the Federal Government in recruiting and retaining the best possible workforce.
• Leveraged as a management tool, telework mitigates potential disruptions to workplace productivity (e.g., severe weather, such as Hurricane Sandy).
• Telework can increase productivity. According to a 2010 survey, 33 agencies reported cost savings/benefits as a result of telework; of these, the greatest benefit was in the area of increased productivity (39 percent) and human capital management, such as recruitment and retention (37 percent).
• Telework has made a demonstrable reduction in overhead, real estate, environmental, and transit costs. Recent estimates suggest that a three-day-a- week Government telecommuter could save an average of $5,878 a year in commuting costs, which would serve as an offset to recently announced pay freezes. In fact, if the 79 percent of U.S. Government employees who are eligible to telework fulltime actually did, they would save an overall $13.9 billion in commuting costs.
• Telework can improve employees' ability to manage their workloads and achieve a better work-life balance.

Surprisingly, some surveys indicate that despite Presidential and Congressional emphasis, only 71 percent of Federal agencies currently provide formal notice of eligibility to their employees. While current numbers may be higher, according to a 2010 survey of Federal employees, only 5.72 percent of the entire Federal population teleworks. Of greater concern to your new boss, survey data suggest that the most significant barriers to increased teleworking are within the organization's control. The most frequently cited barriers are maintaining office coverage (64 percent), the organizational culture (49 percent), and resistance among supervisors (47 percent). Furthermore, well over half of respondent supervisors (57 percent) and managers (57 percent) do not telework because of perceived barriers (e.g., technical issues, not allowed, must be physically present on the job). Given the pending budget cuts, the Director views this resistance as totally unacceptable and as missing an opportunity to realize significant overhead savingswhich led to her decision to announce the new policy at last week's staff meeting.

Current Situation

In light of the high ops tempo, you expect strong skepticism among your fellow division chiefs, who face challenges similar to your own. Within your division, you expect your branch chiefs and lower-level supervisors will oppose telework as well. In fact, as you research the telework issue in preparation for your meeting with the Director, you discover a recent OPM survey that showed relatively low rates of telework participation among supervisors and managers, which doesn't surprise you. However, as the Director pointed out, it's important for leadership to consider the message relayed to employees when managers and other leaders choose not to telework. Modeling telework behavior sends a clear message of support and may provide one effective strategy for efforts to expand Federal telework. Therefore, if a teleworking initiative in the Directorate is to succeed, division chiefs will not only need to achieve buy-in among their branch chiefs and supervisors, but they'll need to model the expected telework behavior for their employees by occasionally teleworking themselves. That's going to be a tough sell.

As a first step, you set up a meeting to discuss this new initiative with your fellow division chiefs and get a feel for the reaction to this new policy. This was the result:

While it may sound like a good idea on the surface, we're not sure this is the right time to be experimenting with aspects of the work environment which could interfere with the mission, and wonder how well thought out the new initiative has been. Specifically, we're concerned about the continued reliability and responsiveness of our employees while working at home; the potential disruption to their division operations in the fast- paced, reactive environment they work in; and our loss of direct supervision and control over our employees. We also wonder whether this might be part of a larger initiative to "flatten" the Directorate by eliminating supervisory positions for some of our lower-level employees, given the recently announced budget cuts. In that environment, any hopes our hard-working people have of promotion may be gone. But most fundamentally, the loss of "face-time" with our people undercuts our personal influence.

In addition to these concerns, your fellow division chiefs fear the new initiative will be negatively perceived among their branch chiefs and other supervisors, and that they'll never truly embrace it. Based on a few preliminary hallway conversations, they've gotten the following reactions:

Who's going to pay for the necessary equipment? In the past, employees who have agreed to telework have had to buy their own laptops. It's unfair to put a financial burden on the employees, just so the new Director can make her mark on the organization.

• Connection reliability and access to required networks is going to be a problem, particularly with respect to classified systems. This has been tried in the past and it's just not practical.
• Some of our more ambitious employees are going to resent the career implications of working from home. As they say, "out of sight, out of mind."
• By working in isolation we'll have limited knowledge sharing and skills development opportunities. As is, we're a learning organization. We'll lose that by having people telework. So why should we risk that?
• The loss of social contact is a major factor. Our strong camaraderie is one of the few things that make working around here bearableit certainly isn't the high pay.
• On the surface, this may seem like a good idea, but the stakes are just too high to initiate a program like this without really knowing what we're getting into. We ought to set up a committee to study the problem in greater depth. There may be other approaches to cutting overhead that would be more effective.