Posted by: By Tim Lagan, Monster Government Solutions
As the federal workforce becomes younger – almost one in three of the 142,690 federal workers hired last year were 29 or younger and one in four was between 30 and 39 – the “typical workday” may change dramatically.
The road to one change was paved earlier this summer with the passage of the Telework Improvements Act which aims to expand work-at-home options for federal agencies. However, despite support from the Obama administration and, presumably, a younger workforce, a recent survey of federal workers showed that only 10 percent take advantage of telework flexibilities.
The Telework Improvements Act is designed to ensure that agencies appoint a telework managing officer who would work toward boosting participation for those federal workers who don’t handle secure or classified information. Some agencies are ahead of the curve with initiatives that help them manage information security concerns. For example, the Veterans Affairs Department has equipped about 60,000 of its 300,000 employees with technology enabling them to work remotely without compromising security.
Government personnel experts predict that in 10 years approximately 400,000 of the 2 million federal workers will be younger than 35, and those workers will expect to partake in the same types of work-life balance initiatives, including telework, that are offered to their private-sector counterparts.
However, aside from employee expectations, there are practical reasons to expand telework flexibilities in government. For those workers in the Washington, D.C. area, the snowstorms of earlier this year – dubbed “Snowmaggedon” – effectively shut down their ability to commute to work for multiple, consecutive days. Telework would save the government millions of dollars in lost productivity due not only to these types of weather events but also to the traffic congestion that can unexpectedly derail any commute in the DC area.
According to John Streufert, deputy chief information officer for information security at the State Department, in a story on GovExec.com, “There’s a lot of talk about the trouble of commuting to work, but to me the real national security issue is if we had something that disrupted the ability of the federal workforce to get to the office, could we continue to provide the services of government? I think you’d find that many departments and agencies would have problems.”
The Government Accounting Office will be responsible for ensuring that agencies are participating in the Telework Improvements Act’s work-at-home initiatives. This vital new program could be a key component of keeping our government workers engaged, satisfied, and able to work through any potential crises.
Thu, Aug 12, 2010
Federal