Telework Exchange News: The Teleworker

As the concept of telework gains traction and agency programs experience more and more success, officials are left to ponder: What's the next step?

Speakers on three panels at the Fall Telework Exchange Town Hall Meeting tackled this question by sharing their recommended best practices based on frontline experience. Some discussed how to encourage a range of employees to try and succeed at telework, while others focused on how to ensure secure operations for mobile workers and how to select appropriate tools and technologies to improve collaboration and productivity.

The speakers, representing various agencies and functions - from government security specialists to industry telework leaders to a Navy captain, also explored how telework can be used to attract and retain the best and brightest of the incoming Millennial Generation and what new types of technology, including the next generation of the Internet, IPv6, will mean for telework initiatives.

Technology Tales
New and better technology is being introduced all the time, but no matter what form it takes, "we have to figure out how to make this simple for teleworkers because simple succeeds," said Josh Sawislak, senior advisor to the administrator and acting chief emergency response and recovery officer at General Services Administration (GSA), in his opening statement. He referred to the concept as "telework in a box."

Making the most of the tools and technology available now and in the future for telework was the theme of the first session, where the panelists covered how to build a business case for funding new technologies, how to help teleworkers and agency officials feel more comfortable with remote technology applications, and how to use collaboration tools to effectively involve teleworkers and other mobile workers in impromptu meetings and conferences.

Barry Morris, vice president of Federal Systems Polycom, noted that videoconferencing and Web conferencing were critical to giving teleworkers and their managers a more personal feel in their interactions. When employees sit in on audio conference calls, the retention rate of participants is just 30 percent, according to one study.

Why? "There's no eye contact," Morris stated, explaining that in its absence people tend to tune out or be easily distracted by e-mail or other office tasks.

By being able to look at someone face-to-face through collaborative conferencing technologies, workers engage in personal interaction and, as such, are able to retain information at a much higher 65 percent rate. Morris suggested that any technology setup needs to answer the question: "How do we make sure that employees are retaining information and being as productive as they can be?"

He also explained that Web 2.0 tools and collaborative technologies were essential to attracting and retaining the incoming Millennial Generation of workers. "They have grown up with interactive technology including Skype, instant messaging, and more - that's where they live."

In response to a question about security, panelists were in agreement that "real" telework does not present unmanageable security issues. Rather the informal teleworkers who have less training and skill in remote work fall through the security cracks and may inadvertently put the enterprise at risk. Morris suggested that instead of partitioning training to include only those workers who regularly telework, agencies need to put a larger percentage of office workers under telework agreements and train them on telework, security, and privacy fundamentals.

Peter Tseronis, senior technical advisor at the Department of Energy, provided a treatise on IPv6, pointing out that China put on an impressive demonstration of the technology when they relied on it for the elaborate the lighting display at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. The next generation of the Internet, he said, will not only allow better communication with devices, such as cars, appliances, and utility systems, but it also will enable more real-time access to applications and better mobility, for teleworkers.

The benefits of IPv6 and its value to government operations is causing some debate within government circles, especially as federal agencies deal with increasingly tighter budgets. "The bottom line is: What is it that you want to do?" Tseronis asked. "Technology will take care of it, but you cannot do that without investing."

Security Tips
Three security experts presented their views in a session on, "Proven Strategies to Ensure Remote Computing." Ron Ross, senior computer scientist and information security researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) opened the discussion with a focus on the telework environments within agencies.

"Everything in security starts with good policies," he stated, before outlining seven priority considerations to ensure effective security of information in three states, in process, in transit, and at rest. Effective security programs must include the following.

Offering regular, relevant security training
Installing identification, authentication, and access controls
Implementing full-disk encryption on laptops
Providing managed services that automatically perform virus scans, patches, and other security tasks for teleworkers

Although security "is not one-size fits all," according to Dennis Heretick, a security consultant and former chief information security officer at the Department of Justice, agencies can improve their ability to manage security by taking an enterprise view and relying on technologies such as enterprise rights management and identity management through common access products.

The latter, he added, "are very powerful technologies that are going to evolve, as telework evolves, because it makes it so much easier to form groups ad hoc and add and subtract (members) of these groups that all have common goals but may have different roles in accomplishing the tasks at hand."

In fact, said Ross, the technology is available and cost-effective enough now to enable truly effective security within the corporate environment or at a telework site.

The real weak link, stated Daud Yamin, a senior systems engineering manager at Cisco Federal, is the end user. Social engineering attacks, typing mistakes, and other pitfalls that can ensnare users "have to be paramount in policy," he said. "Education should be taken very, very seriously around security."

In recalling an old television commercial that warned against helping "a good kid go bad by leaving the car keys in the ignition," Heretick suggested installing tools that audit everything performed on a government-issued computer. Knowing they're being watched can "help people know: ‘Don't stretch beyond what you're authorized to do with data.'"

Ross noted that these user education and awareness issues are not unique to telework, and as such, training and other security policies should be applied to the entire enterprise. "Everything you employ within your own corporate infrastructure, you want to replicate (in the telework environment)," he explained. "So you should already be doing training and awareness, you should already have rules of behavior. Telework should be just an extension of the office."

In fact, Heretick said, one of the unintended, but positive, consequences of telework is that "it has strengthened the core things that we should be doing anyway."

Other tips for better security include:

Make sure that security enhances the mission
Find someone who is doing a good job and model that
Prioritize and manage risk by using two- and even three-factor authentication for sensitive data
Leverage telework to enable better COOP

Overall, the panelists agreed that the objective is to ensure that security acts as a mission and productivity enabler rather than something that locks down resources.

Real-World Lessons
Danette Campbell, senior advisor for telework at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), is usually the one on the hot seat talking about the challenges and best practices of telework, but as moderator of a session titled, "Peer to Peer: Practical Experience with Telework Implementation," she finally got to ask the tough questions.

Delving into subject matter beyond the basics, she pressed panelists for real-world details on how they have enabled telework success within their organizations, overcome typical and unique challenges, extended telework benefits to less traditional employees, and leveraged collaboration tools to enable teleworkers to stay more connected to their project teams.

Capt. Kenneth Barrett, program manager for the Task Force Work Life Initiative for the U.S. Navy, answered a barrage of tough questions, including how the Navy was encouraging a telecommuting future given its face-to-face style of leadership and highly operational mission. Among the topics discussed were the key challenges the Navy faced in getting started, why it was so intent on moving forward quickly with telework, and what core Navy jobs actually would fit a telework environment.

"We've taken a look at (telework and other work arrangements) as kind of a battle for talent," Barrett explained, noting that just two percent of the Navy workforce hails from the Baby Boom generation while more than 50 percent are part of the Millennial Generation. "We've been hearing more and more from our surveys that our people are demanding flexibility and a whole variety of different types of work environments."

There have been challenges, of course, including winning over traditional Navy leaders to embrace the idea and dealing with security questions, but Capt. Barrett and his team have reached out with persistence, he said.

"At every single turn, somebody was always telling us, ‘No,'" he recalls. "If it wasn't somebody from the IT world, it was an individual commander, it was a lawyer….The bottom line is to just say: ‘We're moving forward with this,' otherwise it would just continue to drag on.'"

The good news, he noted, is that as they have moved into the second phase of the telework pilot, they have embraced more collaborative worksites, solved security issues, and expanded the ability for home-based workers to access files. He concluded that as "people start to see more and more the value of this program, they start to embrace it as an organization."

Carolyn Brubaker, director of business development for the Civilian Government Business at Microsoft, explained how her company's decision to transform itself into a largely virtual work environment has resulted in the company commercializing its lessons learned and best practices into products that support public sector agencies. These include intelligence gathering, case management, and information sharing applications that are currently being implemented by intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Microsoft, after repackaging its own internal technologies that enable telework, outfitted the U.S. Department of Agriculture with what's known as a "roundtable" device. This mini-videoconferencing tool with a 360-degree camera "is pretty small and compact and can kind of go with any teleworker, anywhere," Brubaker explained. "It can scribe and conference through your LiveMeeting or WebEx or whatever technology you have for Web conferencing."

Audience members learned from Lester Newell, chief information officer for NASA Headquarters and director of the agency's Information Technology and Communications Division, how putting telework to the test not only can prove the work arrangement's productivity, efficiency, and morale benefits to skeptics, but it also can bring home the fact that telework and Continuity of Operations (COOP), while complementary, are not the same. Teleworking, he noted, has served as a foundation to allow NASA Headquarters to take the next step, which is setting COOP policy and procedures and testing it.

He did provide three lessons learned from NASA's telework test exercise: 1) Employees need to be educated upfront 2) IT tools need to be fully tested 3) Everybody needs to participate

Finally, Karen Jackson, director of the Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance for the Commonwealth of Virginia, discussed how the next phase of telework would enable the Commonwealth of Virginia to use telework as a budgetary control strategy and an economic development tool. "We are now ready to move away from the ‘warm and fuzzy' reasons for doing telework and focus more on telework as an efficiency and cost-savings measure," she explained.

Among its plans for telework for the Virginia workforce is decreasing the State's real estate footprint by increasing its percentage of teleworkers among the existing state workforce, as well as expanding beyond the Richmond region and hiring seasonal and full-time government employees from lower-wage rate rural areas that can telework on a full-time basis from their homes or local telework centers. Jackson noted that by extending jobs into more rural areas, the Commonwealth also will benefit financially from a lower attrition rate. "The turnover rate has been almost zero," she noted, among employees in cities and towns with exceptionally high unemployment rates and fewer work alternatives. Telework has delivered a "win/win" situation for some of Virginia's rural workforce while enabling the State government to control employment-related costs.