Just seven months after challenging the General Services Administration (GSA) to significantly improve upon its telework adoption rate, Lurita Doan, who recently left her post as GSA Administrator, announced at the Telework Exchange Spring 2008 Town Hall Meeting that GSA is well ahead of schedule in meeting its ambitious goals.
Already, the agency has reached its one-year goal of doubling the number of teleworkers, increasing the percentage of its total workforce from 10 percent to 20 percent in just eight months. As a result, Doan predicted, the agency's bigger goal of having 50 percent of employees on the telework bandwagon by 2010 "is going to be an absolute cakewalk."
Doan could barely contain her enthusiasm for telework as she talked about its most positive benefits and what it could do for the agency, including enabling better performance and more productivity, providing a better quality of life for employees, and giving the agency an edge in recruiting younger employees, retaining older ones, and tapping into talent that was previously unavailable, such as the disabled.
Despite its recent success, GSA will not be content to just "hit the numbers," Doan said, but was actively putting in policies and procedures that would make telework sustainable over the long-term, "not just through 2010, but for us to build on it and continue to grow this telework concept because it just makes good sense for government."
Among the steps GSA has taken to ensure that telework is here to stay include the following:
- Develop a structured telework policy and have each teleworker sign a standard agreement
- Establish a common fund that managers can tap for legitimate one-time expenses associated with employees that either work from home or at a telework center
- Make telework an integral component of the Office of Emergency Response Initiatives to ensure Continuity of Operations during a crisis
- Purchase laptops instead of desktops during the agency's regularly-scheduled technology refreshment cycles
- Develop rigorous metrics to measure productivity, costs, and operational uptime
- Meet with private-sector firms to gain additional ideas, best practices, and recommendations on how to optimize telework options and programs
Doan noted that GSA's success to date was attributable to the dedication and hard work of agency employees. She recognized several key contributors, including Bill Kelly, a senior career executive who delayed his pending retirement to champion the agency's telework initiative.
Given 21st Century resource constraints, from budgets to fuel costs to environmental concerns, as well as the growing demand for better work/life balance to attract the best and brightest workers, "it is absolutely clear to me that telework is a no-brainer," Doan concluded. "You have to do it, simply because telework works."
