In an era of dwindling supply and increasing demand for top personnel, the Navy wants to remain a leading employer of choice. To ensure that it can compete effectively with industry and other service branches - especially as more members of Generation Y enter the workforce - Navy officials are set to begin permanently offering telework and other flexible scheduling programs at qualifying commands as a tool to better attract and retain employees.

"This all came out of the fact that we began looking for innovative ways to make sure that our employees are able to be productive and that we as an employer are able to hold people accountable for results, rather than saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got to be standing tall at 0700 in the morning so I can see everybody’s smiling face,’" says Capt. Ken Barrett, director of the Navy’s Task Force Life/Work (TFLW). "That model is just not going to work for us as we get further into the 21st Century."

While the Navy is looking at several work arrangements, it definitely sees telework as an important component of its strategy and is moving forward quickly. A telework pilot was started and continues within the N1 Total Force branch, with surveys showing positive productivity increases and high satisfaction rates among teleworkers and supervisors. Barrett now expects a permanent program to be underway by early 2010, predicting that at least 65 to 75 percent of personnel will be able to telework at least some of the time.

In addition, the new chief of Naval personnel, Vice Admiral Mark Ferguson, now has the ability to telework from his home with the goal to work from there at least one day a week. This decision, says Barrett, "has sent a signal to our entire leadership that telework is something to be embraced. If he is willing to do it, others should too."

In the meantime, TFLW is working with Navy technical personnel to make the telework environment more user-friendly, including putting shared folders on Defense Knowledge Online, the very secure architecture run by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). Barrett expects that task to be completed this fall and to roll-out a Navy-wide instruction by late 2009.

"That would basically be giving the authorization for telework," Barrett says. "Now, we are obviously doing it within our own enterprise, and other folks have been able to embrace it on their own without asking for permission, but being able to have that permission there, that top cover, so to speak, is certainly something that we want to be able to give to the commanders in the field."

On the surface, the idea that the Navy, with its long deployments at sea and hands-on work requirements, would and could embrace telework seems incongruous. And Barrett himself initially thought it might be appropriate only for administrative positions. After hitting the road last fall with three of his lieutenants to get the sailors’ views at Naval bases in San Diego, Norfolk, Hawaii, Japan, and other sites, however, he realized that the work arrangement was not nearly as limited as he first believed.

The first person who brought up telework was an aircraft maintenance worker near San Diego, who inquired about having telework as an option. While the employee obviously needed to be physically on-site to do maintenance, his job also included the requisite scheduling, log-keeping, and other paperwork tasks that he felt could be done, and done more quickly, off-site.

Now, Barrett says, he and his team see potential for all kinds of teleworking opportunities. Sailors could sign up for telework while working their shore jobs in between deployments, for example. People who work with top secret or secret information would not be eligible, but many of those personnel also tend to work with unclassified information, so during that time, they might be eligible to work from home.

The Navy concurrently is investigating and piloting other flexible arrangements, such as compressed scheduling, flexible work hours, and even career intermission, which would allow Naval personnel to take a break from their careers without losing their place in the promotion chain.

Ultimately, though, these work arrangements, along with telework, are all seen as more than a way to improve morale and benefit the work and personal lives of Naval employees. They will also enable the Navy to hang onto its best people and fulfill its mission as effectively as possible.

Barrett notes that he talked to a lot of people during his Road Show last year, even those who had left the Navy. "We heard a lot of variations on this sentiment: ‘I would have loved to have stayed with this organization. I loved the job I was doing, but based on the career path and the timeline for me to move up, it was too rigid. If only you’d given me just a little bit of flexibility, I would have stayed.’ That kind of flexibility is something that other employers are beginning to offer, so we too have got to have those kinds of work options available if we are going to be an employer of choice, so when it comes time for those decisions to join up and then whether not or to stay, they will choose the Navy."