City of Austin bounces back

The City of Austin's telework program is a model to emulate, in good times and bad. Three years ago, when most government offices dismissed telework as too costly, Austin launched an aggressive pilot program with only an $85,000 grant from the Texas State Energy Conservation Office.

Rather than burn through the money buying laptop PCs, the city instead funded a mandatory telework training program and bought a corporate license of GoToMyPC, the PC remote control service that lets employees access office workstations from their home computers. (GoToMyPC is now part of Citrix Systems.) Employees used their personal computers and broadband connections; the city pays for help desk support. 

Hundreds of employees took the training and began working from home three or four days per week. But then fortune frowned. A fiscal crisis resulted in back-to-back years of layoffs, restructuring and a dramatic scaling back of the city's telework program. More than 50 teleworkers were called back to the office, many others cut back, some upper level managers were prohibited from teleworking altogether.

"The downturn changed the face of telework," says Pharr Andrews, the city's telework program manager. "We lost a lot of people. The air quality program, which had four people, dropped down to one, so of course that person had to come back to the office. People came back in because they needed to handle their own administrative work, to man the phones. Every month, the telework training classes got smaller and smaller. Telework came to a crawl."

More than 200 of the city's 11,000 employees were laid off in 2002 and 2003. But the telework pilot hung on, and this year even began growing again. Initially used to decrease vehicular emissions, telework also became a tool to help Austin city agencies, particularly the health and IT departments, deal with employees' increased workloads.

"After the restructuring lots of people were working late every night and coming in on the weekends. It didn't matter that people got laid off. Deadlines still needed to be met," Andrews says.