Like it or not, more federal workers telecommuting

Boosting the ranks of federal employees who telework is a slow, sometimes painful process, despite numerous incentives and legislative edicts lobbed at U.S. agencies over the years.

Take the situation at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which last month was ordered by a federal arbitration panel to allow its legal instrument examiners to telework on a pilot basis.

ATF was against letting these specialists telework because it says the material they need to remove from agency offices in order to telework posed a security risk. The Federal Service Impasses Panel (FSIP) became involved at the request of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which successfully argued its case for allowing the examiners to telework on a pilot basis.

Once the six-month pilot concludes, the union intends to propose that these ATF employees be allowed to telework on a permanent basis, according to Colleen Kelley, the union’s president. “Now that this case has been decided favorably, I am hopeful that ATF will work with NTEU on strategies to make telework succeed for all employees, rather than focusing on ways to prevent employees from being part of the program,” Kelley says.

Click to see: Results of a recent study conducted by the Telework Exchange.

A history of resistance

ATF isn’t the first — nor will it be the last — federal agency to be strong-armed into letting more employees telework.
By law, all executive agencies should be enabling eligible employees to telecommute. Public Law 106-346, which went into effect Oct. 23, 2000, called for agencies to increase telework participation by 25% of the federal workforce annually, until 100% of eligible employees “participate in telecommuting to the maximum extent possible without diminished employee performance.”

More than seven years later, federal telework adoption is still painfully lagging. Only 9.5% of the more than 1.2 million federal employees who were eligible in 2005 to work from an alternative site did so at least once a month, according to survey data released last year by the Office of Personnel Management.

Legislators have made continued efforts to speed up adoption (and penalize those that don’t comply), including the proposed Telework Enhancement Act, which was approved by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in November.

Senators Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) proposed the legislation, which would require all executive and legislative agencies to institute a telework policy, provide training for participating employees and managers, and ensure that each employee review include a discussion of telework feasibility.

Most significantly, the Telework Enhancement Act would change the telework eligibility rules to make all federal employees eligible unless shown otherwise by their employer. Currently, the law states that all employees are ineligible to participate in the telework program unless deemed otherwise by their employing federal agency.

But industry watchers note it may be demographic trends, not legislative mandates, that finally accelerate telework adoption in the federal government.