Teleworking not an experiment at National Science Foundation

While many federal government agencies have struggled to boost telework participation into the double-digits, the National Science Foundation today sees just over half (51%) its staff teleworking. That’s a far cry from five years ago, when NSF’s telework program didn’t even exist.

Sue Whitney joined the agency in the summer of 2003 as labor relations officer, a role that included trying to end a stalemate on telework. “Management hadn’t wanted to negotiate a telework agreement, and the union was pushing for it. One of my first assignments was to get something agreed to on telework,” says Whitney, who is also telework coordinator at the agency that fosters science and engineering research.

She soon learned there were three main issues that concerned management: How managers would know if teleworkers were really working; how managers would evaluate the work of off-site employees; and, most importantly, whether a telework program would open the door to a flood of grievances from union members on telework issues.

Click to see: Where the teleworkers are

Federal telework programs are no strangers to grievances, which are formal union complaints that can be taken to an arbitrator for judgment. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), for example, in December was ordered by a federal arbitration panel to allow its legal instrument examiners to telework on a pilot basis -- the culmination of a battle over whether those employees should be allowed to telework given the sensitivity of the material they handle.

That’s just the sort of maelstrom NSF wanted to avoid. But not building a telework program wasn’t an option. U.S. Public Law 106-346, which went into effect in 2000, called for agencies to increase telework participation by 25% of the federal workforce annually, until 100% of eligible employees were participating.

NSF had some catching up to do.

“When we sat down at the negotiating table, I told the union that management’s biggest fear was being grieved on telework, so [management] didn’t want to experiment with it. Eventually the union agreed -- and it was a big concession for them -- to give us two years where people wouldn’t be allowed to grieve issues over the telework program. That let management agree to go for it.”

Both sides were in favor of a flexible program, which has been key to its success, Whitney says. “We opened the program up to everybody. We didn’t put restrictions, such as not allowing managers or supervisors to telework. We said anybody whose job is appropriate, and whose supervisor says it’s ok, can telework.”

Despite pressure to grow the program quickly, NSF has let it grow at its own pace. “We didn’t force telework down anyone’s throat,” Whitney says. “We left it open to be tried, and hoped more and more people would join the bandwagon, which is exactly what has happened.”

Managers talked to their peers in other divisions, learned telework wasn’t causing productivity to fall off, and saw that employees were happy with the program. “It spread by word of mouth through managers,” she says. “We let individual successes be the selling point of the program.”