Telework thrives at Trademark Office

After big technology hurdles, the agency is rewarded with happy employees and dramatic savings.

The U.S. Trademark Office is ahead of its time. In 1997, long before the federal government mandated eligible employees telework, the agency launched a two-year pilot program with 18 trademark attorneys working three days a week from home. Today, the pilot has phased into a permanent program that includes 108 of the 250 attorneys. More are expected to enter the program next year.

Such success would have been enough for many organizations. But the Trademark Office has much bigger plans that could make the central office obsolete – at least in theory. In November 2001, it launched a “hoteling” pilot in which 20 attorneys work mostly from home. When they do commute to the Trademark Office’s facility in Arlington, Va., they reserve office space in advance. When the pilot goes permanent in November 2003, all teleworkers will move to the hoteling scheme. This will let the agency provide one desk for five teleworkers, shutter two or three of its four office floors, and save between $900,000 and $1.3 million annually in real-estate costs.

In conjunction with the hoteling plan, the agency is building an electronic application system that will let attorneys handle every aspect of the trademark application and approval process online. “Significant pieces of the pipeline are in place today,” says Doug Bourgeois, the Trademark Office’s CIO. The system consists of a half-dozen applications, including a search tool, which eventually will be integrated. The electronic application system is a custom-built, Java-based program that Bourgeois’ team is migrating to XML-based forms. When that’s completed, they will build an application that lets attorneys process, review and manage the workflow of an application.

“Attorneys will be able to access their dockets and the complete files for each case electronically,” Bourgeois says. “We’ll want them to be able to download the file and work locally, make changes and corrections, and make it viewable by others.”

In some organizations, there’s no clear-cut way to measure employee productivity, in or out of the office. But because the Trademark Office already measures the number of cases attorneys handle and the type of work they do on them, officials have been able to gauge not only employees’ performance before and after they began teleworking, but compare teleworkers’ performance to that of an in-office control group.

“We found teleworkers had high job satisfaction, the quality of their work was as high as in the office, and productivity was even higher,” says Deborah Cohn, the Trademark Office’s program manager.

Moreover, the program has let the Trademark Office retain valuable employees such as Vivian First, a participant in the initial pilot program. Two years ago, when First’s husband took a job in Harrisburg, Pa., she assumed she’d have to quit hers. But Cohn gave her the option to work from home. Today, First commutes to the office one day a week, which takes one-and-a-half to three hours depending on traffic. It’s a trade-off she’s happy to make.

On her office day, First attends meetings and training sessions, and sees colleagues. “It’s important to touch base with other attorneys on a regular basis. Otherwise, I could end up making my own law,” she jokes.

“What good is a telework program that doesn’t reach beyond the metro area?” Cohn says. “Some of the other Trademark attorneys have been able to move farther away and now enjoy a better lifestyle.”

First concurs. “Since the cost of living is so much lower in Harrisburg, we were able to buy a beautiful old house that we never could have afforded in Potomac, [Md.],” she says.

The Trademark Office’s telework program is a model to emulate. But its success didn’t come easily, and laid a burden on IT. Bourgeois is reluctant to go into specifics, but he admits, “We hit some bumpy roads.”

Typically, telework programs are launched in offices where workers only need remote access to e-mail and Office applications. But trademark attorneys need to access complex databases, making reliable, robust performance and high-speed Internet access paramount.

For remote access to the network, the agency is using Citrix Systems Metaframe and VPN with RSA Security encryption and token authentication. Metaframe minimizes bandwidth requirements – a must-have for Trademark teleworkers. “But it took a long time to configure it properly to best support our applications,” Bourgeois says. “I don’t want to bash Citrix. They’d never seen applications like these before.”

Bourgeois has a full-time telework project coordinator whose job it is to work with Verizon to get the home-office communications lines up and running. One of the biggest headaches has been Verizon’s claims that DSL service is available at workers’ locations, only to come back two months later and rescind. “We promise them DSL, then have to say, nope, here’s your ISDN line,” Bourgeois says.”Without good communication from our team, users’ frustration levels would go through the roof.”

“If I’m sitting across the table from a CIO in an organization who’s just embarking on a telework program, I’d say expect a lot of trial and error,” he adds.

Despite the jolts, Bourgeois is proud of his team’s accomplishments. “It’s a tremendously successful program. Employees love it. We’ve been able to translate that commute time into…life time,” he says.