Employees in the dark on telework policies

The majority of federal employees could telework part- or full-time, but more than one-third are unaware of their agency's policy on the practice, according to a new study.

"We've done a pretty good job getting out to federal employees the benefits of telework," said Joel Brunson, president of Tandberg Federal, a global video-conferencing firm with offices in Reston, Va. "They're starting to see that, and we're starting to get some traction. But what we're still struggling with is that one out of three is still not aware of their agency's telework program." Tandberg Federal and Telework Exchange released the study Monday.

The survey, which included 664 federal employees from 65 civilian and Defense Department agencies, found that 37 percent of respondents were not aware of their agency's telework policy, and 42 percent did not know their eligibility. According to an assessment tool in the survey, 90 percent of those respondents unaware of their eligibility could in fact telework, and 75 percent of those could telework on a full-time basis.

Tandberg and the Telework Exchange evaluated eligibility by asking respondents about their access to e-mail and phone, their ability to access their agency's IT infrastructure remotely, the safety of their alternate work environment and the degree of control over their schedules. According to those results, 96 percent could telework at least some of the time.

Still, eligibility does not mean that the path to telework is smooth, Brunson said.

"It's not as easy as waving a magic wand and saying 'go forth and telework, you're blessed,' " he said. "We've seen some modes of communication that have fallen down, that weren't robust….You need some redundancy built in, whether it's e-mail, phone [or] remote access."

The benefits of telework are considerable, the survey emphasized. Individual federal employees would save an average of $5,878 in commuting costs annually and produce 9,060 fewer pounds of pollutants if they worked outside of the office three days a week.

"The federal government telework deficit is equivalent to the gross domestic product of Jamaica," said Stephen W.T. O'Keeffe, executive director of the Telework Exchange. "To offset the amount of CO2 emissions feds disperse in the environment by commuting, we would need to plant 32 million trees a year."

Brunson said he thought that benefits like those, and conversations between managers and employees, could help expand telework dramatically.

"We're not in grade school anymore where you get a gold star for perfect attendance," he said. "But on the flip side, the employee has a responsibility to plan their work, to meet deadlines. It's a two-way street. If people sit down and they have a thoughtful conversation and say this is what I need done and these are the deadlines I need met, a lot of the reluctance of the managers goes away."