HUD irks managers with bar on teleworking

The Housing and Urban Development Department's telework program, launched nearly four years ago, has paved the way for one out of every six employees to work away from the office at least one day a week.

But a policy forbidding those with supervisory duties to work away from the office has irritated some managers.

Managers are needed in the office to perform their supervisory duties, said Keith Nelson, assistant secretary of administration at HUD. "If you are a supervisor, you're not eligible to apply for telework," he told Government Executive in an interview Tuesday.

Other HUD employees with customer-oriented duties also are barred from telework, but the agency is always open to reviewing its policies, Nelson said.

Nelson said supervisors as far as seven management layers away from the department secretary are permitted to approve an employee's request to participate in the telework program, which allows a maximum of three days a week away from the office.

The agency is training supervisors and employees to create measurable work assignments that can be completed outside the office, and the program has proven to be fairly popular, Nelson said. Currently, 1,290 out of 8,500 agency employees nationwide are approved for the telework program, which was launched in May 2002.

Most telework-approved employees prefer to work away from the office two days a week, Nelson said.

Some in the agency's management ranks are not pleased with the policy barring them from teleworking.

A manager in HUD's Detroit office, who requested anonymity, said the policy restricting supervisors from teleworking is "ludicrous."

He said some managers are required to supervise employees who are working off-site and the policy ignores their need for a less stressful environment and fewer commutes. It also disregards the fact that their jobs, which involve reviewing staff work, preparing evaluations and communicating with grantees, are often more portable than nonsupervisors', he said.

"As part of the management team, it is difficult to understand the reluctance to provide the same benefits to managers that are made available to bargaining unit staff," the HUD manager said. "This situation has a profound impact on the morale of management employees in HUD."

Other agencies are less restrictive.

Carletha McGriff, the telework coordinator at the Agriculture Department's Telework Center at the George Washington Carver Center, said she sees no reason managers need to always be in the office. She said a GS-15 Agriculture employee occasionally works out of the Beltsville, Md., office complex.

Recently expanded telework programs, such as the Patent and Trademark Office's aggressive initiative to have 500 employees working remotely by September, are open to supervisors.

Stewart Levy, director of the search and information resources administration under the agency's patents commissioner, said the patent office used to train managers to supervise employees by seeing "the whites of their eyes." But last year the agency had hundreds of patent managers work away from the office to test the security of an encrypted virtual private network.

Dianne Johnson, the training manager for FPMI, a Huntsville, Ala.-based company that will provide PTO with telework training courses, said government agencies should determine telework eligibility based on employees' individual responsibilities, rather than their job titles.

"Managers are afraid that if they cannot see a person every day something will go amiss," Johnson said. "What you have to put in place, as opposed to just a person in the office, is standards and you have to look for results. A manager should be able to do that from anywhere."

The Defense Information Systems Agency, which recently expanded its telework program to help retain employees as it relocates its offices from Northern Virginia to a military base south of Baltimore, has always allowed managers and supervisors to telework, according to a spokeswoman.

A Government Accountability Office review (GAO-05-1055R), reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission's policy restricting managers and supervisors from recurring telework schedules was dropped in 2005, and that the SEC, along with the Justice Department, is addressing managerial resistance to telework participation with improved training.

According to a Smithsonian Institution official, managers there are allowed to telework with approval from their supervisors. Since the program is not centrally managed, the agency does not tally the number of participants.

At the Energy Department, each division is allowed to determine eligibility, according to Bruce Murray, the agency's telework coordinator.