Feds and Families

hen President Clinton ordered department and agency heads in 1994 to develop programs allowing employees to better balance their work and family lives, the challenge evoked the lofty ideals of reinventing government. No longer would employees have to battle rush-hour traffic or be docked leave for being a few minutes late in the morning. They could set their own schedules, leave in the middle of the day for an appointment or simply work at home.

In many ways, the government has lived up to those goals. The rate of departments and agencies that offer so-called "family-friendly" programs trounces private-sector employers in many areas, according to federal and nonprofit studies.

Fully 92 percent of agencies offer flexible work schedules that allow employees to change starting and quitting times, sometimes on a daily basis, according to an Office of Personnel Management survey released last year. And 79 percent of agencies offer compressed work schedules that allow employees to put in a 40-hour work week in four days instead of five. More than a third of federal employees work on some sort of flexible schedule, OPM found.

By comparison, only 68 percent of private-sector organizations allow employees to change starting and quitting times, according to a 1998 study by the Families and Work Institute, a New York-based nonprofit organization. And only 24 percent of those organizations allowed the changes on a daily basis, as many federal agencies do.

A 1998 study by the American Management Association also found that 68 percent of the private-sector firms it surveyed offered flexible work hours. Neither study tracked employee usage of the programs.

While federal employees have jumped on the bandwagon of flexible hours, they have shown much less interest in the government's other optional alternative programs. The most-used program after flexible schedules is part-time work. But while 92 percent of agencies offer it, only 3 percent of employees use it. More than 60 percent of agencies offer subsidies for the use of public transportation, but only 2 percent of employees use them. Leave banks, which allow employees to draw on annual leave donated by other employees, are used by only 1 percent of workers. Child care and elder care resource and referral services, offered by fully 83 percent of agencies, have drawn the interest of only 0.1 percent of employees.

In an effort to spur participation in such innovative programs, OPM opened its new Family-Friendly Workplace Advocacy Office on March 1.

Cornerstones

One of the most surprising and complicated findings in OPM's study concerned two cornerstones of the administration's family-friendly program: telecommuting and child-care centers.

While working from home has been a hot trend in the 1990s, only 1.4 percent of federal employees, or about 25,000 workers, have telecommuting arrangements-far short of the administration's stated goal of 60,000 telecommuters by 1998. Yet 73 percent of agencies say they allow telecommuting from home or satellite offices.

In the private sector, studies have shown that 95 percent of Fortune 1000 companies offer telecommuting arrangements, as well as a large number of companies with fewer than 100 employees. However few medium-sized companies allow employees to work away from the office, so the overall private-sector average is about 19 percent, according to David Mead, president of Telecommuting Success Inc., a Colorado-based training and consulting firm. Mead's conclusions are based on an annual study by Olsten Corp. staffing services.

The participation rate in telecommuting among employees in Fortune 1000 firms is 7 percent, which Mead says "is pretty good." Mead found the single biggest obstacle to telecommuting is mid-level management resistance.

When it comes to child-care facilities, the government again outpaces the private sector. As of 1998, 58 percent of agencies offered on- or near-site child care, and two or three new facilities open every year. The Families and Work Institute found only 9 percent of the companies it surveyed offered on- or near-site child care.

Only 1 percent of employees use federal child-care facilities. But that doesn't necessarily mean such programs are underused. Federal child-care administrators note that most centers have waiting lists, although as many as half of child-care slots may be given to children of non-federal employees.

Some employees prefer to leave their children in suburban centers near their homes, rather than in the mostly urban federal centers. Others simply don't want to put their children in day-care facilities. The most common form of child care in the country is care by family or friends, an OPM official says.

Still, government officials, union leaders and child-care advocates say many more employees would use the child-care centers, but can't afford them. The Families and Work Institute found that 9 percent of the firms it studies help employees pay for off-site child care and half of them offer pre-tax savings plans to pay for child care-benefits not available in the government.

OPM says it will continue to urge agencies to improve their child care, telecommuting and other family-friendly policies. "By beating this drum over and over, we want to make sure the benefits are communicated to employees and that managers comply with requests to take advantage of the programs," an OPM official says.

The official attributes the success of flexible schedules to the ease with which they can be implemented, the need for them in high-traffic areas and the benefit for agencies to have longer operating hours. The greater challenge, he says, is encouraging implementation of programs managers don't like, such as telecommuting.

OPM also is looking at several developing family-friendly issues, such as elder care, which 12 percent of employees said in 1992 that they needed. The agency will sponsor a governmentwide child care summit May 12-14 in Kansas City, Mo. OPM is also exploring the issue of breast- feeding arrangements for nursing mothers, which several agencies, such as the National Security Agency, already offer. "We see this as becoming a big workplace issue, and we certainly wouldn't have thought that 10 years ago," the OPM official says.

OPM must report to Congress on the status of family-friendly programs in March 2000.

An Issue of Trust

OPM found that most employee complaints about family-friendly policies come from people who've had their telecommuting requests rejected.

One of the reasons supervisors reject such requests is a lack of trust.

"Some old-timers are really reluctant," says Anne Bartels, director of the Labor Department's WorkLife Center. "They think when employees are out of their sight that there's no work going on. That's craziness and everyone knows it. What are you holding them accountable for, staring at their computers all day?"

The Labor Department has one of the government's strongest telecommuting programs, with about 25 percent of employees, many of them health and safety inspectors, working outside the office at least one day per week. Nearly 85 percent of Labor Department employees work flexible hours, Bartels says.

Managers usually are more open to granting flexible work arrangements if they have benefited from them, personnel managers say.

Theresa Novak, a manager at the Social Security Administration's program service center in Richmond, Calif., convinced her boss in 1988 that she should get six months maternity leave, rather than the three allowed under agency policy, because she had twins. Now Novak works from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. so she can be home for her children after school. Although SSA program service centers have not approved telecommuting because of security concerns, Novak says she tries to grant flexible leave to accommodate employees' personal situations.

"Obviously, you would rather the person be at work, but if they've got problems at home, it's going to show up [in their work] anyway," she says.

The best way to determine if telecommuting will be successful is to fully assess the situation ahead of time, says Vivian Jarcho, assistant director of workforce relations at the Justice Department. Justice is among the 72 percent of departments and agencies that have policies for implementing family-friendly programs, according to OPM.

Under Justice's guidelines, managers should only identify for telecommuting those employees who:

• Demonstrate self motivation, independence and dependability in accomplishing their work.
• Can deal with isolation.
• Have good time-management skills.
• Have overall performance evaluations of fully successful or higher.
• Have clear performance standards.

Potential telecommuters must further demonstrate a "full understanding of the operations of the organization" and indicate an appropriate level of trust in their supervisors. They must also show they have adequate work areas at home and will not allow classified information to leave the office. Then, if they are willing to participate in training and evaluation sessions, they can be approved for telecommuting.

Jarcho says the guidelines ease managers' concerns by making them more secure in their choices of employees for telecommuting. "If there is a problem, it's going to show up pretty quickly," she says. "People are not schizophrenic about how they perform. If they have a strong work ethic, they have it everywhere." The guidelines also are a reminder to employees of their responsibilities, Jarcho says. "We have to stay away from the mentality that this is a right employees have and that once they are approved, there is nothing more for them to do."

Making Telecommuting Work

Kathy Wolf, the Justice Department's WorkLife program manager, received Jarcho's approval to work from home two days per week only after she proved her telecommuting abilities by spending one day a week away from the office.

"Kathy is an excellent example of how an employee can make telecommuting work," Jarcho says. "She's always in contact with me and she makes sure I don't have to worry about how to reach her."

But it took some time for Wolf to figure out how to make her new arrangement work best for her. Concerned that she would be less productive outside the office, Wolf overcompensated.

"Finally, my 7-year-old daughter said to me, 'Mommy, you're always at the computer,'" Wolf says. "And she was right." Wolf set a regular schedule that ends at dinner time, but also allows for some occasional late-evening work.

"It's become a flow for me now," Wolf says. "Work for me is not defined by specific hours in a day. I know what I need to do to get the job done, and I get it done."

To make telecommuting work, Wolf suggests employees keep a set schedule for working at home, making sure to use an office with a door. She also recommends telecommuters go into the agency office at least a couple of days per week and consider not having their office calls forwarded to their home if they need quiet time.

Because agencies do not have to provide equipment for employees to work from home, workers may have to either pay for a computer, fax machine or second phone line themselves or work out an agreement with management to use agency equipment.

Also, there are jobs that don't lend themselves to being done at home or in satellite offices. While attorneys, computer specialists and those who spend most of their time on paperwork may find it easy to telecommute, other employees, such as customer service representatives, are probably out of luck.

Greg Knott, senior adviser to GSA Deputy Administrator Thurman Davis, says he believes many more employees telecommute than are tracked by OPM, which collected data only on formal arrangements. About 800 of GSA's 14,000 employees, or nearly 6 percent, telecommute, mostly by way of a simple agreement between supervisors and a note to human resources departments, he says.

The precedent for telecommuting at GSA started at the top. GSA Administrator David Barram, a Silicon Valley executive before joining the Clinton administration in 1993, directed managers last August to create an agencywide "teleworkforce," adopting a term that emphasizes how employees work, rather than where they work, Knott says.

"This new telework phenomenon is exploding as managers realize that sometimes the most productive environment is not in the office," Barram says.

A GSA office in Fort Worth, Texas, charged with reviewing monthly utility bills in an effort to save money, quickly jumped on the telecommuting bandwagon. The office manager and six employees work from home, saving the agency $25,000 a year in leased space. Productivity in the office is up 25 percent, Knott says.

Whether they arrange property leases, develop contract schedules or provide technical support to other departments, most GSA employees can work outside the office, Knott says. GSA hopes to expand telecommuting to save money on office space.

While some agencies have been skittish about encouraging telecommuting arrangements, many have been enthusiastic supporters of child-care facilities.

Child care provided by federal facilities is widely considered to be among the best available. Federal centers boast of tough standards for staff, buildings and equipment, higher salaries and benefits, and a lower employee turn-over rate than most non-federal facilities.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), the only national child-care accrediting group, has accredited more than 65 percent of the 113 centers run by GSA, based on some 200 standards of criteria. Only about 5 percent of non-federal child-care centers are accredited.

But quality costs. While tuition at the GSA-sponsored child-care centers varies, parents pay on average between $107 per week for a kindergarten-age child and $147 per week for an infant. The price goes as high as $266 per week, depending on location and services offered, GSA figures show.

The average cost of day care for one child in the United States is about $80 a week, says Faith Wohl, president of the Child Care Action Campaign in New York and the former director of GSA's Office of Workplace Initiatives.

Joe Henderson, an attorney in the American Federation of Government Employees' fair practices office, says government centers are simply too expensive for many employees.

"Sure government child care is good," Henderson says. "Just like Tiffany's offers good jewels. But you have to ask, who are your customers? What we have in the federal government is child care for the rich."

The result, Henderson says, is that in the Washington area, "employees end up leaving their kids in the basements of churches outside the Beltway."

The law that created federal child care calls for flat tuition fees based on a child's age and allows no supplemental funding from agencies. Sometimes child-care centers hold fund-raisers for lower-graded employees and donations are available through the Combined Federal Campaign and the United Way, but these efforts don't cover the tuition needs of many employees.

"Is that really a very democratic process for our government?" says Susan Clampitt, who heads GSA's Office of Child Care.

Typically, agencies provide space for child-care centers, cover the costs of utilities and appliances and then lease the space to a nonprofit organization that hires a child-care provider. While rent-free space is attractive, contracts for federal centers are still not as lucrative as many corporate contracts, which subsidize operating costs that otherwise would have to come from tuition, says Michael Day, a vice president of Bright Horizons Family Solutions, a national child-care firm based in Cambridge, Mass.

Day and other proponents of federal child care want legislation to allow GSA and other agencies to pay for all aspects of child-care programs with money appropriated by Congress, as the Defense Department currently does. DoD's child-care workers are employees of the department and receive the full benefits of other federal employees. The employees are given extensive training and turnover rates are low. And the accreditation rate of DoD centers by the NAEYC is higher than 85 percent, say Clampitt and Day. (See "Fighting for Kids," December 1997)

Rep. Connie Morella, R-Md., reintroduced in January a bill that would allow agencies to help employees pay for child care. The House passed an identical bill in October, but it was not taken up by the Senate before Congress adjourned. Sen. James Jeffords, R-Vt., also is expected to reintroduce a bill-passed by the House last fall but rejected by House and Senate negotiators-which would allow agencies more flexibility in designing and implementing new child-care programs.

Whether it is encouraging managers to approve telecommuting arrangements or figuring out ways for employees to afford child care, GSA's Clampitt says there is a strong business case for the government to expand its flexible programs.

"It's about being a good employer," Clampitt says. "It's about recruiting and retaining the best. When people have choices in a tight job market, they're going to consider things like family-friendly policies."

Lisa Daniel is a Washington-area freelance writer who specializes in government personnel issues.