Defense tech agency expands telework program

The number of employees who qualify for the Defense Information Systems Agency's telework program has increased by more than 1,000 since a policy change last December.

Senior officials hope the expanded telework program will help with retention and recruitment as the agency moves from Northern Virginia to a military base south of Baltimore -- a transition scheduled to be completed in 2010.

Jack Penkoske, DISA's manpower, personnel and security director, said last week that the agency's work away from the office program is "beginning to flourish."

The number of employees now eligible is more than 1,400, out of the agency's total workforce of about 5,000. Before the new policies were announced, about 400 employees qualified.

Since the program was expanded in December, the highest number of employees actually teleworking in a given pay period was 356 in early May, a DISA spokesman said.

Under the new policy, approved employees can work out of the office four days during each two-week-long pay period. The agency's policy is to provide 90 percent of all of its employees with a laptop and docking station. DISA will cover half of teleworkers' home broadband Internet costs, Penkoske said.

Aaron Glover, special assistant to director of manpower, personnel, and security at DISA, said once the agency's director, Lt. Gen. Charlie Croom, put his support behind the new telework policy, managers were instructed to review their workforce and determine which positions were telework-eligible.

"The three-star general that leads the place says the only person that can't telework is his driver," Penkoske said at a panel discussion on telework and continuity of operations planning hosted by the Reston, Va.-based market research firm INPUT. "Our workforce wants to stay with us, but a lot of them will not want to move. What we tried to do is try to make it attractive for them to stay."

Even if a position is deemed eligible for telework, some people holding that job may not qualify. "It depends on performance evaluation and level of maturity," Glover said. "Low-performing employees are not likely to be approved for telework."

While employees in the Patent and Trademark Office's massive telework program must give up their offices for shared cubicles, Glover said employees in the DISA program will not lose their office space.

"We're going to use telework as a retention tool," Glover said. "When you are paying $3.09 for gas, a lot of folks are looking at an opportunity to keep some money in their pockets."

Glover said DISA would be expanding telework even if the agency was not moving as a result of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission's final recommendations.

For security reasons, all employees working off-site are required to connect to the agency's network on an agency laptop using a virtual private network, also known as a VPN.

"Security has always been an issue," Glover said. "The IT specialists are working very diligently making sure that the machines we have are going to have encrypted hard drives to make sure that the data stays safe."

The agency's current policy states that employees should not put information on their hard drives and that they should access information through the network to keep data secure.

The early May theft of personal information on 26.5 million people from the home of a Veterans Affairs Department employee, and several other recently disclosed data breaches at federal agencies, have prompted concerns over information security when employees work away from the office.