Happy Thursday! After four straight snow days, now seems as good a time as any to talk seriously about teleworking options for federal
workers.
“About one-third of the D.C. area employees at the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration logged on
to their agencies’ mainframe computers, probably from their homes,” The Post’s Joe Davidson writes today.
“If the stats for those agencies are indicative of what happened around
town, then the blizzard of 2010 may mark a real turning point in Uncle
Sam’s approach to telework.”
“About 103,000 — or almost 9 percent — of eligible federal employees telecommuted in 2008, which was an improvement from the year
before,” according to The Post’s Nicole Norfleet.
It’s hard to find a fed who disagrees with the concept — not because it keeps workers away from office politics and the boss, but
because they seem to realize it increases their personal productivity.
I commend PTO for continuing work on their pressing backlog of patents and trademarks during the storms. They are the model that we all need to emulate. Some of us are isolated, ad hoc teleworkers in agencies that are not advocates of telework. It’s tough to continue teleworking when virtually everyone else in your agency shuts down during storms. Also, work needs to be automated and employees connected to the network to make telework effective. Some of us are still tackling these issues.