FEDTECH: What proportion of your agency usually teleworks?
BOTTOM: I started here on Jan. 6. There were a lot of folks that would telecommute as needed, or a couple of days a week as mission allowed. It wasn’t full-time telework, by any stretch of the imagination. The default right now is for folks to telework, not to come into the office. That’s true both in our headquarters in D.C. and in our regional offices across the country.
FEDTECH: Did you have any concerns about making the transition?
BOTTOM: We had not done this before, certainly not to this scale. You’re always worried about network capacity, because the design of the network is primarily around folks being in the office. It turned out that, from a network standpoint, it went fine. We really haven’t had the performance issues that we could have had. I think that speaks well to the investments that the agency has made overall to keep people productive. People teleworked a couple of times a week, so they were practiced at it, and the capabilities were there. We’ve been working hard to make sure we’re maintaining stability of the infrastructure and maintaining our security posture.
FEDTECH: What remote work tools did you have in place, and did you have to adopt any new tools?
BOTTOM: We haven’t really had to adopt any new tools. Virtual private networking is pretty widely deployed. Our collaboration service is Webex, and we’ve continued to leverage that. From a telework standpoint, people are learning the ins and outs of Webex — making sure to turn the camera on and off, making sure you’re muting and unmuting, all those things that come with being on camera all of the time. We’ve put out a number of tips and tricks for getting the most out of your desktop suite, emphasizing that people are coming in remote, make sure you reboot your laptop once in a while to free up memory, those types of things.
FEDTECH: Have you had to step up IT training?
BOTTOM: It comes in two areas. Certainly, training around the tools themselves — most of that is online. “Here’s where the button is, here’s what the button is intended to do,” the mechanics of using the tools. And then our HR department has done a wonderful job with the workforce on what it means to communicate with people who are remote — keep in mind things that are different when communicating remotely as opposed to being in the same room, what that means in terms of how you run a meeting, making sure people are involved, moving projects along. That’s an investment our HR department has made.