Federal Agencies’ Remote Work Technology Benefits Other Operational Areas

Telework Soared at Federal Agencies Amid the Pandemic

Telework became the norm during the pandemic, with only 17 percent of the 2.2 million federal employees ­physically at their agencies’ worksites full time, according to the 2020 Office of Personnel Management Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.

About 45 percent of all federal employees — not just those considered telework-eligible — worked remotely at some point during fiscal year 2020, a 23 percent increase, according to OPM’s “Status of Telework in the Federal Government Report to Congress: Fiscal Year 2020.”

“We all got the underlying technologies to make full-time telework for everyone possible,” says Jonathan Alboum, principal digital strategist for the federal government at ServiceNow. “People were able to buy the hardware, they were able to buy the software and implement them in relatively short order.

“But the other piece is the culture and the practices around how agencies work — and those things were less developed and less quick to change.”

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Cloud-based Tools Enable Seamless Telework for Feds

Although federal agencies have ­historically relied on ­custom-developed systems, Alboum says, some are adopting end-to-end digital platforms. These offer security reassurance due to FedRAMP certification, and they are helpful in terms of scale, security and speed to develop and implement new requirements.

While some of these new platforms are ­custom-built for an agency, others turned to commercial upgrades to achieve better security and more speed.

“Before the pandemic, and even during the first part, we were still using Skype for videoconferences,” says Farm Credit Administration CIO Jerry Golley. “We were actually able to hasten our upgrades to use Microsoft Teams about a year ago, and that brought a whole host of improved productivity to folks.”

In addition, FCA upgraded all of its laptops to Lenovo ThinkPads with Windows 10. “At the beginning of the ­pandemic, we had two different laptop models,” Golley says. “In the ­middle of the pandemic, we did a tech refresh. We replaced all laptops with brand-new laptops, a single model.”

Another way that agencies increased mission resiliency by ­eliminating delays caused by illness and other human ­capital factors, Alboum says: digitalized, automated workflows that pull in and ­process data received via email or that use a platform with artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to create a ticket an employee would have done manually.

“This is why low-code platforms are very popular technology today,” he says. “They allow the democratization of application development. I’m putting the tools in the hands of program managers, analysts and others to build systems and apps.”

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Agencies Turn to Proven Solutions to Facilitate Telework 

Early in the pandemic, FCA increased its bandwidth and doubled its Palo Alto Networks’ GlobalProtect VPN security client licenses to give more employees a VPN connection.

The agency also digitized paper-based routing processes. Golley says this has streamlined the work and provided better visibility.

“One of the things you can do when it’s digitized is tell where it is in the route and customize the route midstream,” Golley says. “It allows people to not only see content but approve it via signature or authority approval, or make comments or changes to a document.”

FCA’s efforts to facilitate employees’ work needs have paid off. In the 2020 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government ranking, produced by the Partnership for Public Service and Boston Consulting Group, FCA received the highest score in the COVID Overall category across all agencies, regardless of size. This score ­measured the extent that employees felt their organization ­provided the resources to do their jobs during the pandemic.

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Federal Agencies Embrace a World with More Telework

COVID-19 variants have delayed many agencies’ plans to bring employees back into the office en masse. However, a June memo from OPM, the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration suggested arrangements could include “a balanced mix of working offsite and onsite,” or encompass “teleworking a majority of the time or nearly full-time.”

As such, with the underlying t­echnology to enable employees to ­perform work basically in place, ­agencies may increasingly pivot their focus to developing more formal ­policies and approaches on how full-time ­teleworking and supporting geographically dispersed teams will work.

“You’re going to have a variety. It’s not a one-size-fits-all government,” Alboum says. “But they have to be thinking about the return to work as a starting point for the future of work — which is more about how the mission gets done in a hybrid environment, with either ­different technologies or different ways of serving customers.”

For some, such as GPO, the success of their teleworking efforts over the past two years means that a flexible structure may become the norm.

“As we’re coming out of the ­pandemic, we said, ‘This is one of the aspects we implemented on an emergency basis that is really, really working,’” Halpern says. “We want to put it in place as a more permanent way of ­working at GPO.

“A lot of employees are going to be 100 percent telework, and we’re really looking forward to reaping the benefits. It’s a win-win situation for the agency, our teammates and the customers.”

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