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Feds Can’t Work from Home. Good Policy?
President Trump has ordered all federal workers back to the office. On the one hand, I know of specific instances of the remote work option being absurdly abused. On the other hand, there can be some efficiencies if the option is well thought out. For selfish reasons, I kinda liked the COVID era when roads on commuter routes were sparsely used, and I had Metro cars almost all to myself. I never stopped going to my downtown DC office, with the sole exception of a DC government-mandated shutdown period early in the pandemic. The thought of everybody suddenly coming back downtown is not a happy one for me.
At present, commuter traffic and Metro use drops noticeably on Fridays, presumably a popular day to “work from home.” I wonder if something like that will continue.
COVID shutdowns forced the exploration of remote work which seemed to evolve pretty quickly for tasks amenable to Zoom communications and electronic document exchange. Companies evolved (and millennials discovered a new entitlement). And many federal government office buildings simply emptied out. Local lunch counters and convenience stores went out of business.
At the VA, some employees moved to other states while keeping jobs at the DC HQ. For them, remote access was interrupted only by a subsequent requirement to be physically present once every 30 days, which strikes me as both arbitrary and minimalist at the same time. Across the government, supervisors do not have much discretion or leeway for setting personnel policy under rapidly changed circumstances, so the likelihood of gaps in personnel management seems rather high. I suspect there are more than a few federal employees “working remotely” who may even have other jobs and have not done any actual government work for extended periods. A shakeup and shakeout may be a good thing. However, I do sympathize with those who have not abused the policy and remained productive—for whom this mandate will be inconvenient.
My guess is that the Trump back-to-the-office order will soon be tempered by better policies governing remote work in the context of broader civil service reforms. At least, I hope that is what will happen.
Published in General
I’d like the feds to claw back the per diems on DC COLA to people living/“working” in FL or AL. Or ID. I’d also like the # of new hires in the last year who have never been seen inside an office or met their supervisor in person.
Most offices, in my experience, have that creative-problem-solving-at-the-water-cooler thing going on (but do I want that from Fed agencies?!). I really view this as the first round of thinning the ranks. Some will resign over this, maybe many.
One on twitter complained about having to pay for child care. So, was she devoting work time to take care of young kids? If Trump loses in courts thanks to Biden’s union deal, they should have a reverse COLA. Deduct savings made due to no daily commute. If no proof of daycare bills, deduct childcare savings. If living out of area, claw back DC area COLA.
This was my take, also.
FWIW,
https://twitter.com/TorstenProchnow/status/1882513038399467832?
Work from home for the feds has probably been expanded too broadly and abused, but the bottom line is that the abuses are a product of poor management and evaluation tools. If you can’t tell that someone is actually working, that’s a bigger problem than just tele-work. You really need to assess how you measure productivity and whether the job is actually needed to begin with.
As a full-time remote worker, I have long argued against blanket back-to-the-office policies in the corporate world. It would make no sense for me to drive in to an office every day, because the kind of work I do does not require face-to-face collaboration, and the people I work with are all in other states (or other countries). But I recognize that not all jobs are the same, so an all-size-fits-all policy is not the right way to go. This should be based on the nature of the job, and in general the decision should be made by department managers, not corporate executives. It should also be based on the professionalism of the employees and how much supervision they need.
But I’m not sure the same would apply for government workers. Certainly I think the numbers would work out differently; my hunch is that most government jobs are better done in the office. Perhaps more importantly, most government employees are not known for their work ethic, since they are generally free of accountability; so I would expect fewer to be approved for remote work (compared to in the corporate world). In general I am not a fan of a blanket policy because it’s too blunt an instrument, but maybe the provision for exceptions is the right way to approach it.
I’m all for private businesses doing whatever they want. Government doesn’t have the flexibility to pay GS workers on a sliding scale depending on whether they are inconvenienced with a commute or sitting at home. Too much expensive government property is sitting empty.
What is better?
You can argue that office buildings are an unnecessary overhead or that time lost to commuting is a drag on the economy or that the placement of government workers near lobbyists forces higher employee pay, but you did not. But, those things can be offset by moving government work to other locations. The question is, how much inefficiency does remote work cause? Are employees 50% less productive? Also, we have cities, because the concentration of talent leads to innovation. Perhaps that does not apply to government and thus that is not a benefit of having government work located in cities.
My bottom line, is that if we care about efficiency in government we need those lazy SOBs to punch a clock and go to the office, until we can unleash Skynet to monitor and fire employees for slacking. In the meantime move government work to cheap places to live and build.
Each agency should identify jobs that can be done remotely and offer them at a lower pay scale than office jobs. For example, if an agency needs 8 biddlyboppers, let 4-5 slots be in office and the rest be remote but for lesser pay. Require supervisors/department heads to work in the office.
This is a very complicated issue, and I’m sure that Donald Trump, former Manhattan real estate mogul, is aware of all the aspects of it.
I know about many of these because of some books I read in the late nineties when London was experimenting with remote-office work as a way of dealing with inner-city congestion, air pollution, and rising energy costs. I know about a few others from my personal experience of working from an office as a normal employee and then working for the same company as a freelancer (or “independent contractor”). I’ve been wondering about these issues since the pandemic and the change for so many office workers to remote work.
I’ve also been wondering if the offices would ever come back to life, and from what I’ve read, they have not. There’s a lot of unused office space in every major city in America right now. This has turned into a long-term problem.
The public and private sectors have been futzing with these issues throughout the last five years and not really resolving most of them one way or the other in the belief that office life would return to pre-pandemic levels and with the knowledge we need think anew about some of them.
I read a report a few years ago written for chief executive officers (CEOs) in which the researchers said that remote work was here to stay and that these issues needed to be resolved. In the private sector, it would be a competitive issue–companies who could offer this perk would attract the top talent.
The message to the CEOs was that they had to figure it out one way or another. Government, of course, has different concerns, especially so in the executive branch agencies that have law enforcement responsibilities as their raison d’etre.
For the boomer generation, office life was a fact of life. But their kids have said in every way possible that the most valuable “pay” they can have is actually time. They want more of it, and that means not sitting in commuter traffic for hours. They want to go to their kids’ Little League games.
But this will not be a smooth transition, either in government or business, for many reasons:
One, security. Unoccupied offices are a security problem when there are too many of them in one spot in a building.
Two, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) considerations and Workmen’s Compensation issues. Who monitors these home offices to ensure that they comply with all of the rules and regulations? And what happens if someone gets hurt in his or her home office? Who pays for the injury?
Three, budget. Why continue to maintain an office if no one is using it?
And finally, four, taxation. This is where remote work for employees gets most interesting to me as a freelancer (or independent contractor).
The tax implications in the private sector are enormous and complex. If the company requires the employee to do or have certain home office things in order to work from home, those are considered “expenses,” and the reimbursement for those expenses are not taxable income to the employee. But sorting those out is a messy accounting situation, which is why companies prefer to deal with independent contractors like me. But I also get to deduct any work-related expenses from my taxable income.
When I left the company’s office to become a freelancer, I couldn’t believe how much money I saved by working from home. Clothing, meals and snacks, and transportation for starters.
Employees are investing an enormous amount of their own money in their jobs, money that is never reimbursed by the company but money they have to spend in order to do their jobs effectively. When I started freelancing, I thought to myself, “Wait until employees see how much independent contractors can deduct from their income for work-related necessities. They will all want to be self-employed.” :) Which means that the government will taxing less income and will be losing some of its cash flow. The Treasury is saying “Ouch.” :)
The tax rules are that an independent contractor must have a room dedicated just to his or her office work in order to deduct those expenses (something I have always had).
I don’t know how these tax laws are being applied for businesses in the pandemic and post-pandemic work-from-home era.
For employees: they should be reimbursed by their employer for any expenses required by those employers, and I would think that would include the government itself. And that’s not taxable income.
I could write volumes on this subject, and many volumes have indeed been written.
My point is that I am sure that Donald Trump has been hearing from all sides on this issue, and I trust that his return-to-the-office mandate was based on those concerns. Given Donald Trump’s money orientation, I’m guessing the bottom line for him might be, “Why are we paying to provide an office for employees who don’t need them and aren’t using them?”
It is super complicated.
Which will likely increase the costs, in those areas. The people already there, will not appreciate that.
I am in favor of mandatory “work in the office.”
Even though my daughter has been a full time remote worker (for an insurance/financial services company) for over twelve years. Her employer developed “remote work” specifically to avoid losing her as an employee (she had worked for them for five years) when she informed them she was getting married and moving to the location of her new husband’s work (he works with supercomputers that cannot be accessed remotely).
I recognize that I am old, and have never completely mastered running my life on-line. I have been out of the paid workforce since 2018, but some remote work was even then beginning to come into my workspace (I managed a corporate law department for a large corporation). One of my recurring problems was difficulty of finding people when I needed their input. It was inefficient for me and others involved in a matter to have to wait, often not knowing how long it would take to get the proper input. And not seeing body language and facial expressions limited the amount of useful information transferred.
My 41 year old son-in-law (the one who works with supercomputers) often expresses frustration
I developed a pattern of bringing in treats on occasion (once a month or so; doughnuts seemed most effective) and putting them near the coffee machines because I was impressed with the collaborations that would arise when people in the department happened to meet over the treats.
As to government employees, in my corporate role, I dealt with a particular government agency that was on the leading edge of remote work. A problem I ran into was that due to the limited ability of the agency employees who worked remotely to “walk down the hall” to discuss a novel issue with their colleagues. So I had to deal with some remote employees who developed quite bizarre interpretations of agency policies and rules that were way outside the mainstream. Those employees could not be convinced that their views were inconsistent with others within the agency. And since they rarely interacted in casual encounters with other agency employees, they could not see that their interpretations were outside the mainstream of their colleagues.
Recently (over a period of three years) a friend of mine who retired from the federal government had a problem with his government pension. The person he is dealing with at the pension office is a remote employee. That remote employee also has taken a bizarre interpretation of the rules governing my friend’s pension, and he thus my friend continues to be unable to resolve the matter. The remote government employee does not see other employees in casual settings (such as a water cooler or a restroom or a coffee machine or the building cafeteria) in which the employee might get an inkling that the employee’s views might be out of the mainstream. Appeals to a supervisor go nowhere. [A side interest is that this government employee is the very same person who processed my friend’s retirement twenty years ago, and today that employee has exactly the same title and position the employee did twenty years earlier. In other words, the employee has not been promoted or advanced in twenty years. I can think of multiple possible explanations, some of which are not flattering to the employee, and some of which illustrate the risks of being a remote out-of-sight-out-of-mind employee.]
Mentioning the restroom reminded me of something a visiting professor observed when I was still an undergraduate 45 years ago. He was conducting a study of corporate executives and how they made decisions, which he did by following the executives around throughout the day. At the beginning of his studies he waited in the executive’s office when the executive when to the restroom. But the professor quickly discovered that the executives were encountering people in the restroom or in the hallway on the way to or from the restroom, and conducting important parts of their business on the spot. So the professor realized that to be complete in his study he had to follow the executives, even when they were just running down the hall to the restroom.
I.e., the casual encounters that occur in the office are often important to getting work done.
Working from home has lower costs for transportation etc, but could easily have higher costs for heating/cooling etc that would not be used if nobody was there during working hours.
A blanket policy is more gentle than a baseball bat policy, unless of course, you beat the people under the blanket with a bat.
Government pay should be market competitive. That is govt. should pay the minimum to hire and retain the requisite talent level.
Have you ever lived in a town with lots of empty space? That doesn’t happen.
I know this: If Charles says that the moderators can no longer work remotely, but have to come into the office, it’s going to be tough. I don’t even know if Ricochet has a physical office.
Where should the office be located? My vote is a Waffle House.
They don’t serve alcoholic beverages there. You don’t expect us to do this job sober, do you?
Ricochet would be overwhelmed with volunteers to moderate. It might just crash the Internet.
Isn’t it on some beach in St. Augustine? St. Augustine is so beautiful. We visited the city a year ago and really loved it. If it’s there, you would enjoy your “office.” :) And there’s lots of drinking going on everywhere. :)
A very high percentage of Waffle House regulars arrive already intoxicated. Perhaps write that into the job description.
I realized I somehow dropped out of an edit I was making in my comment #15:
My 41 year old son-in-law (the one who works with supercomputers; a Millennial and thus not yet of my old age) often expresses frustration with how it is difficult to find a coworker who has needed information, as some of them do not need access to the supercomputer, and are allowed to work remotely. He also has his doubts about whether his remote co-workers are actually working.
Our department (when I was employed) almost lost its space in one of the company facilities (in favor of some research laboratories), which would have required a couple of the employees in my group to work from home. One of those employees had a problem with that possibility because the employee’s house had neither the space nor the air conditioning to make working from home during the day comfortable. Nor at the time did the employee’s house have internet of sufficient bandwidth to satisfy the company’s communication requirements. Had the company gone through with eliminating my department’s office space and requiring the employees of my department to work from home, we would have had a significant issue with a key employee about upgrades to her house that she considered important to establishing a satisfactory work environment.
Many years ago my brother’s company closed the regional office from which my brother worked, requiring him to set up an office at home. His house was not configured for a home office, so he was uncomfortable for a while until his child left for college. Client confidentiality also was a concern when his office was at home.
Some of them probably aren’t. “Remote work” also would make it easier for them to hire someone in India to do the actual work, for a fraction of what they’re being paid.
That would seem to be a likely problem with a lot of government work.
I think the COVID era work from home policies have been badly abused. Perhaps not all federal employees need to always work from the office, but before a balance can be struck we have to lean toward office full time for everyone and work backwards thoughtfully from there.