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Telework leads to more productive and happier government workers

Leave traffic behind, and save your agency some money

In social situations, when people find out that someone works from home sometimes or all the time, the usual comment is, “Lucky you!” What people don’t realize is that it’s more “lucky employer” than lucky employee. Working from home, or teleworking, sounds great to most people, but as long as the employee doesn’t disregard his or her responsibilities completely, it usually means more productivity and sometimes more hours, not fewer.

I was reminded of this recently when I read an article in Inc. magazine that talked about not setting employees hours and how that tends to get more productivity out of them. I agree. When you set hours for employees, you get time. When you set goals and responsibilities, you get production. That led me down the path of thinking further about telework for the government. Telework can save money and overhead for government agencies just like it does for companies, but more importantly, it will offer happier and more productive government workers too.

Add in the ability to have employees work on what would be liberal leave days (e.g., snow days), or any day that would have been lost to the employee not being in the office, and you start to see how much more you can get out of a teleworking individual. Employees are willing to trade those extra hours for not commuting on traffic-clogged roads and the ability to have lunch at home, sometimes with their families.

So the tradeoff creates a happier employee who tends to work harder. If the employee is 100-percent, or a majority, telework, you can reduce cubes and add guest cubes for when they do need to come in the office.  Now you’re reducing floor space, corporate phones, networking and more in the office.  More for less — how can you go wrong?

There are roadblocks, but we’re here to help

Ah, but there are some challenges that the government faces deploying telework. First and foremost is the control over data that ends up outside the walls of the government organization. Second is the cost of supporting telework vs. constrained budgets. Laptops cost more than desktops. Network connectivity for VPN is expensive. We have solutions to several of these and other problems here at SwishData in our telework solutions practice. Look for more blogs in the future that address both of these issues, or contact us for more details. You can also link up with me on Facebook and Twitter.

Image courtesy Flickr user cathyse97.