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Thoughts on government teleworking from the Telework Exchange event

I attended a Telework Exchange meeting the morning of January 25^th that was enlightening and productive. The Telework Exchange is a forum for both industry and government to share information about telework initiatives going on in the public sector. There are lots of things that came up in the discussion that I could write pages about, but two especially noteworthy items popped up.

ROI for telework

The first topic is ROI (Return on Investment) for telework programs inside of Federal government agencies. Government agencies are under the gun to implement a dozen unfunded mandates, only one of which is telework.  While telework is desirable to most agency chiefs, if it’s unfunded and another mandate is believed to have larger cost savings or benefits, who could blame the agency for prioritizing other mandates ahead of telework?

I believe telework has been mischaracterized as a benefit to only the worker and the environment. I believe telework can give an agency cost savings, better worker efficiency and bring along other benefits like higher security inside and out of an agency. SwishData has been assisting government agencies in implementing some of the solutions required for telework already, and we have experience creating business cases.

During the Telework Exchange meeting, there seemed to be excitement about putting together some guidelines around how to show ROI and a business plan for telework programs. The Telework Exchange leadership is going to create a working group to form these potential guidelines to assist government agencies. I’ll try to blog more about the guidelines developing after the first working group meets.

Mobile vs. virtual workers

The second topic of note from the meeting was the idea of mobile vs. virtual workers. Mobile is defined as someone who has the tools to work from home and probably does once or twice a month. Virtual is defined as someone that works from home nearly all the time and only comes in the office once or twice a month, usually in a hotel cube. This is fairly intuitive, and probably results in a ‘duh,’ but there are some aspects of it that are not.

First, government agencies don’t have many virtual workers, mostly because of fear of the unknown and legacy remote user designs that cost too much and perform poorly. Once a better-performing, more cost-efficient remote system is in place, moving some of those workers to virtual will be more enticing.  Obviously, some people cannot be virtual workers effectively, but many can. The first step to finding out who can go full-time virtual is to get them remote-capable, give them the best possible solution and then see which employees fit. I believe we can go from a large percentage of government workers as office-bound with antiquated remote capabilities, to a significant percentage as effective virtual workers, saving the government even more than just giving them the ability to work remote.

This is the hidden costs savings that will be harder to quantify now, but will be reaped over the long term of a well-designed telework solution. (See how I wrapped that into my first topic?) And when I say long term, I’m not talking 10 years from now. It should happen much faster than that. Government agencies are being squeezed into getting more done with less funding. Telework is one of those solutions that can give rewards now and later. SwishData can help your agency develop a Telework solution that works, and soon, together with the other Telework Exchange participants, we will have some guidelines to assist with the ROI and business case to make it happen. 

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Image courtesy Flickr user Seth W.