Telework is about to change your agency

Telework is now the law of the land for federal agencies.

Proponents say telework can do everything from boost productivity to reduce pollution, but establishing a telework policy involves confronting some risks. The IBM Center for the Business of Government has just released a new telework study looking at how four agencies have already started teleworking, what worked well, and what didn't. Study author Dr. Scott Overmyer from the Center for Graduate Studies at Baker College told Federal News Radio the agencies are the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Overmyer said he picked those agencies "because they're fairly diverse in the jobs that they perform and also their telework programs are probably the most mature." The one problem Overmyer said he found faced by the four agencies was management resistance. Not being able to make a leap of faith when it comes to managing employees when out of the office, said Overmyer, was "probably the primary difficulty that most of these agencies had in common."