Hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Federal Workforce- Telework: Breaking New Ground?

Interview

Hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Federal Workforce- Telework: Breaking New Ground?

REP. DAVIS: (Sounds gavel.) The subcommittee will come to order.

Ranking Member Marchant will probably be here soon, but we're going to proceed, and depending on where we are, we may obviously interrupt so that he can give an opening statement should he choose to do so.

So let me welcome Mr. Marchant and members of the subcommittee, hearing witnesses, and all of those in attendance. Welcome to the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia Subcommittee hearing on "Telework: Breaking New Ground." The hearing will examine why telework, which has strong support of Congress and personnel experts as a strategy for addressing emergency preparedness and energy consumption, is not being universally embraced and implemented by federal agencies.

Hearing no objection, the chair, ranking member and subcommittee members will each have five minutes to make opening statements, and all members will have three days to submit statements for the record.

I'm going to begin, and then we will follow along as members are present.

Ranking Member Marchant, members of the subcommittee and hearing witnesses, welcome to the subcommittee's hearing on telework. Today's hearing will examine why telework continues to be underutilized by federal agencies and the improvements that are needed to allow more federal employees to participate in telework programs.

Telework provides numerous benefits, including increased flexibilities for both employers and employees, continuity of operations during emergency events, and decreased energy use and air pollution. The Office of Personnel Management -- OPM -- defines telework as work arrangements in which an employee regularly performs officially assigned duties at home or other worksites geographically convenient to the residence of the employee.

Many of the current federal programs were developed in response to a provision included in an appropriations bill enacted in October 2000. This law requires each executive branch agency to establish a telework policy under which eligible employees may participate in telecommuting to the maximum extent possible without diminishing employee performance. Under the current legislative framework, the General Services Administration -- GSA-- and OPM have leading roles in implementing governmentwide telework initiatives.

Unfortunately, telework is not being used to the extent it should be. According to OPM's most recent report, only about 119,000 of the approximately 1.8 million federal employees participated in telework in 2005. That figure represents only 6.6 percent of federal agency employees. Some of the barriers to telework include office coverage, organizational culture, management resistance, and technology security and funding.

Today we want to examine ways to address these barriers and encouraging teleworking. On May 7th, 2007, I -- along with my colleague Ranking Member Kenny Marchant and the full committee chairman and ranking minority members Henry Waxman (sic/committee chairman) and Tom Davis -- sent a letter to 25 federal departments and agencies requesting information on the telework programs of those agencies. The letter was intended to help us better understand how well agency telework programs were working.

What we found is that not only is telework inconsistently defined across agencies, many agencies do not effectively measure and track teleworkers. Some agencies do not even know how many of their employees are actually teleworking.

In recent years, telework has increasingly been viewed as an important tool for ensuring continuity of essential government services in a time of crisis, such as in the event of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. To help improve the preparedness of the federal government's operation in emergency situations, last session I introduced H.R. 5366, the Continuity of Operations Demonstration Project Act. This legislation provided for a demonstration project under which at least two federal agencies would perform services and operations under a simulated emergency in which federal employees would have to work at locations away from their usual workplace, including home, for at least 10 consecutive days.

A number of agencies have taken the initiative to perform demonstration exercises in the last several years, but there are still many agencies that have not done so. I would like to see more agencies test their ability to continue operations in an emergency and incorporate telework into their continuity of operations plans.

I am pleased that Representative John Sarbanes along with Chairman Henry Waxman and Representative Frank Wolf will join me in introducing the Telework Improvement Act of 2007. This legislation will bring together the efforts of my colleagues and breaks new ground by ensuring that eligible federal employees have the opportunity to telework and that agencies are incorporating telework into their continuity of operations planning.

Several other legislative proposals have been introduced in the House and in the Senate. This issue is receiving some well-deserved attention.

The federal government can set the example for teleworking. There are some very successful agency and sub-agency telework programs that can serve as models for the public and private sector.

I thank you and look forward to the testimony of today's witnesses. We are fortunate to have a distinguished group of witnesses with us today, and I certainly want to thank you for being here.

And now it's my pleasure to yield such time as he might consume to the ranking member, Mr. Marchant, for any opening statement he'd like to make.

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REP. DAVIS: Thank you very much, Mr. Sarbanes.

And we'll now prepare to hear from our witnesses, but let me just indicate that we had hoped to have Representative Frank Wolf as our first witness because he has been a pioneer in promoting these concepts and ideas and, unfortunately, could not be here at the moment, and so he might still get an opportunity to come in. And should he's (sic) able to do so, then we look forward to hearing from him.

Our panelists are, first of all, Mr. Daniel Green -- is the deputy associate director of the Center for Employee and Family Support and Policy for the Office of Personnel Management. Mr. Green is currently responsible for developing federal employee benefits policy, covering the multibillion-dollar retirement and insurance programs administered by OPM. He is also responsible for promoting important employee and family support programs like telework.

Mr. Green, thank you so much.

We have Mr. Stan Kaczmarczyk. He is the current acting deputy associate administrator for the U.S. General Services Administration's GSA office of Government-wide Policy. Mr. Kaczmarczyk has policymaking authority over several key areas, including personal and real property, travel and transportation, information technology, regulatory information and use of federal advisory committees.

Ms. Bernice Steinhart is the director of strategic issues and has held a variety of leadership positions within the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Congress's analytic and investigative arm. Ms. Steinhart is responsible for examining governmentwide management issues and supporting the federal government's transformation to meet 21st century challenges.

It is the custom and tradition of this committee, as well as it is of others, to swear in witnesses.

(Witnesses are sworn in.) We thank you very much.

And we'll begin with you Mr. Green.

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REP. DAVIS: Thank you very much, Ms. Steinhardt.

And I want to thank each one of you for your testimony.

We will begin with a round of questions.

And I will begin with you, Mr. Green. Could you describe how successful OPM has been in increasing the awareness and comfort level of managers over the past, say, two, three years?

MR. GREEN: Yes, sir. I don't have metrics to show a quantitative increase in satisfaction. I can talk about the things that we have done. I think the most important document that we've produced is the Telework Guide, which is on our website and was widely distributed to all federal agencies.

That guide is a -- does a couple of things. Primary point is that it is directed straight at telework -- managers of teleworkers and employees wanting to telework and gives them off-the-shoulder straightforward information on how to maximize that experience.

The other thing the telework guide does is it talks about issues of importance to agencies in furthering their missions and helping them to integrate telework in some important critical areas, most specifically in their continuity of operations planning and pandemic planning and in dealing with issues of security and protection of data while working remotely.

That's the most important thing we've done. We meet with agencies regularly. We are working with the CHCO Council, as Ms. Steinhardt alluded, to develop metrics and to expand the -- and discuss issues of definitions, of metrics of measuring telework, and for ways to promote a better understanding of what telework can accomplish, what the issues are involving telework and how to deal with them.

REP. DAVIS: It has come to the committee's attention that OPM gave notice to its employees that effective October 29th, 2007 that your telework program has been suspended. Could you explain to us why OPM has suspended its program?

MR. GREEN: Well, that's not actually correct. The program is not suspended; however, telework has been temporarily suspended -- or will be temporarily suspended for some employees who are currently teleworking. The overall program is still active, but the employees that are involved in retirement claims operations will be brought in on a temporary basis for a couple of reasons.

One is: As you know, we're going through a retirement systems modernization effort, and involved in that will have to be retraining of employees and those employees will be needed as well to transition from the current legacy systems to the new RSM.

A more immediate concern to Director Springer and to managers at OPM is the security of personally identifiable information, and that is -- what the issue there is is that retirement case files, which have a lot of personal information, of course, about people, are taken home and worked on when people telework, and so management wants to find alternative ways of protecting that information, and once that's done, then there will be a re-emergence of telework, I'm sure.

And I think, frankly, that RSM will be an ultimate, huge help in protecting data, because we'll be in an electronic mode, and there won't be this same reliance on paper in the future.

REP. DAVIS: So at best one could then say there is a temporary suspension of some aspects of the program while it undergoes review to make adjustments that OPM feel is necessary.

MR. GREEN: Yes, sir. Exactly.

REP. DAVIS: All right.

Let me just ask Mr. Kaczmarczyk: What policies has the GSA put in place to help insure that personally identifiable information is adequately protected and how can you ensure that agents and networks are adequately protected when people are doing telework?

MR. KACZMARCZYK: Sure. Well, as an agency, we have -- we annually inventory all of our IT systems that deal with personally identifiable information to make sure that the program managers are aware of their responsibilities, and as far as teleworkers go, teleworkers of course receive IT security training as teleworkers but also as agency employees, because we're dealing with the same systems in the office that we're dealing with when we work from home.

So everybody gets annual IT training. Everybody's aware of the issues and there are technological solutions for teleworkers with virtual private networks so you can work at home or from a telework center securely and maintain the same security over personally identifiable information from a remote location as you can in the office.

So the general answer is that the policies are in place, the technology is there to support it, and the issue is the same whether you're working from the office or working from another location.

REP. DAVIS: And you're comfortable that this is working will and will continue to work well?

MR. KACZMARCZYK: In GSA, yes.

REP. DAVIS: Thank you very much. I'm going to stop and yield to Mr. Marchant.

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REP. DAVIS: Ms. Steinhardt, you've placed a great deal of emphasis on having clear goals as a way to facilitate the utilization of teleworking. Do you think that it would be very helpful to have governmentwide goals that every agency would be expected to adhere to or pursue, as well as individual agency goals that would be left to the latitude of the agencies themselves?

MS. STEINHARDT: That's a really good question. I would say yes. There are some goals that are not necessarily unique to an agency. Some are -- for example, recruitment and retention, employee morale. Those, I think, are related. They certainly -- every agency has some effort to attract a skilled work force to maintain high employee morale, but the conditions vary agency to agency.

But commute time, for example: I would think that all agencies, that that is a governmentwide issue, and so reducing congestion, reducing energy use might be governmentwide goals; they're not specific to any one agency. That's just by way of example.

REP. DAVIS: In your testimony, you also mention awareness training as a way of helping facilitate movement. Are you aware of any results, how much help that might have been or appeared to be?

MS. STEINHARDT: I'm not aware that there have been any kinds of evaluations there. I would say just anecdotally, based on GAO's own experience, the best -- there clearly needs to be clear guidance on what telework is and under what conditions it's available to employees and the kinds of procedures, rules, policies they need to follow.

But I think one of the best measures to promote telework is actual experience with teleworking, and particularly among staff who believe that it would be helpful to them on an intermittent basis, you know, where they might occasionally want to telework. Once people become familiar with it -- both employees and managers -- it seems to be much more widely accepted -- people know how to use it, and then people may actually start using telework on a more regular basis.

REP. DAVIS: Mr. Kaczmarczyk, you mention in your testimony that you will propose legislation to address travel pay associated with long-distance telework. Could you share some more thinking about that?

MR. KACZMARCZYK: Yes, this is mostly based on the experience of an agency such as Patent and Trademark Office that -- they employee a lot of full-time teleworkers from other locations, and they find that -- PTO's always one of the best examples because they have, you know, cases and (data ?) processing and you have widgets that you can measure for productivity, so they can demonstrate that people who work from home actually produce more widgets, get through more cases over the course of a week than people who are in the office.

So they have the opportunity to hire people who have the right skill set but who live elsewhere out of the Washington, D.C. area or who would like to move out of the Washington, D.C. area. So, for example, if somebody lived in San Francisco and wanted to telecommute full time out of their home to PTO in Crystal City, that can be done. The issue becomes if the person needs to come into the office for -- you know, periodically for training or orientation, that then becomes a travel expense that the agency has to pay because their home office is San Francisco and not in Crystal City.

Now, for one person it's not a big deal, but if you had, you know, several hundred people in this situation and you had to bring them all in periodically for orientation or training or just for a face-to-face meeting, it could be a considerable extra travel expense to the agency, so it's felt that that acts as a deterrent to encouraging these types of virtual work arrangements.

REP. DAVIS: Seems to me that Administrator Doan is a bit more aggressive than some other agency directors and agency heads and has actually laid out some pretty aggressive ideas and goals. Does this include the establishment of telework centers as well?

MR. KACZMARCZYK: She is very much interested in promoting telework centers. The first step is to increase the utilization of our existing 14 centers. And she's going to -- she plans to telecommute herself at each one of them and to invite other senior agency leaders to join her on these days and see for themselves how it is. She also plans to -- for GSA -- to centralize the funding for telework centers so that there'll be a pot of money that will buy a certain number of seats, and then GSA managers won't have a financial constraint themselves; it won't come out of their program budget. They can take advantage of the telework centers.

And once we get the current 14 telework centers fully utilized, then we'd be happy to look at other locations as warranted.

REP. DAVIS: Thank you very much.

Mr. Marchant, do you have any additional --

REP. MARCHANT: I don't have any additional questions for this panel. Thank you.

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REP. DAVIS: Thank you very much.

Let me thank this panel. We appreciate your being here and your testimony, and you're excused. Thank you.

As we are preparing for panel three, I will go ahead with the introduction of our panelists.

Ms. Margaret J.A. Peterlin was sworn in as deputy undersecretary of Commerce for intellectual property and deputy director of the United State Patent and Trademark Office, USPTO, in April 2007. As deputy director of the USPTO she administers the laws of grants and patents and trademarks and the day-to-day management of the $1.9 billion agency and its more than 8,500 employees.

Mr. Lee J. Lofthus is the assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice. He is responsible for departmentwide financial reporting, budget formulation and execution, accounting operations, assets forfeiture fund, operational support, procurement and debt management support. He also oversees departmentwide facilities, management, human resources, business services and planning.

Let me welcome both of you. And it is our custom and tradition, if you would stand to be sworn in.

(Witnesses are sworn in).

We thank you very much for being here with us and we will proceed and begin with Ms. Peterlin.

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REP. DAVIS: Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Lofthus, and we will proceed with questions.

Let me just begin with you, Ms. Peterlin. What position classifications are eligible to telework at the Patent and Trademark Office?

MS. PETERLIN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

We have 17 programs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office because we have found that, based on the work that our employees are doing, we may need some flexibility. But if you look at our two largest programs, eligibility requirements are quite consistent and that is the employee needs to be on a full-time status, they need to have a fully successful rating, they need to demonstrate the ability to work independently, they need to have no performance or disciplinary actions against them, and they need to have high-speed broadband Internet at home.

And so those generally who would be ineligible then, sir, would just be whose primary responsibilities include interaction with internal employees or customers.

REP. DAVIS: And so you have a level of comfort that the individuals who are eligible are going to be able to function at a pretty high level without supervision, in a sense, or a certain level of supervision?

MS. PETERLIN: Yes, sir.

Certainly at the USPTO it is our hope that our managers are engaged, very engaged, with our employees who are teleworking, so that type of supervision would still be ongoing.

In our Trademarks Business Unit, that would mean you have full signatory authority -- that you can make the final determination about whether a trademark, like Coca-Cola, should or should not be registered, because we want to make sure that our employees have the sufficient training and experience that we're setting them up for success. And then everyone -- our managers and our employees -- participate in the telework training program, and that gives us additional confidence.

REP. DAVIS: I wish all of my employees were like that. (Laughter.)

But could you also explain why -- and I think that you have one of the more successful programs and activities -- and why the USPTO has been so successful at teleworking?

MS. PETERLIN: Yes, sir. I appreciate the question because I think if you had called us to testify 10 years ago, we would have a different story, sir. We would say that we are embarking on it, and we would only have had 18 examining attorneys.

I think the reason why 10 years later we are very grateful to be described as a success story is because we have very carefully progressed, assessed the results -- we started small, we assessed our results, we implemented training, we implemented the necessary IT security, and we kept pushing ourselves. We kept saying these results are great; we're getting 99 percent return on our surveys with employees saying "I feel better about my job." We have productivity increases of 10 percent in our patents and trademark area. And so we kept seeing excellent results as we became more and more confident over time.

So I think our success today is because we were willing to start and then the successes kept building, one on the other. That being said, sir, certainly there have been challenges along the way, and some managers needed to be brought to the issue and some employees needed to gain comfort in teleworking.

REP. DAVIS: What advice would you give to other agencies if you had the opportunity to do so to increase their telework numbers?

MS. PETERLIN: Sir, I think the best advice is always the advice that taps into a specific experience that we have confidence in, and for us that has been to have the necessary IT security structure in place, have training for managers and employees, identify what the management criteria will be. If your organization is already managing by results, then you're setting the necessary preconditions to have a successful telework program. If it's managing by observation, then you probably don't have the necessary preconditions in place for teleworking.

And so I would say start off by having a good management structure, by managing by objectives, and that's successful for you whether you're teleworking or not. Then engage your managers at every level, both at the senior level of the organization and the first- level managers. Participate in the necessary training. Endorse that training. And then start a program, start a pilot program, have assessment metrics for the program, survey the individuals, be willing to make adjustments to your program, but then move out, you know? Identify the successes.

One success for the PTO, sir, if I may continue my answer, is that we are hiring at the PTO because of our strategic planning and a situation where we found we were understaffed 1,200 examiners per year over five years.

We have a beautiful new campus in Alexandria, Virginia, which would still not hold the rate of increase that we have found necessary for us to meet our requirements. And so without the telework program in place, we would not be able to even hire sufficiently to meet our mission requirements, so teleworking for us is sort of a bottom-line flexibility in order for us to achieve our mission.

REP. DAVIS: Well, thank you very much, and I'm going to stop and yield to Mr. Marchant.

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REP. DAVIS: The Department of Justice has some innovative programs for telework, but we think that some of its bureaus are lagging. Recently the ATF gave a group of 50 employees in the position of legal instrument examiner the choice of relocating to West Virginia or leaving employment at ATF. West Virginia would be a three-hour commute for many of these employees. Telework was not an option made available to them. The reason given was that it would require automation of form processing, which ATF has claimed would cost $2.7 million.

Could you explain how the ATF arrived at $2.7 million to automate the work of the legal instrument examiners? And aside from money, what would prevent the legal instrument examiners from teleworking?

MR. LOFTHUS: Mr. Chairman, that case is one where I'd prefer to be able to get back to you on the specifics. I do know that ATF was concerned with the costs of any system improvements which would be needed to make telework a viable option there, but if I may, I would prefer to get back to you with specifics.

That falls again the category where I think we're serious about looking for opportunities to make these telework options available to our staff, but sometimes there are barriers.

REP. DAVIS: Thank you.

In a letter sent on May 7, 2007, the subcommittee asked the Department of Justice whether the agency excludes any categories of employees from teleworking. DOJ provided a long list of job categories, covering over 47,000 employees that are excluded from telework. DOJ said these jobs are excluded because they require handling secure materials or performing on-site activities.

Just some of the categories of jobs that are not eligible for telework at the Department of Justice include building maintenance, intelligence analysts, security specialists, supply program manager, language specialist, legal clerk and paralegal specialists. That's just a sample the DOJ identified and actually identified many more jobs that are excluded from telework. I can understand why it would be difficult for some of these employees to work from home.

For example, an employee performing building and maintenance obviously needs to be present at the building in order to perform maintenance on it. But DOJ's list includes a number of jobs where, at least based on the job titles, it seems like the employees may be able to perform at least some of their duties from an alternate work site. Do legal clerks and paralegals need to be present all of the time? Can't they perform research and other work from alternate work sites?

And what happens if an employee in one of these job categories asks to telework? Is that employee automatically excluded, based on his or her job title? Or does DOJ look at specific responsibilities and activities of each employee who would like to telework?

MR. LOFTHUS: We need to look at the specific duties. I don't want to have a Justice environment where we have such sweeping decisions made to exclude people based on job series alone, because of the things I've already pointed out, in the sense that criminal investigators or investigators may have the same job title but very different duties. So I think we need to look at the underlying duties.

And while we did have a long list of jobs that were excluded, 59,000 jobs were deemed eligible for telecommuting, and if one were to take an extremely, I think, restrictive view of the eligible positions, you might say only 40,000 jobs at Justice would be eligible for telecommuting. I think we've tried to be optimistic and include as many jobs as we can to make them eligible, which is how we got up to the 59,000 number of eligible positions. So I think we're trying to give telecommuting the benefit of the doubt= and not exclude people based on job title alone.

Agents: I think if you look at the fact that we have 22,000 agents, we have 30,000-plus correctional officers; there's 50,000 positions alone that one could say, well, those -- you just can't telecommute. Correctional officers may be one thing when you have to present at the institution and there at the prison. But the agents, we do have a small number of agents where we're experimenting with telecommuting. And I think that's an example where we're trying not to exclude people automatically just on a series title; we give people an opportunity to try it, see if it works, see if the supervisors like it.

As some of the other panelists have talked about, results are what really matter here. If we can do this and get good results, then I think our position would be we want to be open to that type of consideration for our employees.

REP. DAVIS: Thank you very much.

And Ms. Peterlin, as I noted earlier, Representatives Marchant, Waxman, Davis and I sent a letter on May 7, 2007 to 25 departments and agencies requesting current information on the agency's telework information. In response to that letter, we received general information from the Department of Commerce but no specific information on the agencies within the department, including the Patent and Trademark Office.

Given the apparent success off PTO's program, it would be helpful to have more specific data in order to compare it with other agency programs. Would you be willing to submit for the record answers to the questions we asked in our May 7th letter?

MS. PETERLIN: Yes, sir. We'd be delighted to.

REP. DAVIS: Thank you both very much.

And Mr. Sarbanes, you have any additional question?

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REP. DAVIS: Thank you, Mr. Cummings.

You know, it sounds like the environment probably has a great deal to do with his productivity. I mean, he is in Illinois, you know. (Laughter.)

MR. WILKE: The city of big shoulders.

REP. DAVIS: Well, let me just ask you one question, Mr. Wilke.

It's pretty obvious from your responses and your productivity that this opportunity has in many ways enhanced your own quality of life, increased, perhaps, your own productivity, and worked extremely well for you and your family. So it's done a great deal, I think, in that sense.

What does it do for the agency?

MR. WILKE: Well, for the agency, it gives the agency the ability to keep people that -- it takes years to really train a trademark examining attorney or a patent attorney, patent examiner, and frankly, you know, private industry pays more than the Patent Office does.

So it's such a benefit to a worker to be able to work from home that the retention rate, it's increased dramatically. I think Ms. Peterlin can speak to that since telework was rolled out into -- the more it's implemented, the more effective that is.

REP. DAVIS: Would you say it's also cost-effective in terms of -- I think one of our witnesses mentioned containment, cost containment earlier. Do you think that when you add it all up and get the bottom line that it's been more cost-effective for the agency to have you work the way that you work than to have you come into an office every day and do what it is that you do?

MR. WILKE: Absolutely. Absolutely. The trademark examining operation, we have over 500 people -- almost 400 attorneys -- yet we only occupy three floors out of those six buildings over in Alexandria.

If we were in the office, we'd still have the same computer equipment that we're set up with at home, so there's no difference there. But there are about 5(00) or 600 -- I'm sorry -- 2(00) to 300 offices that are not used or not needed in the Alexandria campus because of the telework program. I'm just speaking for the trademark side, and it's even larger, of course, for the patent side.

REP. DAVIS: Well, let me thank you very much. We appreciate your being with us.

And I want to thank all of our witnesses. I think we've had a very productive morning. I want to thank our staff for the tremendous outreach that they've had and the recruitment that they've gone through to make sure that we had witnesses who could give us great insight into this issue, and we appreciate it very much.

And with that -- (sounds gavel) -- this hearing is adjourned.

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