When Lurita Doan left the General Services Administration last month, the agency lost its most visible champion of telework. As administrator, Doan had set an ambitious goal for GSA’s program: 50 percent of eligible employees would be teleworking by the end of 2010.
About 18 percent of eligible employees currently telework, putting GSA in reach of its interim goal of having 20 percent of eligible employees teleworking by the end of this year.
Doan’s departure will not delay GSA’s plans to forge ahead with its telework objectives, said William Kelly, senior coordinator of GSA’s telework initiative and previously director of human resources services in the agency’s Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer.
FCW: How has GSA been able to make such rapid progress toward its telework milestones? KELLY: We have worked hard over several years to create a performance-based culture across GSA. We also have a sufficient budget devoted to improving our [information technology] infrastructure. Those factors, coupled with leadership commitment to a clearly stated organizational goal, made the increased numbers of teleworkers attainable.
FCW: What are the biggest challenges you face as you try to reach the 50 percent goal in the next two years? KELLY: The biggest challenge for any organization to implement telework at the level that we are planning for in GSA is changing the corporate culture. Managers and employees need to improve the level of communications and strengthen trust between each other. Managers need to learn new skills in order to understand and provide proper management to remote workers. Managing a virtual or remote workforce requires a leap of faith for some managers and often the adoption of a different management style. We need to ensure that our managers are prepared to manage in this new environment.
The other side of this is that our employees need to get the proper training to allow them to be as productive as possible while working remotely. This training obviously involves the [information technology] skills to handle the technology components of remote access but also training in things such as distance learning and understanding how to be a transparent teleworker — someone whom staff, management and customers are comfortable dealing with, regardless of where that person is geographically seated.
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