VA to increase telework force

By Dorothy Ramienski
Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio

The Department of Veterans Affairs is doing an about-face when it comes to telework.

The VA had been requiring some telework employees to work extra hours to qualify for working from home or remote location.

Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Va.) got wind of the issue and now the VA is not only dropping that extra 140-hours requirement, but will be expanding telework for thousands more employees.

On Friday’s Daily Debrief, hosts Christopher Dorobek and Amy Morris spoke with the Congressman, who says Secretary James Peake sent him a letter about reversing the policy.

[He said] they would end the policy of requiring telework employees to complete an additional 140 hours work of what was required of . . . people who were in the office every day. . . . That whole policy was fundamentally flawed. It went against the law.

Wolf says, in his opinion, the policy simply didn’t make sense, which is why he raised his concerns.

Studies have show that people who telework are as productive or sometimes even more productive than people that are not teleworking. Also, with the cost of energy — with the environmental issues — and all those things together.

Wolf says he does have to give Secretary Peake credit, however.

After it was brought to his attention — I think there were some people below him that sort of thought that this was a way of sort of putting the ends to telework — I don’t think the Secretary was really a participant in [that] decision. . . . He also said, though, which is important that he has decided to increase the number of telework-eligible jobs from less than 2,000, which is one of the lowest in the government, to now 60,000.

Wolf says this unexpected result is equally as important as the VA’s elimination of those additional 140 work hours.

Not only does the Congressman think this will help feds, he also thinks it will do wonders for the federal government.

The Patent and Trademark Office has over 50 percent of their people teleworking and they believe now it’s been the thing to provide more efficiency and saves them money. But, I want to thank the Secretary, too, because . . . he’s relatively new in the job and once he focused [on it] himself, the problem sort of took care of itself.

Wolf says he’s glad that Secretary Peake changed the policy because other federal agencies are still somewhat resistant to adopting telework.

There is still resistance, particularly [among] mid-level managers. So, this was important not only to the VA employees, but also important to any agency because I think if they’d been able to add [those] 140 hours, a lot of agencies would have gone and done that.

Wolf says, now that this policy has been rejected, he thinks telework will have a chance to grow among all federal agencies.

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