Whether feds are in the office or teleworking, experts say it’s all about results

After agencies reached, and in some cases surpassed, the White House’s 50% in-the-office mandate for federal teleworkers, some workplace experts have said it’s well past time to stop talking about the numbers — and instead, focus on outcomes.

It’s true that the Office of Management and Budget’s April 2023 memo asked agencies to increase meaningful in-office work while still maintaining some level of federal telework. But there was more to it than that: It was also about ensuring the federal workforce was meeting productivity and customer service expectations, regardless of where they were working from.

More recently, thanks to a request in appropriations legislation, agencies’ “work environment plans” are now publicly available in a federal telework report OMB sent to Congress earlier this month.

In true federal government fashion, that new memo is almost 3,000 pages. But even in that much content, some agencies still aren’t telling the right story, said Brian Elliott, an executive advisor on the future of work and a workplace culture expert. He emphasized that what’s missing from some agencies’ return-to-office stories is results.

“Talk about your outcomes as an agency — here are the outcomes we’re trying to drive. Here’s how we’re measuring outcomes. Here’s how we hold people accountable to the performance on those outcomes,” Elliott said in an interview. “If you spent your time doing that and didn’t instead try to have people scurrying around, attempting to count the number of times people are coming into the office, that time would be much better spent.”

“We’ve substituted presence as a proxy for productivity or performance, and it simply isn’t,” Kate Lister, a future of work expert and principal of Global Workplace Analytics, said in an interview. “The only way to manage fairly is to manage by outcomes. It doesn’t matter how long somebody spends at their desk. What matters is what they do, how they perform, the outcomes of what they do — and that can be measured.”

GSA, OPM focusing on performance

According to several workplace experts, the General Services Administration appears to be one key example of an agency that focused on the right story in OMB’s report to Congress.

“GSA talks about things that are core to their mission, like how have we done in terms of supplier satisfaction for the people who utilize our services? How are we doing at small business support? How are we doing at contract modifications?” Elliott said. “They are literally measuring out and saying, these are six things that we do that we provide to the rest of government agencies. How are we performing against those things?”

In its response, included in OMB’s federal telework report, GSA also said its “work environment council” continually evaluates measures for organizational health and performance, reviews them quarterly to identify areas where standards aren’t being met — and then makes adjustments accordingly.

In another results-focused example, the Office of Personnel Management began its report with outcomes, particularly with the agency seeing recent increases in its workforce’s engagement and performance.

“For example, last year, Retirement Services processed nearly 100,000 cases and successfully lowered the retirement claims inventory to its lowest level in six years,” OPM wrote in the federal telework report. “OPM HR reduced time to hire by 18% — bringing the agency average to under 80 days … We develop and issue policies faster and the volume of major policy issuances, such as regulations, has increased substantially.”

Only later on did OPM describe that it has about a 50% in-person presence of employees. But that number is only an average, OPM added. The exact breakdown of in-person work versus federal telework depends on the time of year, and the specific office within the agency. The bottom line, OPM said, it’s about centering on “project-focused in-person work.”

“For example, we anticipate an increase in Retirement Services personnel working on-site from January through April, during the annual surge in retirement applications,” OPM said. “Personnel with critical roles will serve on ‘tiger teams’ that work on-site up to five days per week.”

Building fences, not walls for federal telework

Along with focusing on results and performance, workplace experts have also generally said it’s risky to deliver top-down return-to-office mandates. In many cases, setting strict, across-the-board expectations for federal telework leads to higher dissatisfaction from employees, which can in turn affect performance, and possibly cause workers to leave their jobs.

There is a time and a place for in-person work, experts agreed. But setting a strict 50% in-the-office mandate doesn’t lend itself well to the nuances of various working teams and offices, all of which have unique patterns and schedules of how they work best.

“The kinds of decisions about where and when people are going to be working really need to be made at the team level,” Lister said. “It’s best if the leaders of the organization established fences, but not walls, so that down further in the organization, they can decide for themselves. Managers can decide for themselves, or teams can decide for themselves, how they’re going to work.”

Agencies that are letting specific offices determine their own work arrangements appear to be having more success in terms of employee engagement and productivity. Mika Cross, a federal workplace expert, said setting in-office expectations can be beneficial if done correctly, but those expectations shouldn’t be “overly prescriptive.”

“When you’re trying to plug and play a one-size-fits-all mandate, we’re missing sight of the fact that then what happens is the people are just bringing their same job functions to a different location,” Cross said in an interview.

Instead, to make in-person work truly valuable, the decisions should be set at the team level, and still allow flexibility for employees when life happens.

“It might look like designing opportunities so that if people are not able to [come in] because they have COVID or their kid is sick, that we would still catch them up,” Cross said. “But [it’s also saying] yes, on these days, I would love us to come together. Maybe we do one-on-one meetings that day, maybe we do some team building, maybe we do some compliance training, maybe we hash out how we’re looking at our strategic goals and assessing our progress towards our objectives — but we do it together as a community.”

Reconfiguring office space, federal telework

Another key part of making a work environment beneficial to employees is designing the physical space to meet the specific needs of staff members.

While many agencies are still struggling to let go of unneeded office space, there are a few promising examples where agencies have been transforming their workplaces into much more modern arrangements.

The Census Bureau, for instance, reopened its headquarters this summer after reconfiguring its office space to accommodate employees from both the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some construction is still underway to modernize the building and accommodate the relocation of BLS, but the agency said it expects the entire renovation to be complete by the spring of 2025.

Cross-agency collaboration can have rippling, beneficial effects on performance as well as meeting the needs of customers.

“Imagine the kind of collaborative approach to networking, coming up with innovative solutions, if you’re sitting side by side with agencies that otherwise you wouldn’t have had access to,” Cross said. “There’s real benefit there — and cutting the cost for the taxpayer of holding onto space that isn’t needed. The challenge is when the office workflow isn’t designed the right way.”

One challenge is most agencies don’t have the resources to make those changes happen. It’ll take more investments and possibly shifting program dollars. Even then, the changes could be years away. Still, at the end of the day, OPM has said the office should be a magnet, not a mandate.

“That doesn’t mean pizza parties and doughnuts and pickleball,” Cross said. “What it means is that the space adapts to how workers work best and helps enhance innovation and creativity because people want to be there.”

Understanding your workforce

Alongside meeting performance measurements, adjusting office space and reaching stronger outcomes, one major underlying factor is first focusing on employee engagement.

Agencies should work toward truly understanding their workforce composition, and the varying needs of employees, before setting federal telework expectations or making return-to-office decisions, said Jeffrey Vargas, president and CEO of the future of work consulting firm Generationology. According to Vargas, employees at different ages and different stages of their careers see the workplace much differently.

“When we think about what returning to the office looks like, but we don’t consider generational perspectives, we lose opportunities,” Vargas, former chief learning officer at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in an interview.

It’s also important to ensure in-office work makes sense for the setting, experts said. It should focus on intentional collaboration and opportunities to come together during the same “core” hours, rather than coming to the office just to sit on virtual meetings.

“We’re working in new ways, but we’re using old practices and processes. It’s like when we got cellphones and we used to only them inside the house — it was just this old habit,” Lister said. “That’s kind of what we’re doing in distributed work right now, where we’ve shoehorned it into the way we used to work … We haven’t put the practices and processes in place to make it successful.”

At the same time, Elliott questioned the frequency that in-person collaboration is truly necessary over federal telework. There are promising results, he said, in instances where work teams are meeting on-site once per month, or even just once per quarter.

“Quarterly in-person gatherings do far more to boost engagement in ways that random in-office encounters don’t,” Elliott said. “You’re together with your team and you’re using that time to talk about the next quarter’s goals and objectives. You’re using that time to build relationships and build belonging. And that’s got real benefits to it.”

In the long run, agencies will also face the challenge of making sure hybrid workplace collaboration is equitable for employees, regardless of where they’re sitting. Hybrid meetings, for instance, might unintentionally prioritize employees who are physically in the room. But it’s important to make sure those dialing in have the same opportunities to contribute, or even lead, Vargas said.

“It’s not about making sure your hybrid workforce feels included,” Vargas said. “It’s about making sure your hybrid workforce is included.”

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