As a federal worker or contractor, you already know this, but the thinking about telework proves the point: there really are some major differences between the private sector and the federal workforce.

A taskforce of the American Council for Technology (ACT) and Industry Advisory Council (IAC) produced a white paper earlier this year looking at the further difference between a teleworker and an “at-home agent.”

While a teleworker is generally thought of as working from home a day or two or maybe even three a week, the at-home agent works from home or another alternative site full time.

According to the paper, “Federal contact centers have been slower to adopt at-home agent, primarily citing the security and privacy requirements that are specific to the Federal Government.”

Taskforce chair, Mark Samblanet, told the Dorobek Insider there’s one more roadblock: awareness.

One thing we found out through the process is that all these agencies we talked to had a telework program in place, yet, for some reason, when we started talking about at-home agents, they’d never connected the telework [process] to at-home agents. Telework programs have the practices and policies in place. . . . Most people think of telework as an employee with an office who’s working at home part of the time or during a pandemic or an emergency. . . . They don’t necessarily make the [connection] there.

To listen to the the interview with Samblanet and learn more about at-home agents, click here.

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