Time for Telework
In the latest issue of Government Executive, Alyssa Rosenberg writes about telework among government agencies. The US Army is cited as one of the agencies ahead of the power curve on using technology to link in teleworkers.
Telework involves workers setting up to work from home, usually for a few days each week. It is a virtual management challenge we’ll see more of over the next decade.
Incoming workers value greater flexibility and see telework as one way to answer this desire. According to the article, this can be a key draw for a generation that places value on workplace freedoms.
Telework saves time and money because the worker avoids the time of commuting and the expense of commuting. This is an attractive feature for many candidates.
Plus, friendly environmental awareness is an attractive recruiting tool. According to a recent survey, 92 percoent of young professionals are interested in environmentally friendly employers. Eighty percent are interested in jobs that have “a direct positive impact on the environment.” Telework supports this interest as well.
Management concerns include:
- filling the slots that will be left by retiring employees,
- security breaches
- greenhouse gas emission reduction
and the solution for each of these can be supported by telework.
Your Continuity of Operations Plan may already contain elements of telework. If so, a telework arrangement helps shake down your COOP in an incremental way.
Years ago, my Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) centered on telework.
A few months after we designed and tested our COOP, it was activated when a transformer took out all power to our network and offices in Austin Texas. Within 40 minutes our entire team was networked again and productive. Each team member left for home, set up their home system with a new email account (the servers were down, so our network could not be used) and then round-robined by phone to relay their new email address. Primitive, but cheap, fast and efficient.
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