Defense tech agency boosts telework to prevent exodus

The upcoming relocation of the Defense Information Systems Agency's headquarters from Northern Virginia to a military base south of Baltimore has prompted the organization to expand its telework policies.

The agency is permitting employees to work away from the office more often in hopes of retaining its workforce.

The recently released policy now allows employees in approved positions to work away from the office a maximum of two days a week. While DISA officials said they believe the change is significant, it is only an interim step. The agency plans to expand telework even further as the move date, set for 2010, gets closer.

The old policy allowed about 400 of the agency's 5,000 employees to telework one day per pay period, or every two weeks. In addition, more than 1,000 employees were allowed to telework on an intermittent basis.

Maryland's Fort George G. Meade will assume more than 4,100 North Virginia employees: 2,239 civilians, 448 military personnel and 1,483 contractors. The move, which is expected to save the Defense Department $491.2 million over 20 years at a one-time cost of $220 million, comes as a result of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission's final recommendations.

A recent agencywide survey revealed that a majority of the employees would prefer not to move to Fort Meade, which is about 15 miles southwest of Baltimore and 35 miles northeast of the current headquarters.

More than three-quarters of the employees being reassigned to Fort Meade currently live in Northern Virginia, and William Mularie, a longtime telework advocate and chief executive officer of the federally sponsored Telework Consortium, said he believes the new policy does not do enough to help those employees.

Mularie said the agency, which provides military combatants with the capability of receiving battlefield information, will be forced to completely rethink its workplace policies. There's a demand for the agency's highly trained workforce in the private sector, he said.

"The wisdom behind directing a bunch of agencies to hunker down behind barriers at Fort Meade is questionable," Mularie said. "It's going to be clear that there are going to be several disruptive consequences in this move."

He predicted that DISA will realize at some point this year that many of its employees will not move to Fort Meade. Once this becomes clear, he said, the agency may explore alternatives to "19th century" workplace policies.

"Two days in Northern Virginia and three days in Fort Meade is not workable," Mularie said. "I think these department heads will understand that for security and for keeping their workforce, they will have to look at a distributive workforce where geography is not important."

DISA's move to implement more flexible telework policies is not unprecedented for a government agency looking to boost its appeal to current and potential employees.

Late last year, the Patent and Trademark Office launched a program aimed at moving hundreds of employees out of their offices and into a work-from-home arrangement. The agency hopes to free up needed office space to accommodate a significant increase in the patent division's workforce and to make the agency more attractive to younger candidates.

Workforce pressures are not the only motivation for agencies to relax telework policies.

A handful of agencies, not including the patent office or the Defense Department, are under financial pressure from Congress to step up telework efforts.

Language in the fiscal 2006 State-Justice-Commerce appropriations bill (H.R. 2862), signed by President Bush on Nov. 22, requires five agencies to increase the number of employees who work away from the office or lose out on $5 million in appropriations.

The Office of Personnel Management's annual telework survey found that the practice of working away from the office grew by 37 percent in 2004, continuing an upward trend.