Topics discussed

• The pros (and cons) of a teleworking federal government workforce
• Impact of telework on improving hiring, retention, and diversity
• How long-term telework can help with short term and long term disaster planning
• Trends around organizations closing offices permanently - and others that are encouraging return-to-office

Video

Agencies leading the change

The transition to mass government telework has been fraught with various concerns, but many agencies are reporting productivity gains and program improvements since employees stopped working from physical office buildings.

Examples include:

• Social Security Administration saw a rise in productivity and a drop in backlogged cases
• Veterans Benefits Administration exceeded performance goals and connected with thousands of Veterans via tele-townhalls
• Department of Homeland Security reported “great efficiencies” and “higher utilization”
• Department of Transportation reported an “absolute increase” in productivity
• Department of Veterans Affairs got positive feedback about their online telehealth services and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expanded coverage of telehealth services to Medicare beneficiaries
• U.S. House of Representatives found that they could conduct business “efficiently” without convening in person

The evolution from co-located to fully distributed work and flexible, autonomous teams is a gradual uphill climb and won’t happen overnight – but now that agencies have had a taste of the benefits and savings that can result from the effort, some are implementing telework-at-scale as a key part of their long term modernization strategy.

Examples include:

• Department of Defense plans to keep many parts of its enhanced teleworking capabilities
• U.S. Postal Service and NASA say they will use telework lessons learned going forward
• Deloitte has identified billions of dollars in potential savings if government adopts long-term telework
• Center for Digital Government has released a resource guide to help state and local IT leaders navigate the “next normal” for COVID-19 recovery and beyond
• Travis County, Texas announced plans to keep 75% of staff working remotely after COVID
• State of California released a proposal for “expanded long-term telework strategies”
• Officials at Wausheka County, Wisconsin (among other state and local governments) say that telework has “changed the way we work forever”
• Brattleboro, Vermont plans to “definitely allow more [teleworking] in the future”

To prepare for successful long term telework, agencies need to gauge their readiness in the following areas:

• Laptops and collaboration tools for staff
• Up-to-date telework and security policies
• Cloud and modern technology adoption
• Digital forms and e-signatures
• Training / change management

Build capacity through training

The last item on this list is one of the most important. Empowering agency staff to use digital tools and work collaboratively is the only way to get the full benefits of a distributed workforce.

Andrea Ippolito, Lecturer in the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University, recently discussed the role of digital training at federal agencies with the prospect of continued telework.

“The federal government needs to lean into having a digital-first mentality … and we need to educate our workforce on how to use these digital tools so they feel confident and can continue to iterate and improve upon them,” she said.

A model for this approach is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which provided training for its workers during their move to telework, including:

• Instructional pamphlets on topics like using Microsoft Teams at home and connecting to the agency’s virtual-private network (VPN)
• “Telework Test Day” to see if systems could handle the increased load of hundreds of remote workers
• Virtual instruction courses to build tech skills for agency staff

Similarly, several states that had embraced telework prior to coronavirus, including online training programs for staff, were able to adapt more effectively when the pandemic hit. Recommendations for post-COVID telework include the evaluation of staff roles and the providing of infrastructure and logistics support needed to empower successful distributed government teams.

Regardless of whether your agency made any provisions or training for telework prior to the pandemic, this is the moment to seize the opportunity that “forced telework” has presented – the chance for government to become more flexible, modern, and resilient. Give your workforce the tools and training they will need to deliver services in the modern era, and they just might surprise you with how much they get done.

As civic leaders wrestle with and seriously address the issues of our times — disasters, pandemics, climate change, health and wellness, economic empowerment — distributed teams is the obvious solution for delivering responsive and resilient government services.

Defining distributed

John O’Duinn, author of Distributed Teams: The Art and Practice of Working Together While Physically Apart, has written the definitive book on why distributed teams are important, and how they can be even more effective than their physically collocated counterparts.

While antiquated terms like ‘telework’ and ‘remote’ continue to be flippantly used, O’Duinn makes clear distinctions between key terms, such as ‘distributed teams,’ ‘virtual teams,’ ‘virtual employee,’ ‘remote work,’ ‘remote employee,’ ‘work from home,’ ‘work from anywhere’ and ‘telework’.

And the subtle differences in each drastically impact our perceptions and assumptions around distributed teams.

How O’Duinn describes ‘distributed’:

All humans on the team work together, even though they are physically apart from each other. This is not a collection of individuals who each do solo heads-down work from different locations. Instead, this is a group of humans who coordinate their work with others on their physically distributed team. Because everyone on the physically distributed team is “remote” from someone, it is clear that everyone on the team has equal responsibility to communicate and coordinate their work with coworkers – regardless of whether any individual human is working from a building with the company logo on the door, from home, from a coworking space, a hotel or a parked car! Example usage: “I work on a distributed team”, “my team is distributed”.

Why distributed is important

Distributed takes a holistic approach to work and what society values, and areas civic institutions must address if they are to stay relevant.

Here are key reasons why distributed teams are critical, especially for government:

• Representation: Geographically distributed government workforce more closely matches the needs and concerns of the wider population.
• Resiliency: Ability to maintain operations regardless of whereabouts, especially if physical locations or regions have been compromised for a prolonged period of time.
• Recruiting: Talent pool is expanded to include people of diverse backgrounds, ages, abilities and experience.
• Cost savings: Leasing and maintenance of physical buildings become flexible expenses as agencies shift to partly or fully distributed.
• Sustainability: Decreased carbon footprint as fewer people are commuting.
• Work/life balance: Government employees spend less time commuting and invest more energy into their families and communities.
• Economic empowerment: Financial employment benefits are distributed across multiple local communities rather than centralizing to one.

Increased empathy

In addition to the above reasons, distributed government teams can tap into a stronger sense of empathy — a value inherent in the role of authentic public service.

Once you truly experience distributed culture, you have a stronger understanding of what digital services really mean and how they can make or break the end user experience. If public servants don’t place themselves in digital environments of their own, their ability to have complete empathy for those they serve is lessened.

Distributed digital government service teams have more potential to have empathy for their end users. Immersing yourself into a distributed team is the ultimate digital service user research experience.

We have the means

We now have low-cost, high-reliability tools — G Suite, Slack, Trello, GitHub and Zoom to name just a few — that fully empower asynchronous, instant collaboration. Training on the tools is of course important. Just as important is the training on how to work in and lead distributed teams, fostering a culture of distributed work, and implementing policies to support highly effective distributed teams.

Government is doing this

18F has actively socialized the benefits of distributed teams and how this model has made its teams more effective. Some documentation on their recommended best practices:

• 18F’s best practices for making distributed teams work
• Leading dynamic and distributed teams
• Making a distributed design team work
• 3 ways to manage research projects remotely

Vendors are doing this

Many government contractors and vendors are fully distributed. CivicActions is a 90-person government digital services firm serving federal, state and local governments throughout the United States. There are many others — particularly newer, more innovative government and civic technology vendors — operating in the same way. Being able to work in physically distributed teams allows government agencies to work with the best vendor for that project, not just the best nearby vendor.

Survey says

A 2019 Owl Labs survey highlights the varying benefits of the distributed model.

Here are just a few:

• Remote workers earn salaries higher than $100,000/year, 2.2x more frequently than on-site workers.
• Remote workers say they’re happy in their jobs 29% more than on-site workers — 71% of remote workers say they’re happy in their job, and only 55% of on-site workers say they’re happy in their job.
• 34% of U.S. workers would take a pay cut of up to 5% in order to work remotely.
• 42% of remote workers plan to work remotely more frequently than they currently do in the next 5 years, and that more than half of on-site workers want to start working remotely.
• 55% of remote workers would be likely to look for another job if they were no longer allowed to work remotely. And 61% of remote workers would expect a pay increase if they were no longer allowed to work remotely.
• 68% of remote workers say they are not concerned working remotely will impact their career progression, while 23% say they fear it would.
• The top reasons remote workers choose to work remotely include: better work-life balance (91%), increased productivity/better focus (79%), less stress (78%) and avoiding a commute (78%).
• Remote workers say they work more than 40 hours per week 43% more than on-site workers do. However, on-site workers are also working longer weeks because it’s required of them, while more remote workers are doing so because they enjoy what they do.

Distributed government

For government to authentically deliver meaningful public services of the future, it will need to embrace the inevitable relevance and importance of distributed teams.

If government leaders truly value representation, resiliency, sustainability, work/life balance, hiring the best and brightest, economic empowerment, instilling exponential passion for mission-driven work and the many other possibilities for civic innovation, embracing the distributed mindset is the new requisite of how we will define the next phase of public service.

Topics discussed

• What is distributed government (and DistributedGov).
• Why distributed government is important (especially now).
• How COVID-19 has highlighted the need for distributed government.
• The long-term benefits for government hiring and retention.
• Where government should start and how to do this safely.
• Best practices for building a resilient and responsive work environment.

Video

Full video.

Launched to help public service teams build and scale highly effective remote and telework environments, DistributedGov takes a broad approach to addressing these challenges.

DistributedGov is a full-scale platform of services, resources and community to support public service leaders and team members as remote/telework becomes a standard way for how government operates.

DistributedGov provides a topic-based filter so that public service teams can easily find immediately practical remote/telework services and resources:

• Communications
• Culture
• Hiring
• Managing
• Meetings
• Policy
• Project management
• Security
• Technology
• Telework

Services

DistributedGov provides comprehensive training, coaching, and consulting services from distributed work experts with extensive experience working with and for private industry and government.

Guide

The Distributed Government Guide provides topic-based guidance on remote/telework best practices, including checklists, tools and resources specific to both government leaders and team members.

Help

DistributedGov community leaders will also respond to direct questions from the community in an ‘ask us anything’ format. Responses are posted to the help section of the platform. Initial topics addressed include Zoom for government, Zoom and security, and the new semantics around the terms “distributed,” “telework” and “remote.”

Webinar

On July 8, DistributedGov will host a free, one-hour webinar, ‘Distributed Government 101: Introduction to Effective Telework in Government,’ presented by John O’Duinn, author of “Distributed Teams: The Art and Practice of Working Together While Physically Apart.”

DistributedGov is powered by CivicActions, a 100-person digital government services firm that has operated in a fully distributed work environment with no office since its inception, for more than 15 years.