Federal agencies are not consistently evaluating the impact of telework on their ability to provide services, said the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a new report issued on Nov. 22. […]
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued new guidance to Federal agencies on Wednesday to help them design their remote work policies and programs post-pandemic. […]
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has called on Federal agencies to increase in-office work to at least 50 percent of employees’ hours, yet House Republicans say they’re still not receiving enough data regarding Federal telework policies. […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) is making a change in how it addresses remote work and telework by adding new preconditions – some focusing on data classification levels – outlined in an updated telework policy that marks the Pentagon’s first formal update to the policy since 2012. […]
Members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee are requesting additional documents and information from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) regarding Federal agencies’ telework and remote policies. […]
Republicans on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee are keeping up their pressure on the White House for data on Federal employees’ work from home habits, and on policy changes being pursued by the Biden administration that will return more Feds to their traditional office locations. […]
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa., is calling for Federal government workers to return to in-office work, as well as an investigation across agencies to determine the “impact of telework on the delivery and response times of services” provided by the government. […]
U.S. Army officials said this week that they are relying on bring-your-own-device (BYOD) technologies to connect service members and provide secure access to government data, with a focus on Army Reserve and National Guard units that have the most geographically dispersed and complex IT user population across the Federal government. […]
Bob Westbrooks, who retired earlier this year as executive director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), delivered a wholehearted endorsement on Feb. 9 of the enduring value of wide-scale telework practices that the Federal government turned to in response to the coronavirus pandemic. […]
With Federal government agencies approaching the three-year anniversary of the turn to widespread telework in March 2020, a senior official at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) explained this week that cyber hygiene measures for the remote workforce remain as important as ever in securing an expanded attack surface. […]
The House voted 221–206 on Feb. 1 to approve legislation that would roll back Federal agency telework policies to their year-end 2019 levels, and require agencies to justify any future changes in telework policies through reporting to Congress. […]
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a July 20 memo to agencies that instructs them to consider telework and remote work, as well as the status of online collaboration tools when submitting their office workspace plans. […]
The House Oversight and Reform Committee on June 15 approved legislation that would modernize Federal telework programs and promote additional data collection about the benefits of telework. The bill now heads to the full House for consideration. […]
Reps. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., and John Sarbanes, D-Md. – both of whom represent districts with large Federal employee populations – have reintroduced legislation that the members of Congress said will “strengthen and expand the federal government’s telework programs by capitalizing on lessons learned” during the coronavirus pandemic when many Federal agencies had most employees working from remote locations. […]
According to the results of The Office of Personnel Management’s 2021 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, federal workers’ engagement and satisfaction with their jobs has decreased from 2020. In an accompanied report, OPM predicted that some of the declines in engagement and satisfaction might be due to the fact that agencies were preparing – or had already begun – efforts to move Federal workers back to traditional work sites. […]
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will be welcoming back employees to their traditional offices by lifting its maximum telework policy on April 25. The degree to which telework will still represent a hybrid-workplace option for agency employees is still being determined. […]
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reached an agreement with the union representing agency employees for policies governing the return of employees to traditional offices in what amounts to a larger hybrid work-location approach. […]
As the COVID-19 pandemic wanes, the Department of Defense (DoD) Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks issued guidance on the reentry of DoD employees to their normal workplaces, stating that telework is here to stay. […]
According to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) needs to generate more reliable data on Federal telework. […]
Edging into what everyone hopes will be a post-pandemic environment, Federal agencies have learned a lot about remote work. But as employees continue to work from remote environments, agency tech leaders will need to continue to rethink policies, IT modernization, security, and training practices to ensure an integrated workplace environment, several Federal CIOs chief said during ATARC’s CIO Virtual Summit Jan. 25. […]
Digital transformation in the Federal government is shifting the focal point of security to the user and device – not the data center. As Federal IT leaders look to keep pace with new modernization and cybersecurity requirements, they need platforms and capabilities that support fresh approaches to security and data. […]
Effective 5 a.m. EST on Monday, Jan. 10, 2022, the Pentagon Reservation will be moving to Health Protection Condition (HPCON) Charlie, with workspace capacity required to be at less than 25 percent and supervisors continuing to provide maximum telework opportunities. […]
Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Kiran Ahuja emphasized in a recent report summing up the Federal government’s experience with telework during Fiscal Year 2020 that the practice will remain important to the government going forward particularly in creating further resiliency of agency operations and in helping workforce recruiting efforts. […]
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., expressed “serious concerns” regarding wide-scale government telework in a Dec. 8 letter to leadership at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Office of Personnel Management, and the General Services Administration. […]
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) released a new guide to telework and remote work for Federal agencies on November 12, in response to increased agency interest in working from home. […]
A sampling of Federal agencies’ efforts to provide remote access for telework during the COVID-19 pandemic shows that each of the agencies was able to put the right technologies in place to accomplish that goal, but that several had not fully addressed relevant guidance for securing remote access systems, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found. […]
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, along with other natural disasters, forced the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to shift to remote work. In a new report, the agency’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) said that the EPA was able to effectively plan a long-term solution to address remote access concerns while also transitioning to the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract. […]
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has invested “proactively and preemptively” in technology, so that when the coronavirus pandemic hit NIH it was able to seamlessly transition to a telework environment, according to the NIH CIO and Director of the Center for Information Technology, Andrea Norris. […]
While the COVID-19 pandemic pushed much of the Federal government to telework, a delay in IT Modernization efforts left the Passport Services Directorate forced to work in a paper-based environment during the pandemic, a new report from the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found. […]
As the COVID-19 pandemic forced Federal agencies to quickly move to a remote environment, Federal and private sector leaders say the shift to telework provided valuable benefits, such as increased leadership and employee engagement, as well as digital savviness among employees. […]