A DoD civilian employee teleworks in early April 2020. Agencies said that many factors affect improvements or declines in productivity, making it difficult to parse out the role of higher telework. Image: DoD Courtesy Photo
By: FEDweek StaffAvailability of telework has had a positive impact on recruitment and retention, a sampling of four agencies told GAO, but its effect on customer service and other agency operations is hard to gauge—and three of the four have done little to even try.
The effect on productivity has become a major focus in the ongoing debate over agency telework levels that, although well below the peak of the pandemic period, remain high by historic measures. The GAO report, while not conclusive, adds information to a debate that may result in moves to restrict telework starting in January by the new Congress, the Trump administration, or both.
The GAO found all four agencies it studied—Farm Service Agency, IRS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Veterans Benefits Administration—cited recruitment and retention benefits such as expanding the potential talent pool to people who lived further away from agency locations and “significantly increased applicant interest in positions.”
The FSA, where telework levels are the lowest of the four, meanwhile “said that limited telework availability likely contributed to recruitment and retention challenges, but pay and workload issues were more important factors.”
However, the GAO found that the first three had not formally evaluated the impact on productivity, for reasons including “the complexity of identifying how telework alone affects performance” and uncertainty over what indicators to use.
Some congressional Republicans, essentially equating teleworking to not working, have repeatedly pressed Biden administration officials for data on rates and the impact on programs such as veterans benefits and Social Security. During a 2023 hearing, the then-OPM director was largely unable to provide either, resulting in a directive in a law passed earlier this year for a full report.
That report showed that just above half of federal employees are not eligible to telework due to the nature of their jobs; that employees who do telework on average are onsite three days per week; and that rates varied greatly among agencies, with some under the Biden administration’s goal of an average of 50 percent onsite work by teleworkers.
However, while some agencies described how their performance had improved in certain ways in recent years, they did not draw a direct connection to telework’s impact.
In the GAO report, agencies said that many factors affect improvements or declines in productivity, making it difficult to parse out the role of higher telework. For example, the IRS said that additional staffing and technology upgrades also contributed to improvements in its call center customer service, while the temporary closing of a records center during the pandemic contributed to backlogs in correspondence.
The VBA meanwhile cited additional flexibilities to hire staff and increased automation as contributing to improvements in processing veterans’ education benefit claims, while citing the records center closing and “a substantial increase in workload—rather than telework use—as reasons why the timeliness of disability claim decisions declined.”
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