This is not true in the government. Many gs15s were not allowed to telework at all pre pandemic

‘Brain’

And the new hires who are faced with a laptop screen, limited artificial interactions with seniors and mentors, no sympathy for them either?

There are countless successful organizations that are 100% remote. Are they all lazy too? Or just smarter than you?

Commoditization of downtown DC is not a reason to force thousands of people back to an office for no personal benefit to the employee or to the organization.

Mayor Bowser needs to find ways to revitalize downtown for the realities of today vs. forcing people back to an antiquated system.

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That seems not done right, then.

A hot desk is a communal space, just like a breakroom table. The space needs to be obviously built to be shared, part of the cleaners' rotation (an added cost, yes, but perhaps less the 4x desks, and the built setup matters. Design for cleaning.)

I'll say that I've worked remotely for 4 years, but I do occasionally (monthly?) use a hot desk at my HQ. They are clearly designed and treated as communal spaces, and I haven't had a problem as a result.

This really is a stupid move on the Fed government's part.

Literally one of the appeals of fed government work is their flexible telework policy. Even with this policy, they're suffering a brain drain.

Get rid of this policy and the brain drain will happen even faster.

Go to work.. quit being lazy. Not that deep. You’re lazy if you are fighting to stay home all day.

The thing that gets me with the social discourse around return to office, is that upper level executive types have always been allowed to work from wherever they want pretty much as much as they want.

It’s only us peons having that freedom when it’s suddenly an organizational problem.

My employer is doing Hybrid, and it’s designed to bring people in on the same days to foster those spurious connections. Marketing and Event Planning people are both in on Monday, that kind of thing. But the big draw back to it is that it removes any of the flexibility from it, you’re definitely expected to be in on YOUR days.

Part IV: “There’s a comfort issue for individuals, particularly those who were subjected to harassment, that they’re not having to come sit in a conference room with the folks that they find to be intimidating," Shonfield said. “We would like recognition at EEOC that this is a post-Covid world, that other agencies are expanding their pre-Covid telework policies and having remote policies."

John Falcicchio, D.C.’s deputy mayor for planning and economic development, said he would like to see the Biden administration issue a clear, overarching policy on how many days it wants to see federal workers in the office.

“We think it's best that there is a centralized policy that comes from the White House,” Falcicchio said. “It should be a clear concise enterprisewide directive for how folks come back to the office.” He also said the Bowser administration has been steadfast in its assertion that the District just needs some workers coming in for part of the week in order to make a difference in the health of downtown, not a unilateral return-to-office five days a week.

A majority of the District government’s 37,000 employees are working on a hybrid schedule, according to Falcicchio. He argued that if D.C. can mandate in-office time and still attract and retain talent, then the federal government should be able to do the same. “We have the same aspects of trying to compete with the private sector and also compete with other employers who offer more liberal telework policies,” Falcicchio said. “We understand that perspective, but it's something we've been able to implement.”

Contact Jacob Wallace at jacob.wallace@bisnow.com

Related Topics: GSA, Darian LeBlanc, Joe Biden, The GSA, Norman Dong, The General Services Administration, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, John Falcicchio, Return to office, Presiden Joe Biden

I do desk shares, and honestly I’m fucking sick of it - people are disgusting, I shouldn’t have to pick up people’s trash and wipe away their filthy every day before I sit down at a workstation

Part III: FD Stonewater Managing Director Norman Dong, who oversaw the federal government's office portfolio for the General Services Administration between 2014 and 2017, said that labor was a huge component of discussions about real estate needs during that time.

He said that guidance issued by OMB in 2021 delegating the task of return-to-office plans to agency heads and other top officials has driven much of the internal discussions over re-entry since.

“Agencies are competing for talent in terms of recruiting and retaining employees. Telework is something that factors into the mix," Dong said. “I come back to the written guidance. That is like gospel to people."

But despite broad pronouncements that telework is here to stay, commercial office owners have been frustrated by re-entey plans that are piecemeal and lack a clear overall direction from the top, said Darien Leblanc, an executive vice chairman at Cushman & Wakefield.

“If the federal government is going to embrace broad-scale remote work across most federal agencies indefinitely, then announcing that publicly will be helpful, because then the private sector can begin to extrapolate what that could mean,” Leblanc said. “The deafening silence right now in terms of what it consists of means that people can’t plan.”

D.C. leaders say the effects of federal workers’ slow return to downtown buildings are clear: Retail vacancies remain high in the office-heavy downtown and East End, where workers once bought lunch, visited dry cleaners and shopped regularly. The Washington-area Metro system is also missing hundreds of thousands of riders.

But despite that strain, one area where union leaders and policy setters in the federal government agree is that the federal government’s footprint will shrink, a policy that Transwestern Managing Director Lucy Kitchin described at a Bisnow event last year as one of “reduction, reduction, reduction." That’s likely to continue as the federal government competes with the private sector for labor.

More than a quarter of federal workers are set to retire by 2027, forcing the feds to incorporate incentives like teleworking to promote recruitment and retention, according to an analysis by JLL shared with Bisnow. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office is preparing a Federal Building Utilization Study that will provide some answers on just how many workers are returning to the office when it is published in the coming months, Dong said.

But Shonfield said the cat is already out of the bag — EEOC employees have told her they’ve had an easier time doing much of their work handling workplace disputes remotely. The union is continuing to negotiate a more permanent telework policy, and she said she’s advocating for more flexibility going forward.

That version of hybrid makes a lot of sense for random connections. Just put everyone in the same room periodically.

The problem, I see, is that it takes a ton of infrastructure. I work in contracting, and the rate difference for an onsite (hosted by the contractor) vs offsite (hosted by the customer) is huge. Some of that is IT load and similar, but a lot is just who owns the building. Keeping that up, but only getting 25% utilization is very wasteful. Perhaps multiple users per desk, but that takes some build out (is it like hotdesking, a timeshare? does everyone have a personal drawer?)

I think the other challenge will be hiring for positions that aren't suitable to do remote. Worse, ones that require the same skill-set as ones that are. Think IT that requires touching the actually hardware, mailroom, anything with sensitive data, etc. I know I won't be applying for any of those jobs anytime soon.

Part II: “Federal employees have an obligation to deliver services for the American people,” said Jaqueline Simon, national policy director for AFGE. “They do not have an obligation to patronize businesses in downtown D.C.”

The pressure to return to the office has boiled into public view this year. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said in her inaugural address in January that the federal government — which employs roughly a quarter of the District’s workforce and leases or owns a third of its office stock -- had a responsibility to come up with a return-to-office plan.

“We need decisive action by the White House to either get most federal workers back to the office most of the time or to realign their vast property holdings for use by the local government, by nonprofits, by businesses and by any user willing to revitalize it,” Bowser said in remarks on Jan. 2.

The EEOC didn't respond to a request for comment. While its brush with the Federal Labor Relations Authority was unusual, it us far from the only federal agency to renegotiate its telework arrangements with union intervention.

In December, the National Archives and Records Administration reached an agreement with its union allowing up to five telework days per week for all employees, which are to be granted “based on legitimate business needs,” according to the AFGE.

The month prior, the National Science Foundation’s new four-year collective bargaining agreement allowed employees to telework up to eight days per pay period and expanded the number of teleworkers allowed from eight to 150.

Negotiations are ongoing at other federal agencies, including at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where AFGE Local 421 found that roughly half of the 1,000 workers in its bargaining unit would consider a job elsewhere.

Despite Biden’s pronouncement about the return of federal workers, re-entry plans have been delayed for more than a year. Experts attribute that not to challenges with real estate, but to issues with labor.

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees federal guidance on telework policies, referred Bisnow to the agency’s 2022 telework report. In its introduction, OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said embracing telework was a priority in order to ensure the federal government hired and retained top talent, arguing "there is no going back."

“There has been a sea change in the American labor market,” Ahuja said. “Federal agencies must continue to embrace workplace flexibilities, such as telework, to remain competitive.” The report found that between fiscal year 2020 and 2021, the percentage of federal employees teleworking increased from 45% to 47% of all workers.

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Part I: February 13, 2023 When President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address on March 1, 2022, that the “vast majority” of federal workers would soon return to the office, workers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had been waiting months for a post-Covid office re-entry plan.

Three days after Biden’s address, the EEOC’s employees were provided with a plan. It had no remote work policy and ignored months of engagement with decision-makers, Rachel Shonfield, president of the union representing more than 1,500 EEOC employees, told Bisnow.

“My phone lit up … folks were saying, ‘Why did we fill out these surveys, why did we go to these focus groups, because nobody listened!’” Shonfield said. “People were so completely demoralized.”

After the policy was unilaterally imposed in May, her union, the American Federation of Government Employees Council 216, filed an unfair labor practice charge against the EEOC. The Federal Labor Relations Authority sided with the union in June, arguing that the EEOC hadn’t been negotiating in good faith. The two sides reached a temporary agreement with a more flexible telework policy in November, but Shonfield said the dispute speaks to a broader issue: that officials are trying to "check boxes" in their return-to-office push without taking the time to understand the needs of their employees.

The EEOC case isn’t the only dispute between labor and federal agency heads over telework policies, and in a workforce that is more heavily unionized than the private sector, that could spell further trouble for the federal return-to-office push.

The federal government has faced consistent calls from office owners and local officials, especially those in D.C., to come up with a re-entry plan for the more than 2 million federal workers across the country.

But the unions representing federal workers have been clear as negotiations over re-entry plans continue that the old expectations about the federal workforce’s office presence will need to be replaced with a new reality: Telework will be a much bigger part of workers’ lives going forward.

There are exactly zero remote federal employees being paid for a locality other than the one where their house is located. There is no such thing as offering "favorably offered locality pay" for remote employees. If an employee is not remote, they are required to go into an office 2X per pay period, and locality is based on the location of that office.

That's not just your agency's stance, it's OPM's stance.

I am definitely very sympathetic to the points you make here, and do recognize that this may vary substantially from one team to the next as far as how well remote has been working out.

Tbh I really do personally like hybrid as a sort of "best of both worlds" thing - my wife works for an NGO that I think has a really reasonable approach to it, which is that they have one day a week where all hands are expected to be in office, then it is up to different department heads to determine if and how much they want their teams to be in person. For my wife's team that she leads, she has picked one additional day per week where her people come in which helps with some of the stuff you identified, but still leaves a lot more flexibility in people's lives. In our case, it means that we were able to move further out from the core of DC to somewhere that we can actually afford to buy a house which means that although the commute is longer, because she generally only has to go in twice per week means she spends less total time commuting and has that flexibility to be home with pets, go to appointments, etc. And, in our case, means that we are able to think about having a kid since we know that our jobs now give us the flexibility in our home lives to be able to handle that.

In general though I tend to land on the side that we shouldn't be forcing people who never had to come in person for their jobs to start doing so - I think that represents a bit of an unreasonable modification to working rules which is exactly the thing that unions are supposed to defend against.

What is the conversation to be had over locality pay? My agency's stance seems to be if you are in the office once a pay period you get the office locality, otherwise it's where you live. Which seems pretty fair.

No, the pandemic changed employers. Before the pandemic, they swore up and down that remote work wasn’t feasible. Employees have been proving them wrong since Day 1 of the lockdowns. Since it can be done, and we have been delivering results, there is no reason that we can’t keep doing it.

I have a little bit of a disagreement with the first point. 3 years can involve deferred projects and may not yet be a steady state. Not the same as staffing, but there is a bus garage being closed and rebuilt near me. A community push was, "if it can be closed for 3 years, why not just close permanently?". The answer, of course, is that it is putting pressure on the system. Other places have too much load and can't renovate.

That said, I've been remote for 4 years. If my sector actually had offices in DC proper, I might think differently, but the benefits of not traveling and just being able to walk the dog during lunch are huge. There are a lot of jobs that can be accomplished at the same level or better than at the office. Many gov't jobs fall into that.

But, I find hybrid painful. You lose out on spurious connections because the other people are hybrid on different days.

The next Republican president will absolutely do this if work from home is still going on.