Federal employees need to be regularly working from home — at least once a week — if the government hopes to see benefits from teleworking, Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry said Sept. 24.

"Using it once a month is good for making sure that the equipment works and that we have a COOP [continuity of operations] fallback option, but it's not going to enhance productivity or keep us operating near normal levels during a COOP situation," Berry said last week at a conference hosted by the Telework Exchange, a public-private partnership that promotes expanded federal telework.

An OPM survey earlier this month found that 36 percent of the government's 102,900 teleworkers worked from home one to three times a month in 2008. Almost 51 percent of the government's teleworkers worked from home once or twice a week, and the remaining 13 percent teleworked three days a week.

Berry said teleworking will improve federal workers' productivity by eliminating commuting time and allow them to better balance their personal and family responsibilities with their work life.

For example, a federal employee can more easily take a parent to a doctor's appointment or drop his children off at school between his work responsibilities if he is regularly working from home, Berry said.

"Feds are big-hearted people and we take on many responsibilities outside the workplace," Berry said.

And if federal employees are used to working outside the office, they can keep their agencies operating efficiently when the whole office has to shut down due to a snowstorm, pandemic flu, or other COOP situation, Berry said.

He said federal offices near the site of last week's G20 summit in Pittsburgh shut down, but many employees were able to get at least some of their work done through teleworking.

"Telework is perfect for a situation like the G20 because it changes the conversation entirely," Berry said. "Instead of asking, ‘What's the minimum we can do during this time?' we can aim high and ask, ‘What's the maximum we can do? Can we do 70 percent of a normal day's work? Eighty percent? Ninety?' "

But employees and managers must know and understand that teleworking "is not vacation time," Berry said. "A telework day is a work day and we expect productivity."

And increased teleworking opportunities will be a good way to attract and retain talented young workers and "make government cool again," Berry said.

Jack Penkoske, director of manpower, personnel and security at the Defense Information Systems Agency, said he thinks teleworking opportunities will become a key way to attract and retain younger people in coming years.

"People are going to be negotiating more and more about telework [than] pay," Penkoske said at a Sept. 22 luncheon hosted by the Association for Federal Information Resources Management. "We've seen people who say I'll come to your agency if I can telework, or I'll stay at your agency if you can increase my number of teleworking days from two to three days. I think you'll see much more of that in the future."

Penkoske said 40 percent of DISA's 5,400 employees now regularly telework — some as much as three days per week. About 90 percent of DISA's computers are now laptops that employees can take home, and those laptops are encrypted to ensure data is not compromised if one is stolen. DISA also covers half the cost of broadband Internet at teleworking employees' homes.

"What we're trying to do is knock down the barriers," Penkoske said.

Sharie Bourbeau, deputy undersecretary for management at the Homeland Security Department, said some managers and agencies are afraid to let their employees telework.

"It's a trust issue," Bourbeau said. "If you don't trust your employees, then you'll never let them go on travel or go to a meeting down the street. We [managers] have to look at our own internal barriers [against telework] and come to grips with them."