When two major snowstorms buried Washington this month, Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry said teleworking kept the government operating.

"This is a watershed moment," Berry told Federal News Radio Feb. 10. "If there is a silver lining in the storm of 2010, it is that this will be the moment, I predict, for all managers and every agency to recognize the criticality of telework to maintaining their functionality and their operations."

Berry estimated the amount of lost productivity during the storm at as much as $450 million — $100 million per day. But he added that teleoworking among federal employees lessened that loss.

There were some teleworking success stories. But the government's actual track record appears mixed at best. The Patent and Trademark Office, for example, said about 4,400 of its patent examiners, trademark attorneys and other employees — roughly 46 percent of its Northern Virginia staff — teleworked daily when the government was closed. PTO usually has about 3,300 employees teleworking on an average day. And Berry said 30 percent of employees at the General Services Administration and OPM were teleworking during the storms.

However, employees at agencies such as the Homeland Security, Treasury and Agriculture departments said they think little work got done during the storms. A combination of cultural resistance, a lack of formal telework agreements spelling out what happens during government closures and technological hurdles meant many employees who probably could have kept working spent much of the snowstorm idle.

And some government employees simply felt they shouldn't have to work, even if they could.

"The government was closed — how could I make them work?" said one Agriculture Department manager who said she got some work done during the storm, but didn't require her employees to telework even though they could. "It's almost a volunteer system." She asked that her name not be published.

OPM has asked agencies in the Washington area to compile telework rates during the closures, which lasted from Feb. 8 to 11. A human resources manager at Homeland Security, who also asked not to be identified, said there were only "pockets" of people at his agency who teleworked during and after the storms.

"I don't think it's going to be many people," he said. "When everybody else is off and you work in a role where you support everybody else, it's tough to do your work."

The Agriculture manager said a lack of telework-ready computers meant it wasn't even an option for some. Due to cybersecurity concerns, Agriculture last year took down its Webmail page that let employees check their work e-mails from home, she said. So only employees who were issued laptops or Blackberrys could access Agriculture's mainframe and e-mail — and their Blackberrys were of limited use because users couldn't view attachments or download documents, she said.

Berry said the government needs to address that problem.

"One of the lessons learned from the snowstorm is that we need to encourage agencies to acquire more portable, modern computers that will make it easier and more secure to work from home," Berry said during a Feb. 11 chat on The Washington Post's Web site.

Berry also said agencies need to lift arbitrary rules that restrict who can telework.

A Treasury employee, who also asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said he did little besides respond to a few e-mails and check his voice mail.

"Last week, I played in the snow with my kids," he said. "There was nothing preventing me from being able to log in from home and see my files. But really, there's no incentive. If I go in and do something, I'm probably the only one. I doubt anyone else was teleworking."

He said Treasury managers have discouraged regular teleworking, so when the government was shut down, few people in his office were used to it.

"They talk a good talk," he said. "But I think it's, if they don't see you, you must not be working. That old mindset. It's kind of frustrating."

The Homeland Security human resources official said he probably worked five or six hours during the four days the government was closed.

"Enough for my wife to complain," he said. "She said, ‘Why are you working? You're supposed to be off today.' That's part of the culture of the government. If they close, that means you should not be checking e-mails. I didn't get any e-mails returned to me."

Berry previously estimated that each day the government closes, it loses $102 million — the daily payroll for the Washington area's roughly 270,000 employees. But after the storm hit, he said that estimate is too high and didn't factor in teleworkers and essential employees who had to show up for work. Berry said OPM will revise its estimate, but the agency did not say how.

Bernice Steinhardt, the Government Accountability Office's strategic issues director, said it may be impossible to tell exactly how many people were actually teleworking.

"Most of the agencies don't have systems that allow them to know who's teleworking," Steinhardt said. "Were we able to actually get things done? Could we estimate, with any degree of reliability, the extent to which people were teleworking? No, I don't think so."

Some offices outside of the Washington area said they didn't have much difficulty dealing with headquarters during the closures.

"Sometimes it was harder to get people on the phone, but people responded to e-mails," said John Woosley, director of the Small Business Administration's district office in Albuquerque, N.M. "They didn't have their paper files in front of them sometimes, so some things were harder to respond to. But they did a good job of being responsive and being available."

Yolanda Choates, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection in Houston, said her office held its usual conference calls with headquarters officials during the snowstorms.

"We didn't see a disconnect," Choates said.

The Defense Information Systems Agency said it had about 1,200 employees logging into its systems remotely each day during the government closures, when it usually has about 500 each day.

"The workforce was prepared," telework program manager Aaron Glover said. "We recommended the workforce take laptops home [on Feb. 4] in preparation for the event beginning on Friday. One big lesson learned is the continued need to have employees practice teleworking to be prepared. The more familiar employees are with teleworking, it makes them more productive when they're required to do so."

PTO didn't relax its examiners' biweekly quotas in place during the storm, so they had to keep working. The agency began teleworking in 1997 and now considers it a key part of agency operations and recruitment efforts.

"We consider the past snow a [continuity of operations] event," said Danette Campbell, PTO's senior adviser for telework. "We didn't have to stop our business practices because of the snow."