How is your federal agency implementing telework?
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Anonymous
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My office does not have a transparent policy. We are expected to request it very sparingly and then it seems to require 3 levels of approval. I am constantly wondering if I should just move my home office setup to storage.
Before this, before Covid, and dating back to the second Clinton administration, we had to be in the office 2 times per pay period, with flexibility to only come in once. |
Anonymous
Very hard to fire for productivity in the federal government (first hand experience). Easy to fire for time card fraud. Every time an employee isn’t doing their work, they blame it on bad managers. It’s a catch 22 for managers. When you try to go after bad employees, they say it’s your fault for not being stricter and that’s why the employees are underperforming. We have no telework at my agency. Except everyone got RAs for anxiety and back problems. |
Anonymous
| How can people just telework without approval? Aren’t your supervisors in the same office? We have to put it on Teams if we won’t be physically present for any reason: leave or TW. |
Anonymous
No to the bolded. One of the reasons telework has been happening for decades is that people work in distributed teams and with partners all over the country/world. I have a weekly call at 7 am because of international time zones, and that didn't change because of RTO. |
Anonymous
Some people are at a building physically separate from their team and supervisors, like people that were over 50 miles from their office previously. But for us, we also have really strict rules and have to mark it on our timesheet. |
Anonymous
| I'm fortunate to have a ton of leave. When I ask for ad hoc telework, I always offer to just take the day off instead. We're busy and they'd rather I work. |
Anonymous
Look, time card fraud is frankly inexcusable—but hard to monitor as a supervisor. I’d rather have a warning that one of my employee is not accounting for their time properly than have to go through months of feet dragging with HR about performance managing an employee who is unreliable because they simply aren’t working full time, and lying about it. Thats a conduct issue that I can’t address until it’s way too late for them. It’s not hard to track your time and ask for leave and put in your time card the right way. We have very generous policies around leave , there’s really no excuse for lying. So I support more transparency on that front. I also think telework should be more widely available again, and we should follow the OPM guidance from before the pandemic. It worked fine. |
Anonymous
| If you code your time as in-office but you are teleworking, that isn't time card fraud per se but you are lying when you code your time and can be subject to disciplinary action. I think EPA is very generous compared to other agencies with the 24 hours of leave every 2 pay periods and I am lucky to have that! |
Anonymous
| My fed office is in a leased space and always use gov badges to enter. We have been told that Kastle cards are being implemented next week. Guess they want to track people. |
Anonymous
What an embarrassment. Like this is the fraud, waste and abuse we should be focusing on at present? |
Anonymous
This sounds like the SEC. Atkins really has his priorities straight. |
Anonymous
+1. This is the primary way they are planning to get rid of people at my agency. |
Anonymous
Is that really happening at the SEC? |
Anonymous
| How is telework at financial regulators besides sec? Is CFTC the same as sec of no telework? |
Anonymous
You earn 3 days of vacation every month at EPA? Seven weeks of vacation a year? |