From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: Federal Telework Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Yvonne Jones, Director, Strategic Issues Related GAO Work: GAO-16-551: Federal Telework: Better Guidance Could Help Agencies Calculate Benefits and Costs Released: August 2016 [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's August 2016. It used to be that if you weren't in the office you couldn't get work done. Now, at least one million federal employees are eligible to telework. A team led by Yvonne Jones, a director in GAO's Strategic Issues team, recently reviewed the costs and benefits of federal telework, as well as the resources available to agencies to help calculate them. GAO's Jacques Arsenault sat down with Yvonne to talk about what they found. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] Telework at federal agencies has increased in recent years and your team looked at some of the data about whether it's working. Can you tell me about what you found? [ Yvonne Jones: ] A little background first.The Telework Enhancement Act of 2010 encouraged the use of telework by federal employees while also focusing on the need to gather data about the impact of telework. So we found that the number of employees eligible to telework increased by 49 percent between 2011 and 2012. And the number of employees with telework agreements actually increased by 84 percent during the same period. The number of employees actually teleworking didn't increase by as large a percentage but it did increase by about 15 percent between 2012 and 2013. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] It sounds like we have pretty clear numbers of increases in terms of the number of eligible employees teleworking and the actual amount of teleworking. [ Yvonne Jones: ] Yes. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] But it seems like there's an incomplete picture when it comes to what are the benefits and costs that agencies are seeing.Can you talk about that data or what might be missing? [ Yvonne Jones: ] Agencies do report, by law, they report on the benefits that they experience through telework and they report annually through a survey that OPM conducts. So, they have somewhat more information. Some of it's numerical, some of it is qualitative about the benefits but, you know, there are a number of benefits they identified, like improved employee recruitment and retention, maintaining operations. If we have bad weather or some kind of disruptive event, reducing commuting and transit costs because people are not travelling to the office as much.And for example reducing real estate costs because an agency doesn't spend as much money on office space as it would have spent before. So that's a range of some of the benefits that they noted. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] What did you find out about the costs of telework? [ Yvonne Jones: ] Well, on the costs we found that actually agencies have much less information. Of the six agencies that we examined only two of them were actually able to provide costs. But there are two kinds of costs, there are one-time costs such as planning for the establishment of a telework program and the cost of the information technology to help an employee work from home. Or and also for example a cost like buying laptops for employees the kind that they need for to work from home. Then there are ongoing costs and those include for example annual training for employees and then the cost of the administration of the program. So by law, each agency has to appoint a telework managing officer, those people are working all the time so that's an ongoing administrative cost. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] Now the Office of Personnel Management or OPM plays a significant role in federal telework, can you explain what OPM's role is here? [ Yvonne Jones: ] As the Office of Personnel Management, they have to provide policy and policy guidance for telework for all of the agencies in the executive branch, so that means that they can help agencies define appropriate numerical and qualitative measures to assess the impact of telework. They can also identify best practices across the government and recommend practices that agencies can undertake. OPM is responsible for producing an annual report to Congress. That report evaluates each agency's progress in meeting the telework goals that the agency defined for itself. So for example like the number of telework, teleworking staff at an agency would like to see year to year. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] Do they play sort of a coordinating and also a reporting function but they don't tell the agencies how they should be developing their telework strategies? [ Yvonne Jones: ] No they don't because OPM really thinks that each agency has the information that it needs to define for itself exactly what it wants to do in terms of its telework program but it can provide overarching training and policy advice, it's also there to if an agency calls with specific questions, it's there to help them out whether it's for policy or for specific aspects of managing the telework program. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] So let me ask you then, what recommendations is GAO making to OPM in this report? [ Yvonne Jones: ] We made two recommendations. We recommended that OPM include questions on reporting cost savings in its annual agency survey of telework practices because as I said earlier the Telework Enhancement Act doesn't require that agencies report on costs but we think that it's good management practice that the agencies report on costs and cost savings. We also recommended that agencies work with OPM and the Chief Human Capital Officer's Council to develop more guidance on potential sources of data for telework costs and benefits. We think that agencies are gathering data that's required in other circumstances, that could be beneficial for assessing the impact of telework but they would need some assistance from OPM and the Chief Human Capital Officer's Council to understand how to apply that information to their telework program so that they would have good data. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] And finally what would you say is the bottom line of this report? [ Yvonne Jones: ] The bottom line is like any other agency management policies, agencies need to know the value of telework. So because employees increasingly telework, agencies need to examine its impact on performance and bottom line costs. Congress has a clear interest in the value of this flexibility to the federal work force so agencies would need to know costs and benefits. So in today's constrained budgetary environment cost savings are an important measure of the success of telework but ultimately without more verifiable data on costs and benefits agencies can't determine if the benefits of telework outweigh the cost. [ Background Music ] [Narrator:] To learn more, visit GAO.gov and be sure to tune in to the next episode of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office.