When she goes to work every Thursday, Catherine Svoboda has a room with a view — of the carp in her backyard’s pond and the great blue herons that visit them.
Svoboda, a Maryland Department of Transportation employee for 18 years, has been teleworking for the past decade.
But she also is a rare example of a state employee working remotely on a regular basis. Data from the state show that outside of the transportation department’s headquarters, a tiny percentage of employees telework on a regular basis in Maryland. That pales in comparison to statistics for neighboring Virginia.
Early in the week — before Thursday, when she works out of her Hyattsville home — Svoboda, the recertification manager in the department’s Office of Minority Business Enterprise, files a plan with her boss outlining what she will produce when she teleworks, as required by the state.
On Fridays, when she returns to the department’s headquarters in Hanover, Svoboda goes over with her supervisor, Richelle Thomas, what she has accomplished in her attic office to show that she has delivered on her promise. The work for employees like Svoboda can range from writing drafts of proposed policies for the department, to considering to reviewing new regulations and Excel spreadsheets — all of which she can do from home.
In between, Svoboda saves the roughly two hours she typically spends commuting, and in the course of a year, $700 on gasoline alone (she undertook a cost-benefit analysis herself).
And there’s one final benefit.
“I’m much more efficient. I get things done much faster,” said Svoboda on one such Thursday in December.
She isn’t an isolated case. A 2010 report from Richmond, Va.-based Mack Global Consulting on teleworking reported that the state’s transportation department showed a 27 percent increase in productivity among employees who telework.
Svoboda gets to the Hanover office at 9 a.m., but sometimes begins telework as early as 7:30 a.m.
“That is very much the norm for most teleworkers,” Thomas, deputy director for the minority business enterprise office, said of the early start to the day.
Discussing her own work habits, Thomas said she sometimes logs on to her work information from home at 6 or 6:30 a.m. when she teleworks.
Transportation out front
Of the 43,000 state employees in the State Personnel Management System (excluding transportation department workers), about 6,000 were eligible for telework. Some 581 employees, or 1.3 percent of all workers in the system and 9.6 percent of those eligible, actually teleworked, as of June.
Those teleworkers represented 19 state agencies, and on average worked outside the office 22 hours each month.
Among executive branch agencies, the transportation department is where teleworking has been relatively popular.
Out of about 315 employees working at transportation department headquarters, 101 of 197 employees eligible to telework do so. Of those, 73 work outside the office at least four times a month, and on average 1.3 days per week.
Maryland’s regulations governing telework, created in 1999 and revised in 2009, require each agency to attempt to allow at least 10 percent of its eligible employees to telework to some extent.
There hasn’t been a significant effort recently to increase the number of state employees who telework, said Cindy Kollner, executive director of the Office of Personnel Services and Benefits within the state’s Department of Budget and Management, which oversees the state’s telework program.
For example, those who work in the state prison system, state police, state hospital workers and employees in social and juvenile services are not considered telework eligible. (Kollner wasn’t able to provide the number of such workers.)
“It’s kind of hard to have a lot of people here teleworking because we do have walk-in people,” Kollner said. “I think you kind of have to be strategic in terms of who you allow to be teleworkers.”
Making the telework case
Despite the fact that some state workers can’t work remotely because of the nature of their jobs, raising the number of eligible workers to even 25 percent of the state work force would be a major step forward, said Chuck Wilsker, president and CEO of the Telework Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that promotes telework in both the public and private sectors.
“Baltimore is a little more old-fashioned than the D.C. suburbs,” he said.
One major impediment to teleworking, Wilsker noted, is that in Maryland, each employee’s supervisor is ultimately responsible for deciding telework eligibility. The approach should be reversed to assume that employees are eligible, and the burden of proof should be on the employer to show why they should not be.
This approach makes sense due to the amount of work that employees can do on mobile devices like BlackBerries and laptops, Wilsker said.
But Thomas says that in some obvious cases, such as highway engineers, teleworking should never be the default assumption.
Still, she praised the myriad benefits of the practice — from employee morale to environmental. Because the public sector often can’t match private-sector salaries, teleworking is an attractive benefit that government offices could offer, Thomas said.
“I’ve got an employee who is more relaxed as they start their workday. Their mind is more engaged in the work already,” she said.
In a May 2011 report from Microsoft on which U.S. metropolitan areas best support teleworking, Baltimore did not rank in the top 15, despite a campaign from the Baltimore Metropolitan Council to increase teleworking in the region. Washington, D.C., ranked seventh.
By contrast, Virginia’s legislature set a goal in 2008 for 20 percent of eligible state employees to telework at least one day a week by 2010. The state met the goal and now has about 8,500 state workers telecommuting (more than 10 times the number available from Maryland’s data) out of the 25,000 deemed eligible.
Citing concerns about traffic congestion as a reason for the 20 percent goal, Virginia Deputy Secretary of Technology Karen Jackson recalled, “It was actually driven out of the Northern Virginia contingent (of legislators).”
The average U.S. worker would save more than $2,000 annually in gas alone by teleworking every day, reports Telework Exchange, a public-private partnership in Alexandria, Va., that examines remote work issues.
Eating at the desk
A few years ago, Svoboda began using software on her home computer that allowed her to access her work remotely without additional software. Her phone, printer and Internet connection complete her technology requirements.
Normally, Svoboda would take a lunch break at the Hanover office. When she’s at home in Hyattsville, she contents herself with a sandwich that she eats over her computer while she works.
“I save on stress,” she said.
Svoboda can’t think of a single negative regarding teleworking. In fact, she likes not being distracted by office chatter and being pulled aside for tasks that keep her from her main projects.
On average, Svoboda leaves the Hanover office at about 5:30 p.m., but when she teleworks, she’ll toil away until 7:30 or 8 p.m.
“I’m on a roll. I want to get it done,” she said.
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