Several bills pending in Congress would either encourage or require agencies to reduce their real estate use if average utilization falls below 60 percent. Image: OmerYontar/Shutterstock.com

A White House report on offsite work provides nearly 3,000 pages of guidelines but few details on the impact of offsite work on two issues at the heart of the debate over these practices: employee productivity and the potential for a reduction in government office space.

The report said agencies are expected to “continue to optimize their work environment and telework attitudes, with the fulfillment of their mission at the forefront” and that they have “implemented written policies, including legally binding collective bargaining agreements, to govern their telework program and ensure high levels of employee performance.”

“Typically, these agency policies require that all teleworkers, on behalf of the agency, enter into a mutually agreed written telework agreement with their supervisor that sets forth the basic expectations for participation in the telework program and, if applicable, a regular telework schedule,” it states.

Teleworkers will still be subject to performance evaluations and agencies will be expected to “ensure that employees comply with telework and performance management policies and take action when individual or work unit performance is negatively impacted.” Such actions may include revocation of telework authorization and possibly disciplinary action, it says.

The two dozen ministries and agencies that provided details of their offsite work programs all made similar comments, although only some of them provided data on productivity, which, while showing recent improvements, were not specifically due to increased offsite work.

The report also looked at reducing office space – and the costs associated with it – given lower usage compared to pre-pandemic times. Several bills pending in Congress would either encourage or require agencies to reduce their real estate needs when usage falls below 60 percent on average. This comes after a GAO report last summer found that 17 of 24 major buildings were using less than 25 percent of their capacity on average.

The report states: “No data is currently collected to calculate average office space occupancy, but OMB is developing occupancy metrics that will require the calculation of annual average occupancy in the near future.” Even before the pandemic, “many agencies recognized that they had more office space than they needed,” but downsizing was difficult, including for reasons such as “lack of funding from Congress to reconfigure and consolidate office space to meet mission needs.”

“OMB expects all agencies to create purposeful, competitive, and sustainable work environments that help agencies succeed in both the short and long term, and to appropriately manage their real estate portfolios to support these decisions,” it said.

Individual agencies stated that they regularly evaluate their space needs, and several mentioned planned or already implemented reductions, but these were mostly due to long-standing initiatives rather than the increase in offsite work in recent years.

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