In February, the U.S. Department of Agriculture imposed strict new limits on telework in spite of arguments that workers would have a harder time balancing work and family life and predictions of even worse traffic in the nation’s capital.
But more than nine months later, the program is well on its way toward being implemented and thousands of USDA employees aren’t routinely working from home anymore.
During the Obama administration, telework was encouraged. Some employees were at home for as many as three days a week. USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue overhauled the policy so that only one day a week could be spent working from home — months later, the results have been dramatic.
No legal challenges were filed after the policy was applied to the first wave of workers, and employees are mostly complying with the change, despite some grumbling. Now, USDA is showing other agencies what it did to help ensure federal employees are working together on site as a team to help fulfill their mission.
“We’ve shared a lot,” Deputy USDA Secretary Steve Censky told the Washington Examiner this week. “Other agencies, departments have watched what we have done,” he said. “We’ve had quite a few that have reached out to us to ask, how did you do it, can we see your policy, how did it go?”
Two other agencies have followed suit, the departments of Commerce and Education. So far, the Office of Personnel Management says it’s up to individual agencies whether to implement a similar program and that there isn’t any mandate to do so from the Trump White House.
“Agencies make their own telework policy decisions and make changes based on organizational needs,” an OPM spokesman told the Washington Examiner.
Censky says USDA has been explaining to other departments what it’s done. “On a monthly basis, the President’s Management Council meets, which is the deputies throughout all of the Cabinet agencies,” he said. “These were some of the things that we were sharing there on what we were doing.”
While President Trump has promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., the push to at least make sure federal officials are showing up to work on time came from Perdue. Censky says Perdue installed the program based on the lessons he learned as governor of Georgia.
“He led great efforts to make Georgia government work and be more accountable to the people, and bringing a lot of those same ideas here to the federal government as well,” Censky said.
Perdue and Censky said the program is meant to ensure USDA is doing all it can to provide better customer service to farmers. Before telework was slashed, USDA leaders would hear complaints that certain projects or initiatives would be delayed because people weren’t in the office.
“We have seen around a 90 percent reduction … in the number of employees that are teleworking three or more days per week,” Censky said. “We’ve gone from around 7,000 employees that were … teleworking three or more days per week down to 750.”
The first wave of the policy change only hit employees who aren’t covered by collective bargaining agreements. The rest of USDA employees are governed by about 50 labor agreements, and Censky said that as each one is being renegotiated, telework options are being reduced.
He said unions have accepted the fact that USDA has the power to require its workers to be at work most days of the week.
“There are certain parameters that are up to management in labor contracts, and then there are certain provisions that are negotiable,” Censky said. “And this falls into one of those areas that management can set and can determine.”
“And they know that,” he added. “And I think that’s why, frankly, we probably haven’t seen a legal challenge.”
That doesn’t mean there haven’t been complaints. Before the policy was implemented, USDA was warned that morale would drop and that it would make life miserable for the department’s workers.
Many employees definitely miss the perk. In the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, just 38 percent said they like USDA’s new telework rules, compared to 81 percent who said they liked the old rules in 2017. Support levels also fell at the Department of Education.
Censky admitted that when the full survey is released this year, overall satisfaction for workers at USDA is going to see “some hit” due to the policy change.
But he said he hasn’t seen employees walking out en masse because of the change and said, in some cases, employees have said they prefer the new rules. “There was grumbling I think among those employees who were impacted,” he said. “What wasn’t reported so much … because people don’t like to talk about their colleagues, but we’ve heard just a lot of, ‘Oh, thank you, because we can be more productive now. We can get more things done.'”
Censky said he believes the radical change to the work life of thousands of USDA employees was able to take hold without much in the way of protests or legal battles because it reflects common sense and wasn’t done with malice toward employees. He said one early complaint about the change helps make that case.
Early in the process, an assistant to Perdue overheard a USDA worker complaining about the change. The assistant asked the worker what his job was. “He was a mechanic,” Censky said. “So tell me how a mechanic is eligible for telework?”
