Telework can work for the state
I’ve heard a lot of debate, pro and con, over the rescinding of telework for most state employees. I’ve been teleworking almost exclusively since 2005 and traveling monthly to see clients and staff.
A lot of skeptics envision teleworking state employees in pajamas on the couch binge watching Yellowstone with their laptop and cell phone on the coffee table in case their boss emails. I confess I have had one employee like this. Over 17 years, that’s not too bad, and that individual was quickly determined to be “not a fit” for the company.
For the most part, however, teleworkers have the opposite problem. When you work from home, you never leave the office. I check my email typically around 6 a.m. since the bulk of my employees and clients are in the Eastern time zone. I wind it down by 5 these days, but in the early days of a company startup, 12 hour days were not unusual.
Telework always depends on the job. Plain and simple. You can’t telework in construction. Or food and beverage, or retail. For a lot of office-based jobs, telework does work, but only if management sets the tone.
The first is accessibility and proactive contact. This isn’t different from being present in a typical office. Heard of the trend of “quiet quitting?” You can do that just as easily in person as remotely. Supervisors need to reach out to their staff early and often throughout the week in a new telework environment to set the expectation that active participation and engagement is still required.
Next, a telework culture needs to be created from regular engagement in the virtual environment. Make your staff attend virtual meetings so they are reminded they are part of your organization. Have different employees present on topics of interest so the conversations are not just one-way.
Most importantly, track performance. If work is not being completed on time or to standard, management must act immediately. Distance is not your friend in this situation. Remote workers who aren’t performing up to par can be difficult to reach; managers will have to go the extra mile to get to the bottom of the issue.
If this sounds like Workplace 101, it is. And as I write this, I wonder, based on my experience either as a direct consumer or a consumer of state and local news, whether anyone is managing anyone in some state agencies.
Anyone trying to start a business in this state knows that the Secretary of State’s Business Services department is a mess. Guidance on the website is inconsistent, response time is slow and often inaccurate, and processes that seem basic for business structure and registration are convoluted and opaque.
That’s not telework; that’s poor management.
The onslaught of unemployment claims during the pandemic nearly broke the Department of Workforce Solutions and slow response times resulted in death threats to the department secretary. Former Secretary Bill McCamley even pulled hundreds of workers from other state agencies and responded to requests personally to try and meet the crushing demand.
From an outsider’s view, it looked like one man attempting to manage a tremendous crisis. Did McCamley have the strong managers he needed to help him? He pushed the executive branch as hard has he could in pulling in workers from other agencies, but in a state where the part-time, unpaid legislature has no emergency powers, emergency response falls solely on the executive branch to figure out.
That’s not telework; that’s a state government structure that lacks agility, transparency and true checks and balances.
My company has been fortunate to grow by nearly 30 percent since before the pandemic. As someone doing a good bit of hiring, I can tell you that the labor market is brutal and telework is a key consideration. Job seekers have more leverage than ever, and they want at least a partial telework situation. The best workers will go to the most flexible employers.
For the state, this means they will lose some talent to other, more flexible employers if it stands firm on on-site work. Given the current competition among employers in the labor market, it can be expected that employee quality will decline, or a number of state jobs will go unfilled.
Given the challenges our major state agencies face – Workforce Solutions is still trying to recoup over $100 million in benefit overpayments, PED is trying yet again to move the needle forward for our dismal educational outcomes, and CYFD must simply reform itself at every level – now is not the time to shut the door on the best talent in the labor market.
Telework is an important tool for all employers in 2022 and beyond. New Mexico should look to its future workforce, not polls and perception.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a PR executive and former Navy officer. She appears regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican, she lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run two head of dog, and two of cat. She can be reached at news.ind.merritt@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: Telework can work for the state
