Federal Managers Association

In the News

• Teleworking feds are spending 60% of their time working in person, OMB says - August 14, 2024

• In a congressionally mandated report, the Office of Management and Budget rebuffed many common complaints by congressional Republicans about the popular workplace flexibility.

  Erich Wagner, Government Executive

  Anew report from the Office of Management and Budget found that as of May 2024, telework-eligible federal employees spent 61.2% of their work hours at traditional federal work sites, a rate that closely aligns with telework usage across all industries.

  Over the last several years, congressional Republicans have become increasingly agitated by the perception that federal employees’ use of telework and remote work has been negatively impacting agencies’ productivity.

  Administration officials and Democrats have argued that continued usage of telework and the creation of hybrid work environments are necessary following the COVID-19 pandemic, both to protect the continuity of operations and to compete with private sector employers for talent, instead blaming chronic underfunding of agencies for many backlogs. But they have often lacked the data to prove it, owing in part to the fact that the Office of Personnel Management’s annual telework reports are published more than a year removed from when the underlying data are collected.

  To read the full article, click here.

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