From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9, editorial comment below.
"
Congressman Griffith's Weekly E-Newsletter 2.3.23That was then. It’s been three years since the start of the pandemic, and it is largely behind us.
Most Americans have returned to work in person as they had done before COVID-19. Unfortunately, the federal workforce in large measure hasn’t followed suit.
During President Biden’s State of the Union address last March, he said, “People working from home can feel safe and begin to return to their offices. We’re doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”
But this hasn’t been the case. According to a Federal Times report from October, just 1 in 3 federal workers had returned to work in-person full time in 2022.
Before the pandemic, only about 3% of federal employees teleworked daily. In their most recent report on telework, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said that nearly half, or 47%, of federal workers currently teleworked routinely or situationally in Fiscal Year 2021, which ended Sept. 30, 2022.
Too many people around the country, those in the 9th District included, have seen the real-world effects of federal workers not being in their offices.
Seniors have waited on the phone for hours to talk to someone from the Social Security Administration about receiving their benefits as they have been unable to talk to someone in person. In part because the agency has kept their offices largely closed to the public.
Many veterans have waited for months to get their medical records from the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC), part of the National Archives. At one point, the center had a backlog of approximately 500,000 requests for records.
One constituent requested medals and records from the Navy in August of 2020 through our office. Despite numerous follow-ups, the response from the NPRC was that they were backlogged. In May of 2021, he died. We received the medals and records a year later in May of 2022.
Because of closures to passport offices around the country, in-person appointments have mostly disappeared, leaving people with the inability to get a new passport in a timely manner.
In one case we had a constituent reach out for help after realizing his passport was expired. Because of staffing issues and backlogs, the regional passport agency could not provide an appointment due to limited appointments. After reaching out to all the passport agency acceptance centers in the country, the only available appointment was in Aurora, Colorado.
Obviously, federal workers aren’t supposed to take home your tax return, passport application, or Social Security records.
It’s time for federal workers to actually return to work so that they can more adequately serve the needs of the American people.
When Republicans took control of Congress, we ended proxy voting, which allowed Members of Congress to phone in their votes. More discussions to improve legislation occur in hallways, stairwells, and elevators than ever occurred on a zoom meeting with 30 people. The same is true for federal workers. More collaboration on solving problems will occur when they actually work together in the office.
Unfortunately, while Republicans have tried for months to get information from the Biden Administration on how telework has decreased federal agencies’ ability to perform their duties, the Administration has not responded.
We can no longer wait on the Administration. We have to push them. Accordingly, just a few days ago I voted in favor of the Stopping Home Office Work's Unproductive Problems Act, or the SHOW UP Act.
The SHOW Up Act, which passed the House largely along party lines, requires federal agencies to return to pre-pandemic levels by reinstating telework policies that were in place on Dec. 31, 2019.
The bill would also require federal agencies to submit a study to Congress looking at the effects of telework, whether it improved or harmed agency effectiveness.
If an agency can demonstrate to Congress that they are able to perform better with telework, while also lowering agency costs and ensuring agency network security, increased telework can be considered as an option.
Bottomline, we must do what we can to best serve the needs of our fellow Americans by promoting productivity and effectiveness in our federal workforce.
I believe that is returning to work in person.
If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or my Washington office at 202-225-3861. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.
"
Editorial comment:
Right. Some federal offices have a problem. But restoring the Dreaded D.C. Traffic to previous levels of gridlock can't be the only aolurion.
Frankly, Congressman, some of these offices were full of time-wasting time-servers in the Reagan Administration when I was a young word/data processor. And in the Nixon Administration when a friend was a young typist.
We were hired on the basis of skills and test scores, so there was an incentive to be skilled, efficient workers who got the job done. Then we'd go to these offices and encounter the reverse incentives. Emphasis on looking busy to reduce hassle allowed us to type or even write books at the office, while being continually scolded about the lack of cordiality our mere presence seemed to evoke from the career office workers, which no one ever described in a way that we could understand as what it really meant, "Making us look bad."
And if anybody imagines that these career office workers were taking a week to type, e.g., an elaborately formatted document that was still unsatisfactory and that I redid from scratch in three hours, at Fish & Wildlife, because they were the ones actually finding the records and answering taxpayers' questions? Possibly person would be interested in some beachfront property in Roanoke? It was more as if points were being awarded for the number of phone calls to different offices a taxpayer could be told to make. Actually answering a question was like something only a temporary worker would ever do!
Just bringing these people back into the office won't get their work done more efficiently but it will substantially increase the danger of D.C. traffic. When federal office workers are not motivated to help taxpayers, chances are that they're not motivated to drive courteously either.
Based on my limited (thank Heaven) experience as a federal office worker, I propose that these offices are due for a completely revised system of management.
As a general rule, introverts are motivated to do their jobs for their own sake, without needing someone else to sit around supervising them. Extroverts, who aren't task-focussed and efficient when they are supervised, come completely unglued when left to supervise themselves working from home. But we don't want those people back in government offices. We want them employed as cafeteria servers or garden weeders, where they can chatter all day and still get something useful done. We want introverts, especially people who left federal offices with notes on their records that they "did excellent work but didn't seem to relate well to the others," doing the office work. That means that the individuals who are more productive, and more helpful to taxpayers, while working from home, keep their jobs...and the extroverts are either transferred or dismissed. We want them kept out of federal offices.
We want a system that monitors federal workers' actual productivity and rewards good efficient work, rather than kaffeeklatsching and working at the slowest possible pace.
Taxpayers' phone calls could go through a system that asks them just one question about the performance of the employee who took the call: "If your question or concern has been completely resolved, press 1. If you need to make another call, press 2." Two callers pressing 2 in one day would indeed be a reason for bringing the employee back to the office...for retraining. Two retrainings would be grounds for transfer or termination.
While confidential records should be maintained as hard copies and not shipped hither and yon via the Internet, most federal employees don't actually handle confidential records often. What can be done via the Internet can be done better from home...if the right people are doing it.
Requiring agencies to show that they can work more efficiently without the gridlock is a self-defeating effort because the agencies have failed to hire, or have lost, the right sort of workers. Instead, the question should be whether individuals can work more efficiently from home--which the right individuals most certainly can.
I can tell you, Congressman, that on several contracts and subcontracts with federal offices, I had one job responsibility that I couldn't have handled better from home, if today's technology had existed back then. That was teaching other people how to use their shiny new computers, all loaded with state-of-the-art software like Lotus and Word Perfect. And even then, it might have required more thought from me, but it might also have been less embarrassing for older employees, if that had been done via Zoom, instead of my going into their offices, breathing on them and being breathed on, touching their keyboards, and demonstrating how to do things like adding their own names to their "dictionary" files.
For all other purposes, every hour I spent in every federal office where I worked could have been more profitably spent at home.
I never actually worked forty hours for the taxpayers on any federal office job. Never once. Of course the bureaucracy could have been restructured, as it has since been, so that I could have started out with more room to learn new skills and take on new responsibilities. But no office was generating enough paperwork to keep me typing and editing for eight hours a day in a federal office, the way my independent typing service did during the weeks before exams at a big university. Everyone went to the office on time, lots of wasted gas commuting from all over Maryland and Virginia, and we spent some time sipping coffee and snacking, some time hauling paper to the copying room and waiting for a turn at the copying machines, some time going to meetings of two or three people that would have been better handled by phone, some time taking mandatory breaks and buying lunch. I'm willing to believe that some of the people in some of those offices really were focussing their minds on their jobs, some part of the time, and honestly needing an hour to type two letters accurately. I would ask the person responsible for those letters to dictate them to me at the computer, make corrections, and let the person take them out of the printer, in five minutes. And then I'd spend the rest of the hour typing students' papers I'd brought from my own office, or writing my own letters, or making samizdat copies of library books, just to look busy. The taxpayers paid me to transcribe about a dozen library books and make photocopies of knitting patterns from two or three dozen more, just because even I was not clueless enough to be seen knitting or exercising while everyone else was typing, even if my keyboard rattled continuously while theirs went click...click...click click...click...
The federal government does need more of the kind of worker that I was and it does need to get rid of the kaffeeklatschers. It does not need to turn back the clock and have people commuting to work every single day, when their jobs do not consist of handling confidential records that need to be locked up in one place.
Politicians, even the good ones, tend to be extroverts. That doesn't have to be all bad as long as they understand that most of the work of government is better done by introverts. Working from home may have led to an overall loss of efficiency in government offices, but that certainly is not because the way the offices had been working before was efficient. It is because unsuitable people were doing the office work before. It would be better to use working from home as a test that can efficiently eliminate the inefficient, unhelpful, unreliable people from the offices.
In far too many cases it's too late for federal agencies to correct the problem they started by paying any attention to "interpersonal skills" when evaluating the fast and accurate work of the file clerks, mail clerks, typists, bookkeepers, proofreaders, and other office workers who just didn't seem to be "liked" by others at the office. It's not too late in every case. It would still be possible for the agencies to locate some of us, explain that it was wrong that our good work was unappreciated because of other people's envy and hostility, and beg us to come back and be senior consultants and managers in the offices where we used to be unappreciated clerks. At least it would be a laugh, for a demographic group who tend to lead long healthy lives, to be able to say that most of us were now enjoying being professors emeriti, business owners, or just grandparents, too much to want to go back. And I personally would be willing to take the 90% online courses I'd need to qualify as head of the EPA, or even Secretary of the Interior, just to find out how sorry it's possible to make the people who've failed to get glyphosate banned.
But there is time for the federal government to adopt a policy that, if sorting mail or taking calls or digging up files for the taxpayers is not something you the young career employee want to do as well as it can possibly be done, for its own sake, then you are not the one who needs to be doing that job. If you need supervision to do the work that goes on in a federal office, then what you really need to do is retire and let someone who cares about the job take it over.
No comments:
Post a Comment