6 Telework: Rethinking the Process of Work

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

The next time you’re in Alexandria, Virginia, turn onto Dulany Street and make your way south into the heart of a beautiful, modern campus centered around the Madison building—a sleek steel and glass structure with an eye-catching ten-story atrium visible from miles around. The campus fans out to include four adjacent buildings situated among small parks, quiet traffic circles, restaurants, coffee shops, and a variety of retail stores. Old Town Alexandria, with its colonial charm, is a short walk from the King Street or Eisenhower Metro stations connecting individuals with much of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area.

The campus of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a component of the Department of Commerce, employs more than 10,000 patent examiners, attorneys, and other professional and administrative staff. But nearly 7,000 of its 10,000 employees don’t always work there; instead, they telework from home or from an alternate worksite. Why they telework and why USPTO encourages them to do so is a long story. But if you were on the USPTO campus and looked to the south, you would quickly see one major reason: the Capital Beltway. In 2011, the Washington, DC, area was ranked number two for having the worst traffic in the United States.

For those 10,000 USPTO workers who live in homes scattered across this sprawling metropolitan area of more than 5.5 million people, working from home is a win-win for both employee and employer. Telework gives employees additional time to spend on actual work as well as family time they would otherwise spend preparing for and driving to and from the office. In addition, for an agency aggressively expanding its workforce to handle a growing backlog of patent applications, telework frees up office space for new hires who require time on campus for mentoring and training without incurring the significant costs of building expansion.

The USPTO workforce, highly professional and sought after in a competitive labor market, has many employment choices. By providing its employees a choice that does not include a two-hour commute in bumper-to-bumper traffic, USPTO can attract the talent it needs to meet its mission, accomplish its strategic goals, and hire new employees without securing additional real estate.

Fifteen Years in the Making

The “trademark work at home” (TW@H) program began more than 15 years ago when Deborah Cohn, now the Commissioner for the Trademark organization, started a pilot telework program. In 1997, 18 Trademark examining attorneys were permitted to telework three days per week. At the time, the teleworkers accessed USPTO systems using dialup or ISDN (integrated services digital network) connections and carried their paper files to and from the office. The examining attorneys at headquarters agreed to share their single offices to support the program. This pilot program was selected as a National Performance Review Reinvention Lab during the Clinton administration and has received awards and accolades over the years since for being a model government telework program.

By 2002, when Trademark examination became more fully electronic, examining attorneys began teleworking four days a week and gave up assigned offices at headquarters; instead, they reserved shared space, a practice known as “hoteling.” Most were able to connect to USPTO’s intranet site, PTONet, using DSL or cable connectivity. All telework examining attorneys used government-supplied land telephone lines at home for calling applicants for trademark protection. A few Trademark service units also piloted teleworking a few days per week.

Six years later, in 2008, expanding and improving telework opportunities for all Trademark employees became a goal of the Trademark human capital strategic plan. Today, 92 percent of all Trademark staff in eligible positions telework between one and five days per week. All Trademark services work units have telework programs, and many supervisors and managers also participate in telework programs.

In 2006, Patents launched the patent hoteling program (PHP) with a goal of deploying 500 patent examiners per year to work from home full-time, improving on its previous one-day-per-week telework program. Patents has succeeded in meeting that goal each year since and now allows managers to telework as well. As of 2012, 87 percent of Patent employees in eligible positions teleworked between one and five days per week.

The Program

USPTO’s success comes not so much from the program design, but from the way the organization has pursued the change to telework using a “business-unit need” approach. This approach traces its roots back to the original Trademarks pilot program and the vision of the current Commissioner for Trademarks, Deborah Cohn. It also undergirds the structure of the program. For example, USPTO’s annual teleworking report addresses its numerous telework programs. Each line of business has a separate section in the report—for example, the Trademark Work at Home Program (TW@H), PHP, and the Office of the Chief Information Officer Telework Program.

Each organizational component of USPTO has shaped telework to fit its unique operating environment and constraints. This approach is also apparent in USPTO’s telework policy document. Like most policy documents, it includes program scope, background, definitions, authorities, and responsibilities. But one particular statement jumps out in bold, underlined and italicized print: “The operational needs of the business unit are paramount.”

The expansion of telework at USPTO was also dependent on the ability of USPTO labor and management, working as a team, to create telework policy and guidelines that would ensure success for the agency and for its employees. As USPTO began to see the value of expanding telework, it realized a position was necessary to manage and coordinate the pilot programs, the data collection, and the growth of telework throughout the agency. A telework senior advisor position was created; one of the primary duties of this position was to expand telework to the corporate business units (i.e., non-Patent and non-Trademark business units such as the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer, the Office of the Chief Information Officer, the Office of External Affairs, the Office of the Under Secretary, and the Office of the Chief Communications Officer).

To ensure this expansion, the business unit heads of these offices needed to fully buy in to the program. They needed to know how telework would help them meet their business-unit goals. They needed to understand the return on investment of incorporating telework as a business strategy.

USPTO’s senior telework advisor is Danette Campbell. She came to USPTO from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG), where she helped promote the use of telework to public and private sector entities in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. During her tenure at COG, she realized the importance of having defensible data, case studies, and return-on-investment information when presenting the business case for telework. With this information, the business unit head or agency executive can more easily make a strategic decision about incorporating telework.

While the secret to USPTO’s success lies in its business-driven, strategic approach, a few common elements and themes to telework are also critical to its success. These include technology and systems specifically designed to support the teleworker; comprehensive training programs to prepare the teleworker and the manager for potential issues and challenges; active communication across USPTO on telework goals, accomplishments, and policy; and a rigorous approach to evaluating and continually improving telework programs. As Campbell points out, “telework at the USPTO is not a one-size–fits-all initiative. Just like any good program or initiative, telework at the USPTO is a work-in-progress, constantly evolving to meet the needs of our agency.”

Getting the technology right is clearly an important ingredient to USPTO’s telework success. Employees must be comfortable and confident that they can accomplish their work using the technology they have available to them at home. USPTO provides teleworkers with a laptop, docking station, and collaborative communication tools such as Office Communicator (a collaboration product that seamlessly integrates with email and calendars). Combined, these tools provide employees with the means to “see” when colleagues are available and communicate with them via instant messaging, email, phone, video, and desktop sharing. WebEx allows employees to attend meetings and conferences from their desktop, wherever that may be. In turn, USPTO requires the teleworker have access to high-speed cable or fiber-optic broadband internet service. Some business units provide employees with additional in-home equipment, such as printers and scanners, depending upon the business unit and the position requirements.

USPTO provides a number of supporting tools and services as well. Teleworkers can access the IT help desk between 5:30 a.m. and midnight, Monday through Friday, and 5:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. on weekends and all federal holidays except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. USPTO has created a telework resource website that includes information technology rules of the road, user guides, and video training modules on using audio, video, desktop, and file-sharing collaboration tools. The site is a reference, education, and training tool for all USPTO employees concerning its telework and hoteling programs. The site also lists the numerous awards that USPTO has won over the years, including the Telework Exchange’s prestigious Innovative Applications of Technology to Support Telework award in 2010. Teleworkers have the same access to desktop files and documents as they do when they are working on campus. For example, in the Patents line of business, teleworkers have full access to all patent information and the business systems used in the examination process.

Training and communication are central to USPTO’s telework program. The typical curriculum for a new teleworker includes (1) a non-IT discussion for employees and managers and (2) IT-specific training for teleworkers. The non-IT discussion is an orientation to telework that addresses program policy and goals, employee and supervisory responsibilities, reporting requirements and techniques, data and records maintenance, security, performance management, and communication. This training is delivered live either on campus or through the Department of Commerce learning center. New teleworkers also receive comprehensive technology training, which covers hardware installation and use, VPN (virtual private network) and remote desktop connection, maintenance software, use of the computer’s soft phone, WebEx, and Office Communicator collaboration tools.

Telework places higher demands on a manager’s ability to motivate and monitor the workforce. Managers need to clearly define performance expectations and goals for their employees, which they then translate into documented deliverables and other results. They must build effective work teams that communicate well, are cohesive, and come together to get work done—with employees they may see only occasionally. They need to support and coach these employees through their work and their career, helping them use their time effectively, respond to work problems and challenges, and develop their professional skills. These fundamental management requirements become even more critical in a teleworking environment. USPTO helps develop and refine these skills through a non-IT facilitated discussion for managers.

USPTO has also established mechanisms to facilitate communication regarding telework. Each line of business identifies telework coordinators, who have formed a working group that meets quarterly to discuss telework issues the agency needs to address. In addition, USPTO publishes a telework annual report and shares information on telework programs and plans through a variety of communication vehicles, including business unit–specific newsletters and intranet sites. To facilitate cohesion among teleworking teams, USPTO encourages the use of collaboration tools, which enable teleworkers to maintain real-time connections with their coworkers and simulate the collegiality of an office environment.

The Results

USPTO’s telework program is widely recognized as a federal human capital success story. The program has received more than a dozen formal awards from groups such as the Telework Exchange, the Alliance for Work-Life Progress, and the Telework Coalition. Numerous federal agencies have turned to USPTO for advice in starting or expanding their telework programs and have explored implementing various aspects. Members of Congress and other political leaders refer to the successes of the USPTO telework program as a leading practice. Through telework, USPTO has enhanced employee performance, achieved cost savings and avoidances by reducing office space requirements, attracted and retained a top-caliber workforce, created a distributed workforce, enhanced its organizational culture, and reduced costs and personal wear and tear associated with daily commuting. Highlights include the following:

• Improved performance. Historically, supervisors and managers have managed employee performance by watching what their employees do. Most managers start out uncomfortable with telework because it challenges this simple model. Although the model of watching what people do may have been common for centuries inside organizations, a very different model has been used outside organizations, in marketplaces. While the factory foreman watches everything his workers do and in that way holds them accountable, the shopper buying what the factory produces has no idea who did what or how the product being purchased was produced. The shopper focuses instead on the product itself—its quality, price, and usefulness—and makes the purchasing decision based on that assessment.
  
  Telework starts to move performance management towards this marketplace model, away from the more controlling and paternalistic job-foreman model. It forces managers to focus on products, results, and outcomes rather than the hour-by-hour work habits and methods of the employee. As Danette Campbell notes:

  Our work at USPTO is very production-oriented. We have a backlog of patent applications. Some patent applications are more complex than others. But the agency understands that and has clear expectations in terms of production—quality, quantity, timeliness…. I would characterize what we’ve done more as “rethinking the process of work.” We focus on a model of clearly defined expectations and then empower employees to meet and exceed those expectations.

• Reduced office space. An obvious benefit of teleworking is that it reduces the cost of office space. USPTO estimates that it has been able to avoid $20 million in real estate costs as a direct result of its hoteling programs, where employees completely relinquish their office space to work from home full-time. Offices are configured with two work stations each, designed for hoteling employees to use when they are on-site. Hoteling employees schedule their time in the work space through an electronic concierge.

• Enhanced recruitment and retention. Initially implemented as a way to retain and attract talented examining attorneys who were spending far too much time commuting and struggling with work/life balance issues, USPTO’s telework program has now grown to include all business units in the agency. Attracting and keeping talent is as important to its mission as anything else it does. According to Danette Campbell, “We have an extremely professional, highly skilled workforce. Telework is a means to help us retain the best and brightest employees. It gives us a huge competitive edge.”

• Improved emergency management. In the winter of 2010, Washington, DC, experienced “Snowmageddon.” In a single storm, more than 30 inches of snow fell on a city that panics when two or three inches blow through. The news dominated headlines for days. The Washington Post, in an article headlined “In Blizzard’s Clouds, a Silver Lining for Teleworking,” noted that “The snow may have closed Federal offices this week, but that doesn’t mean Federal workers aren’t working…. The Trademark Assistance Center, on the Trademark side of the Patent and Trademark Office, reported production at 85% of normal levels on Monday and Tuesday, when the government was officially closed, a spokeswoman said. That’s remarkable.”
  
  A key benefit of telework that is especially important for government is emergency management. Since 9/11, agencies have been required to develop continuity-of-operations plans that document how they will respond in emergency situations to keep their operations providing essential services. If the entire workforce is in one location and can engage in its work from only that single location, emergencies can easily bring an agency’s work to a halt. At USPTO, telework enabled creation of a “distributed workforce” that can continue working at full strength even if employees are unable to get to the Alexandria campus.

• Reduced social costs. The City of Santa Clara, California, has a website that helps commuters calculate the cost of their commutes. A major element of the overall cost of commuting is the indirect cost, borne not by the commuter directly but by governments and society at large. Those indirect costs include accidents, highway construction and maintenance, air pollution, noise, water pollution, and land use impacts. The Santa Clara website calculates the total cost of indirect costs to be 39 cents per mile. USPTO estimates that its teleworking programs reduce commuting distances traveled by its workforce by a total of 33,049,695 miles per year. Using Santa Clara’s cost metric, the total indirect cost savings realized by the community as a result of the USPTO telework and hoteling programs are about $13 million per year. And that is on top of the cash that employees save directly through lower gasoline costs and reduced car maintenance.