From a Northrop Grumman website:
Ordinarily, the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) headquarters and its more than 1,200 field offices across the country, are visited daily by thousands of citizens either in person, or by phone, seeking assistance with supplemental income and health and disability insurance. ...
Four years ago, a Northrop Grumman team began working with the SSA on a project to allow field office workers the opportunity to telework one or two days per week using a softphone, or having access to their phone lines through their computers. ...
The project had rolled out to nearly half of the field office workforce, about 28,000 employees, however policy changes at the SSA had slowed down any further expansion.
That changed with the rapid spread of COVID-19.
With SSA facilities closing in response to the coronavirus pandemic, there was suddenly an immediate need for all 50,000+ SSA field office employees to have softphone access.
During a marathon multiday session beginning March 13, a team of 16 Northrop Grumman employees who support the SSA on the Information Technology Support Services Contract (ITSSC2), sorted through databases to identify the SSA employees who were not set up with softphones. More than 30,000 names were identified and given to the SSA’s Division of Integrated Telecommunications Management (DITM). Plans were immediately put in place to accelerate the softphone rollout. ...
Within five days, the project to identify names and provide softphone access was complete. ...What I've wondered about is how they came up with all the hardware so quickly. I'm pretty sure the "softphones" require hardware.
14 comments:
Softphones require a USB headset and a piece of software installed on the laptop.
You don’t really need the headset, I have taken calls using the headphones packaged with my cell phone
Whatever it is, they got it. Initially, I had difficulty hearing the rep, but now it's very clear.
Did the ALJs get the softphones/headsets? In my first couple of telephone hearings it was so hard to hear the ALJ that we ended up terminating the hearing and rescheduling for a different date. Since those first couple of days the sound quality has gotten exponentially better.
Turns out it is important for a critical government agency responsible for the administration of millions of dollars in benefits to critical needs individuals to have its employees be able to work remotely. What a concept.
I'm convinced the only reason businesses and government agencies didn't allow widespread work from home to begin with is because all the middle managers needed to justify their existence. As we're now discovering, the myth that people are less productive while working from home is busted. All of these managers that existed only to supervise and coordinate in office meeting so they could share with their staff information from other in office meetings now have nothing to do.
Reminds me of a classic Office Space scene:
Bob Slydell : What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers?
Tom Smykowski : Yes, yes that's right.
Bob Porter : Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people?
Tom Smykowski : Well, I'll tell you why, because, engineers are not good at dealing with customers.
Bob Slydell : So you physically take the specs from the customer?
Tom Smykowski : Well... No. My secretary does that, or they're faxed.
Bob Porter : So then you must physically bring them to the software people?
Tom Smykowski : Well. No. Ah sometimes.
Bob Slydell : What would you say you do here?
Anon 2:08 Agreed. Working in cubicles and offices is antiquated. I have been working from home since 2010. So much more efficient. Except when the kiddos are home due to the quarantine. Bottom line is there are ways to track the productivity of an employee electronically. This can be done from home. It is 2020. This is the wave of the future.
@208 PM. Can't speak for all offices but I know mgmt in my office is working very hard now. They have been helping to fix computer problems remotely, soft phone problems, etc. Plus they have been opening the mail (after having it sit the amount of time the CDC recommends), scanning the 300+ pieces of mail into work track, figuring out where all those items are to be routed (many don't come with much info to determine why they are even submitted) and then regular supervisor work like monitoring lists, etc.
It's interesting that it took an outside organization with a talented team working long hours to bring about positive change and challenge the status quo. My experience is that employees always state they want to change but won't challenge the status quo. Both management and the union tend to be stuck in old ways of thinking. SSA needs forward-thinking leaders and talented employees. Maybe there is hope going forward.
Can't speak for other components but everybody in my OHO had both the softphone software and the hardware at the start of the pandemic. And, echoing 8:54, in my OHO, the group supervisors--the so called middle management--have been working harder than anyone during the pandemic.
"We are also ending a telework pilot, which was implemented without necessary controls or data collection to evaluate effectiveness or impact on public service. I support work-life balance for SSA employees consistent with meeting our first obligation: to serve the public. A time of workload crisis is not the time to experiment with working at home, especially for the more than 40,000 employees who staff our public facing offices."
Andrew Saul, November 4, 2019.
After what Commissioner Saul pulled last November, abrubtly ending telework without any providing logical rationale, I do not trust him to make the right decision going forward on this issue. The telework "experiment" had been in place for years, was working well and his decision to terminate telework was the worst decision any SSA Commissioner has ever made.
Softphone and other vital telework technology would be much further along now if not for Andrew Saul's action last year. The right thing would be for him to apologize.
Can employees telework from anywhere or do they have to be in their actual home? Meaning, can they telework from a relative’s home if there is a private room to work from?
We were told it had to be from home. One worker in my office changed her residence to her fiance just to keep working.
@329 We had to sign something saying we would do it from home. I would think if there were extenuating circumstances that could be changed.
Whatever decision he makes management will back him and gas light employees. It will be emperor's new clothes situation. That was the unspoken assumption when I was in management.
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