From the Washington Post:
As the Biden administration contemplates how to return the massive federal workforce to the office, government officials are moving to make a pandemic experiment permanent by allowing more employees than ever to work from home — a sweeping cultural change that would have been unthinkable a year ago. ...
Notice of the change is expected in June, when the administration is set to release long-awaited guidance to agencies about when and how many federal employees can return to the office — likely in hybrid workplaces that combine in-person and at-home options, according to officials and memos obtained by The Washington Post. The bulletin is expected to address remote work policies in the immediate and long term.
“We anticipate this guidance will leave room for decision-making at departments and agencies, to provide maximum flexibility for defining work requirements to meet mission and workforce needs,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because plans have not yet been finalized. ...
How much other federal employees will be able to work from home will be up to individual agencies and is likely to vary widely depending on employee needs, manager preferences and the department’s mission, officials said. ...
Mark Hinkle, a Social Security Administration spokesman, said in an email that the agency is “carefully and incrementally increasing the number of employees working in our local field offices” to help whittle down workloads and is beginning to increase in-office appointments. ...
11 comments:
Start the Monday morning pool!
This is good news indeed! it seems to indicate , that the Biden Administration will make telework permanent for SSA in some form. It only makes sense, it's good for the employees and good for the pubic we serve too
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After more than a year of teleworking SSA has the logistics completed and employees are much more knowledgeable about how to get the work done at home.
I'm thinking it would be good to let employees age 60+ or other high risk, to continue 100% telework, just in case there is a vaccine resistant breakthrough wave of the virus.
For all other SSA employees perhaps. a hybrid model where they come in to the office 1 or 2 days per week of their choosing. This would allow for social distancing and safety while at the same time the FO could reopen for the few tasks which must be done in person.
Despite the doubts some have, telework really is working extremely well, and more work is getting done per hour. Any increase in backlog is caused by recent severe cutbacks in overtime, which hopefully is a temporary situation.
It should not be left up to Andrew Saul to decide how much telework SSA will have. He has already shown he is not knowledgeable on this issue and that he rushes into rash decisions such as when abruptly ended telework shortly after he took office.
. The Biden Administration should keep a close watch on Saul and force him to do the right thing. Or force him to step down as Commissioner if he is intransegent.
@1:41 pm SSA management has a habit of not doing the right thing. So, no one should expect them to get the telework model right either.
@ 1:41 Agreed. Saul has always been resistant to telework. He is clueless in a modern society. The worst person to head the SSA.
Better Not Call Saul.
"We anticipate this guidance will leave room for decision-making at departments and agencies, to provide maximum flexibility for defining work requirements to meet mission and workforce needs". That may, unfortunately, allow SSA management the discretion to limit telework as they see fit. And, given the tendency of SSA management to make poor decisions, that's not a good thing.
@609 re poor decisions by mgmt--didn't they hire everyone that is complaining about how terrible they are? They aren't the best but they don't always make bad decisions. I'd expect them to be overly cautious re returning to work. They already have been.
anon@6:09pm,
Yep, that my friends will be the ball game.
The quoted statement means that Biden is essentially going to abdicate decision making on this matter strictly to the heads of each of the various agencies so he doesn't have to be involved. I'm not surprised he is doing it, as Biden has recently demonstrated a Trump-esque propensity for walking back on his promises (he jettisoned his promise to discharge student debt earlier this afternoon, which was yet another one of his major election planks gone).
Biden has made a conscious choice to leave Saul in charge at SSA, which shows he has no interest in the agency at this time. And, because Saul is large and in charge, we all know what his furry little minions (who actually run the agency for him) are going to do just as soon as they can justify doing it.
I predict they'll opt to phase field office reopening back in (maybe as soon as early July) with partial telework/partial in-office work over a month or two.
Once the field offices are open to the public for full office hours, there will be an absolute onslaught of in-office visitors the likes of which SSA hasn't dealt with in many, many years. This in turn will cause the tracked customer wait times to explode massively upwards everywhere for the remainder of this year.
At that time, Saul and his minions will then use those "statistics" to justify a decision to recall all employees back into the offices. They'll do this by rolling back telework to its original form as quickly as they can draft the order.
Mark my words, it will happen.
I disagree with those who believe that Saul will be able to walk over SSA employees as he did when Trump was President. Saul has already been put on warning by having "Acting" Commissioner as his new title imposed by the Biden Administration.He is on thin ice and if he pulls something like trying to end telework he will be removed from his office for dereliction of duty.
Read the Post article again guys. The essence of the article is that that the federal government is going to make telework permanent. Stop trying to read between the lines and turn this into something bad for SSA workers.
@8:51: I agree with you Biden has made a conscious decision to keep Saul & his minions. What stuns me is why? I recall Obama/Biden Administration were far to lackluster with SSA. I honestly thought Biden would be more interested & assertive where SSA is concerned, especially with all the well documented Labor/Employee/Union issues. There’s been no shortage of news articles about the s
terrible situation at SSA concerning recalcitrance of Management.
Another Commenter here mentioned Management hired you employees, so we must not be all that bad. This is not true! Many employees were hired decades ago when SSA had decent Management and cared about its employees. We know what those years were like. What we’ve had Management wise at SSA since HPI has been an absolute disaster that only seems to get worse with each passing year. I encourage everyone who cares to contact the White House through their website or Social Media sites, and inform the Biden Administration what’s really been going on at SSA for many years now. Obama/Biden ignored SSA. Let’s not allow this to happen again.
I am not aware Andrew Saul has been formally moved from SSA Commissioner to Acting Commissioner. Is this true?
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