Keeping Federal Workers Out of the Office

The term “telework” was coined by a consultant for a U.S. Air Force program who thought employees would be better off spending time working from home rather than commuting. Although the idea is nearly 40 years old, it’s still hampered by the belief that if employees aren’t at their office desks, they’ll slack off, says Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute. “Employers like the warm-body theory of labor,” says Green, who has studied the phenomenon of what is now more popularly called telecommuting. “They think, like some Roman generals, if you are followed around by more constituents, you are more powerful.”

But several federal agencies, adhering to a proposal from early in the last decade to raise the rate of telecommuting by 20 percent, have saved money and found efficiencies by boosting their share of work-at-home employees.