The General Services Administration instituted a new governmentwide telework policy Monday that essentially flips the managerial presumption that employees cannot telecommute to one that presumes they can. It also sets a new benchmark in detailing the government’s mobility and telework guidelines for federal employees and supervisors.

“Work is what we do, not where we are,” the GSA policy states, and a phrase that GSA Administrator Martha Johnson often repeats in her public remarks.

The new policy document says it “recognizes mobility as an overarching term describing the ability of employees, enabled by the robustness of information technology and progressive workplace policies, to perform work both within and outside the agency worksite as defined in this policy. It includes a range of separate and distinct modes of work,” including:

• Alternative Officing (desk sharing, hoteling, hot desking)
• Conference attendance
• Mobile work (site audits, client visits, site inspections, etc.)
• Satellite work
• Telework
• Training
• Emergency Situations
• Travel
• Virtual and distributed work

The new policy outlined several goals, according to GSA Chief People Officer Anthony Costa: Make every GSA employee, with few exceptions, eligible for telework; explicitly define some of the ways in which we work, such as hot desking, the workspace sharing arrangements known as hoteling and desk sharing; and empower our entire workforce to be mobile for the 21st century.

Costa’s comments, along with those of GSA Administrator Martha Johnson and Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry at a special signing ceremony at GSA’s temporary headquarters, were reported by Government Executive.

“Work is what we do, not where we are.”

The new policy expands on requirements of the 2010 Telework Enhancement Act, which requires agencies to increase the use of flexible work arrangements “to improve management effectiveness…and agency continuity of operations” as well as enhance work-life balance.

But the new policy also reflects Johnson’s vision for sustainability and GSA’s plans to accommodate as many as 4,500 employees in its headquarters office space–currently under reconstruction–that, previously officed 2000 employees.

In addition to detailing who can telework and under what circumstances, the policy also spells out the notion of “alternative officing,” an arrangement in which an employee has no dedicated or assigned workspace at a worksite, but instead has access to workspace under three scenarios:

• Desk sharing– which involves sharing a common desk at scheduled times
• Hoteling – where an employee could work at non-dedicated workspaces at reserved times
• Hot Desking – where an employee could work on at a non-dedicated workspace on a first-come first served basis.

Johnson has in a variety of speeches, including her most recent appearance at the Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, stressed that successful telework “is a team sport” that depends on “culture and trust, not a bunch of rules.”

According to the OPM 2011 Federal Employees Viewpoint Survey, 78% of GSA employees are teleworking in form or another.