The nation’s largest employer says it’s time for employees to return to the office more regularly, offering the latest salvo in America’s work from home battle.
The Biden administration on Thursday detailed new guidance for a return to work for federal employees, making clear that they must “substantially” increase in-office work. The guidance called on each department and agency to formulate its own plans based on their organization’s needs, but stopped short of calling for any specific requirement.
“The guidance we are releasing today directs agencies to refresh their Work Environment plans and policies—with the general expectation that agency headquarters will continue to substantially increase in-person presence in the office—while also conducting regular assessments to determine what is working well, what is not, and what can be improved,” Jason Miller, the deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a blog post explaining the new guidelines.
The plans to return the workforce to more regular in-person attendance come as the federal pandemic response is coming to a close, with programs winding down as the public health emergency is set to end May 11.
“One year after agencies completed reentry, and with the planned conclusion of the public health emergency, it is the right time for agencies to assess their work environments, reflecting on what they have learned as they build routines for measuring and monitoring organizational health and organizational performance,” White House Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young said in a memo sent to the heads of executive departments and agencies.
Young added, “It is the expectation that as a part of these assessments agencies will continue to substantially increase meaningful in-person work at Federal offices, particularly at headquarters and equivalents, while still using flexible operational policies as an important tool in talent recruitment and retention.”
Young’s memo called on each department to update “work environment plans,” to “establish routines to assess and optimize such changes,” and “identify a set of indicators” to monitor workforce health and performance. There will be efforts to share best practices and also to hold underperforming agencies accountable. There are specific steps each agency must complete within 30, 60, 90, and 150 days of the memo’s Thursday release.
There are about 2 million federal employees spanning all aspects of government, from Transportation Security Administration employees at the nation’s airports, to West Wing staffers, to NASA scientists, to your neighborhood postal service worker. Many members of the federal workforce were never given the option to work from home during the Covid-19 pandemic over the past three years. But Thursday’s guidance is likely to disproportionally impact those working in the Washington, DC, metro area, where 14.7% of the federal workforce is based, according to data from the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser used her third inaugural address earlier this year, in part, to call on the Biden administration to get more DC federal workers back into their buildings – an important revenue-generator for surrounding businesses struggling in their absence.
“The federal government represents one quarter of DC’s pre-pandemic jobs and owns or leases one third of DC’s office space,” Bowser said in her January speech. “We need decisive action by the White House to either get most federal workers back to the office most of the time or to realign their vast property holdings for use by the local government, by non-profits, by businesses and by any user willing to revitalize it.”
Though 61% of US workers “do not have jobs that can be done from home,” many American workers have come to take advantage of a hybrid work arrangement: “41% of those with jobs that can be done remotely are working a hybrid schedule… up from 35% in January 2022,” the Pew Research Center said in a March report.
Previous guidance from the Office of Personnel Management had called on agencies to “start re-assessing schedules for and frequency of telework, based upon the experiences of the last 15 months, and re-establish them in a way that best meets mission needs (including the agency’s ability to compete for qualified candidates and retain talent).”