Government Teleworking Rates

For office workers around the country, teleworking has become a viable solution to creating social distance and keeping people safe during the COVID pandemic.  It has been new ground for many companies who are used to having employees connect face to face, but adaptation has been the name of the game over the past year.  Twitter decided on a rather radical move to allow employees to work from home permanently while Google hasn’t gone quite so far, and will require employees to be in the office three days per week starting this fall.

In the public sector, Government Technology has analyzed data that shows that government workers have gone remote at a higher rate than the employed population as a whole.  The percentage of workers that are remote has been dropping since May, but still remains higher in government than in the general workforce.

The chart below shows the data they gathered and how it compares to the economy as a whole.

These rates are related to those who are teleworking specifically because of the pandemic, not those that would have been remote regardless.  It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that government workers were displaced from the office at a higher rate given how many of the jobs exist in a traditional office environment. 

The numbers for the economy as a whole simply can’t be as high due to the nature of many in-person service positions.  There were other verticals that surpassed government workers in terms of telework, like computer and mathematical positions, which reached a peak of 76% in May and have stayed quite high, at 68% in August.

It’s a credit to governments that they were able to transition to telework in such an effective manner.  While we’ve mentioned that the nature of the work matters, the transition still carries significant effort from IT teams to get employees successfully set up with a secure remote connection.  On top of that, each employee will have hardware requirements, connection requirements, and more to ensure that they can work just as effectively from home as they would from the office.

For some governments, remote work has also forced certain IT projects from being nice to have into a necessity.  In offices where customers would physically come in to look at tangible records, governments had to push to digitize them and make them available online.  The flexibility to implement projects like this has also been part of the reason that governments have been able to enable remote work so effectively.

We’ve worked on several projects like this at Extract, automatically redacting sensitive information in documents so they could be made available over the internet.  We work with state and local governments to help give them the flexibility and agility they need to index or redact their documents without having to disrupt the normal course of business.  If you’d like to learn more about how we do this, please reach out.