How To Lose A Week In Ten Days

Warning: the following blog entry contains math!

I have come to realize that I only enjoy snow in the abstract. The idea of it is fun and enchanting from the living room window, but the cold hard reality of snow from the driveway is all blood, sweat, and tears. If you live in the DC area and don't have a flying car, you were probably stuck at home for much of the "Snowpocalypse last year." If you were prepared, you had food and activities. If you were lucky, you had uninterrupted electricity, cable, Internet, and you got paid.
With 300,000 federal government employees in the DC metro area according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and an average salary of about $71,000 according to USA Today, every lost hour of work costs the taxpayer about $10.5 million. The government was basically closed for an entire week, but some workers had access to email or brought some work home with them. Some others may have teleworked. Let's figure 30 hours lost over the snow emergency, which therefore cost a whopping $315 million. Keep in mind, that's only a direct cost, which doesn't count lost productivity by people working out of the area who couldn't communicate with DC people.

Now, I know what you're thinking: the number sounds big, but it's a drop in the federal bucket. Fair enough, but we received zero for it. Nada, zilch, niente. And the government will never make up that productivity over the fiscal year. Is this situation preventable somehow?

Well of course it is, with telework. According to telework.gov's 2009 Annual Report, 102,900 federal employees are teleworking out of 2 million total, which is about 5 percent. The problem is that about half of agencies have not put telework into their Continuity of Operations (COOP) planning in a meaningful way. According to the report, the biggest stumbling blocks aren't IT or security, they are "office coverage" and management resistance.

In a snowstorm, there's no need for office coverage, because nobody's there anyway. For the managers, they should ask whether it's better to encourage telework and put a real plan in place or to watch their human capital budget go down the storm drain. Thanks to technologies like Microsoft SharePoint, any worker with Internet access can work on documents, engage in discussion groups, and schedule meetings much more efficiently than with Outlook. Best of all, documents can stay on a server managed by IT rather than being saved on a home computer. Even if teleworking isn't practical for everyone on a regular basis, it's a great way to ensure that the people's business gets done.