More Incentives for Teleworkers?

The record blizzard that has shut down federal agencies in Washington for four consecutive days has drawn a flurry of articles on how the government must significantly boost the number of federal employees who telework.

According to The Washington Post, about one-third of Washington-based employees at the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management have logged on to their agencies' mainframe computers, most likely from home, during the past four days.

One of the articles I've found most interesting, however, is Alyssa Rosenberg's piece that highlights a Virginia lawmaker's call to provide incentives to employees who telework when the federal work day is cancelled for their office-working colleagues. In a letter to Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., asked OPM to quantify how many telework agreements in government require employees to keep working during office closures, and to determine what percentage of employees operating under such agreements worked remotely during the snowstorms.

"You've got this double standard," Connolly wrote. "The rest of the workforce is given a free day, but if you've signed a telework agreement in some agencies, you're required to work from a remote location. Obviously unintentionally, it serves as a disincentive."

Still, isn't the benefit of being able to telework throughout the year, including the savings generated from commuting costs, enough incentive for teleworking employees to continue working through the blizzard, even despite their co-workers having a day off? The same case could be made that incentives are needed for federal employees who must report to work in areas not affected by the snow. After all, isn't that the overall goal of telework -- to hold up government operations in the face of an emergency, while also boosting employee satisfaction, decreasing traffic congestion and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions?

What are your thoughts? Are more incentives needed for teleworkers?