WFH Will Likely Increase in This Large Sector Once the Pandemic Ends

It’s often said that the federal government is slower to move than the private sector. But coming out of COVID-19, even government workers may find themselves working from home a lot more than they were before.

Kurt Stout, executive vice president, Government Solutions at Colliers International, doesn’t think the pandemic will necessarily drive space decisions for the federal sector in the future. But he does believe it will change work-from-home policies for the federal workforce, which has an estimated 2.1 million civilian workers, according to an October 2020 report from the Office of Management and Budget.

“I don’t think space will be designed to continue to achieve social distancing the way that it is  today,” Stout says. “But what I do think is going to persist once the COVID-19 virus is hopefully eradicated is this idea of more remote work. In the federal sector, we’ve heard from the heads of a number of agencies that this [telework] is working and that their employees appreciate it. They want to continue working from home.”

With a Democratic administration now in control, Stout expects that the Federal workers’ unions, which advocate for worker-friendly policies, will have a lot of say going forward.

“In the federal space, which is my world, I think we’re going to see policies established that are going to allow for continued telework in a way that did not exist prior to the pandemic,” Stout says.

The federal government had a telework program before the pandemic, but Stout says many employees didn’t take advantage of it.

“I think this [COVID] really accelerates that evolution [of telework],” Stout says. “It would have taken years to achieve otherwise.”

Still, in essential jobs, there are certain government officials that won’t be able to telework. “They’re either unable or it’s impractical,” Stout says. “So there will be case-by-case decisions by agency and even within agencies.”

One of the drivers of telework before the pandemic, according to Stout, was that the federal government wanted to reduce its office footprint. As with the private sector, the motivation behind shrinking its real estate footprint is to reduce costs. He says that desire really began with the arrival of the Tea Party.

“You had a real push within the federal government to reduce costs,” Stout says. “One place to do that, of course, was the size of the footprint—the amount of space that the government occupied. That was the primary tool that the government has been using to achieve downsizing at a time when spending is increasing, and employment really hasn’t changed.”

Still, Stout says the government’s space needs weren’t getting any smaller. “The only way to make the government smaller was to reconfigure the workplace,” Stout says.