A decade before the new coronavirus arrived in California, the state encouraged departments to promote telework.

In addition to improving performance, morale, health and wellness, teleworking could promote “effective continuation of business” during an emergency, according to 2010 guidance issued by the Department of General Services.

Yet three weeks after California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared an emergency to help address the virus, many state workers say they are facing resistance, confusion and uneven responses when they ask to work remotely.

“These supervisors are picking and choosing what they want to comply with,” said Fernando Gandara, 65, a Caltrans employee who lives in Beaumont.

Gandara, a right-of-way agent, said 90 percent of the job could be done from home, yet few workers in his office have been able to obtain telework agreements. That’s despite a Thursday email from Caltrans Director Toks Omishakin telling employees to reach telework agreements with supervisors where feasible.

Gandara, who has diabetes and is near retirement, said he submitted a doctor’s note to his supervisor and stopped going to the office. He is waiting to find out if he’ll receive administrative time off or if his pay will be docked.

Contributing to the variation among managers are long-standing cultural factors and differences in technical readiness, according to interviews and emails.

“It’s a scary and difficult time and you’d like to think that the state of California departments were moving to adhere to the governor’s executive order to stay at home and protect public health,” said Ted Toppin, executive director of the union Professional Engineers in California Government, which represents Caltrans engineers. “And for the state to do that, that means to put their employees to work at home. But we know this: State government is a battleship. It is very slow.”

Caltrans spokesman Matt Rocco said in a statement that the agency “has assessed the capabilities of a 20,000-employee department to determine who is serving an essential function and how we can get as many people teleworking as quickly as possible while following CalHR’s guidance.”

“Every supervisor in the department determines how to move employees to teleworking by using state laptops and phones, when available, to give staff at every level the opportunity to work from home,” he said.

Peter Flores, the president of the state attorneys’ union, has members stationed in about 90 different state offices. Flores said in an interview last week that some of the attorneys have obtained telework agreements easily while others have found there is no effective telework policy in place.

“I think we’re having to modernize what I would call an outdated attitude among some managers, and some of them are just figuring out the logistics,” he said.

A telecommuting test

The Department of General Services guidance sets policies, procedures and security protocols for telework generally.

The state also has anticipated the need for telework during a pandemic.

In 2009, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services published a “Statewide Concept of Operations for Pandemic Influenza” that tasked all state agencies and departments with developing telework plans and planning for flexible work schedules.

Security standards kept by the California Department of Technology say telework may easily be done at home in emergency situations.

“In many cases, a telephone and email access through a Web-based connection may be all that is required,” according to the security standards, which were updated in October 2018.

The influenza plan cites Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance that says teleworking employees should have “access to vital records, databases and other files, consistent with encryption protocols.”

That direction points to one of the technical challenges for the state of broadly adopting teleworking: Workers in many offices deal with sensitive information related to taxes, finances, law enforcement and medical records. Workers also use specialized software and programs unique to California state government, whose struggles with IT are well documented.

The 2010 guidance draws on even older California code promoting telework. The state Legislature in 1990 directed state agencies to implement teleworking plans where “practical and beneficial” by 1995.

The legislative action followed the conclusion of a pilot program on telework launched by former Gov. George Deukmejian, who had become concerned about traffic congestion. The program showed teleworkers were more effective than their peers in the office, according to a report on the results.

Incidentally, the pilot project showed benefits of teleworking during an emergency. Teleworkers at the Public Utilities Commission continued working immediately after the Loma Prieta earthquake even though the PUC was officially shut down, according to the report.

Under the state’s directions, each department is supposed to have a telework coordinator to manage the agreements. Managers are supposed to read and understand their departments’ telework policies, identify suitable tasks for telework and make sure teleworkers are productive.

‘A state worker mowing the lawn’

While telework is becoming more prevalent in the private sector, public employers in California and elsewhere have been slow to embrace it, partly due to longstanding cultural issues and perceptions, said Frederick Pilot, a former California state worker who wrote a book titled, “Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century.”

Appearances are a concern, he said.

“If people saw a state worker mowing their lawn on their lunch our, the taxpayer would think, ‘hey, I’m paying this person’s salary. Why aren’t they at the office,’” he said.

“The culture is based on showing up at the office,” Pilot said. “That’s considered working. Whether you’re doing anything or not, presence at the office is paramount.”

Caltrans, one of the state’s largest departments, promotes telework on its website as a benefit of working there.

Dan Waterhouse, a former Caltrans environmental planner, said the department had a telework policy in place prior to his retirement in 2016.

Telework would have been feasible for him and many of his colleagues, yet the culture in the department discouraged it, Waterhouse, 65, of Fresno said.

“We encouraged it in policy, but a lot of managers were really uncomfortable with it because of how they were held accountable for employee work,” he said.

Jealousy from workers in other departments where telework wasn’t feasible contributed, he said.

“There was a culture of snitching on other employees if other people thought that that employee’s manager was letting them get away with stuff that no one else was being allowed to do,” he said.

The department has also been dinged by the State Auditor’s Office for failing to properly manage one teleworker, leading to an auditor’s recommendation to increase the paperwork required of someone working from home.

Toppin, the director of the state engineers’ union, said the union has supported telework for a long time.

“Maybe what comes out of this crisis is that state departments will recognize that telework will work,” he said. “That you can still deliver for taxpayers from your home office.”

This story was originally published March 24, 2020 at 12:46 PM with the headline "’Outdated attitude’: Why California wasn’t ready for its state workers to telecommute."