WASHINGTON -- Federal officials said they hope a renovated building at 18th and F streets Northwest in downtown Washington will embody a new streamlining of the federal workforce, accomplishing the proverbial "more with less" in an age of budget battles and sequestration. In fact, it may epitomize the era a little too well.
The building serves as headquarters for the General Services Administration, the federal government's landlord and the agency tasked with helping other federal agencies cut costs. By consolidating office space and implementing some novel workplace rules, the GSA overhaul is supposed to provide a new blueprint for private sector-style efficiency in federal government. But in an ironic turn, agency officials learned while the renovation was underway that they wouldn't have enough funding to carry out all the cost-saving work they originally had in mind.
Despite that disappointment, Dan Tangherlini, GSA's acting administrator, said he hopes the revamping of the headquarters, which will be reoccupied by employees beginning this spring, represents a new way of thinking about how government agencies can carry out their missions on a smaller footprint. He also said it accomplishes the project's number-one goal: "create a place where people want to come to work."
"The demand for ours services is not going down. In fact, it's going up. And the resources we have to deliver those services are increasingly constrained," Tangherlini said of the federal government generally. "We need to enhance productivity and innovate. So that means rethinking, perhaps, how we've laid ourselves out physically."
For a lot of GSA employees, it also means reimagining what to expect at the office. The roughly 4,000 workers employed at GSA headquarters are in for some potentially jarring changes when they return. For starters, they won't have their own desks.
Considering how rare it is that all of the building's employees are there at the same moment, GSA has decided to toss out the traditional personal workspace. Instead, employees will log onto an online system to reserve a workspace for the day, up to two weeks in advance -- an arrangement sometimes called "hotelling." By the agency's calculations, the system will help roughly double the building's capacity with only a modest amount of additional square footage, while also allowing the agency to drop three other office leases to save money.
"We've done some analyses looking at how often people are looking at their desks," said Tangherlini, a well regarded budget wonk who previously served as an Obama Treasury Department official and the city administrator for the District of Columbia. "It can average 40, 50, 60 percent. ... Why pay for 100 percent of a desk if it will only be used half the time?"
In theory, the hotelling plan could allow GSA to shut down an entire floor, lending it to another federal agency in need.
But in addition to saving space, the move may also unsettle veteran employees, for better or worse. An employee who's proprietary about space will have to be open to working in a group setting, storing paperwork and personal items in a designated locker at the end of the day. Employees may also have to get used to sitting next to different colleagues throughout the week. Renovation planners said that in addition to cutting down on redundancies, they hope the change will shake up the traditional staid office environment.
Given the changes -- some GSA employees have been using the same desk for two decades -- the agency is having workers return in waves, to better transition them to the new environment.
"We're undertaking a pretty widescale change," Tangherlini said. "We've ripped down an awful lot of walls. We're moving towards a shared-desk environment. In preparation ... we've set up demonstrations and asked them to try it out to see what that workspace looks like. In one instance, we took a survey of folks afterwards, and we were pleasantly surprised to find 80 percent found it enhanced productivity in their office environment. That's not deeply scientific, but we're understanding what workers' interests are, taking feedback, and making sure the change is better managed."
Desk sharing aside, there's plenty in the new GSA headquarters that we don't normally equate with D.C.'s drab-gray federal buildings. That includes open floor plans, lots of natural light and some eco-friendly fixtures, like lighting that self-calibrates according to how much sun is hitting the room. Hallway walls have been torn down, cubicle walls have been dropped, and offices have been outfitted with glass door "quiet rooms," where employees can find some seclusion.
That doesn't mean employees should expect the more avant-garde workplace features like Google's slides or the ubiquitous tech-office Ping-Pong table. Setting any merits aside -- "I'd be curious to see how that does actually contribute," Tangherlini said -- GSA officials should be on high alert for anything that appears extravagant or a tad too novel. The agency's image is still recovering from a scandal last spring, when the inspector general revealed that a regional office splurged $800,000 on a lavish powwow in Las Vegas, prompting hearings on Capitol Hill.
"We're not ready to make the jump to pool tables and foosball," Tangherlini, who took over the GSA post-scandal, noted. "But lower-format walls on cubes. More collaborative space. And things that look like couches and chairs around a coffee table, so people can have spontaneous interaction."
Tangherlini said he expects taxpayers would have a high tolerance for the agency's experimentations, so long as they're done with an eye toward saving money. As for other agencies, he hopes that officials in D.C. and around the country will take a look at the changes at GSA and maybe take a few back with them. That's assuming, of course, that the innovations actually work.
"Sequestration has maybe increased the heat a bit, but agencies are already interested," Tangherlini said. "It's worth experimenting with, even if the experiments don't work out."
Also on HuffPost:
via http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/25/sequester-gsa-workplace_n_3158598.html?utm_hp_ref=healthy-living&ir=Healthy%20Living
0 comments:
Post a Comment