Transitioning the Federal Government with GSA
Tune into this webinar featuring Deputy Administrator Allison Fahrenkopf Brigati from the General Services Administration (GSA). Read about the transition to remote work and how GSA has been supporting its workforce during this period. Key points discussed include GSA’s prior preparation for telework, the successful transition to mandatory telework for over 11,000 employees, the importance of constant communication, the need for technological tools and training, the impact on recruitment and retention of employees, and the potential long-term cultural shifts in the workplace.
Meg:
It is my distinct honor and privilege to introduce you to our guest today, Deputy Administrator Allison Fahrenkopf Brigati. Allison is coming to us from the General Services Administration and she began her career at GSA in July of 2017 as the associate administrator of the GSA’s Office of Government-Wide Policy, so you can see why we are going to ask her a whole lot of questions about some government-wide telework policy coming up here. Prior to joining GSA, Deputy Administrator Brigati served as the general counsel and the director of strategic initiatives for the National Academy of Public Administration, and prior to that, choose at the World Bank, so lots of government experience, lots. No one has all of this quarantine experience down, but we could not have hoped for a better leader to kick off this series. Allison is coming to us from her dining room in Maryland and so I would like to welcome Allison to our chat.
Allison:
Thanks, Meg. I’m really excited to be with you guys today. I’m looking forward to some good questions and just happy that the sun is out.
Meg:
Also excited the sun is out. I’m not totally sure I can provide you all of the good questions, but hopefully again, that chat function, if folks out there do have questions, drop it in that chat. But I will start with the first hard-hitting question of, how has the transition been for you?
Allison:
It’s been okay. I have a family of five with three older children ranging in age from 18 to 24, so they are all here. My husband is here and our two dogs, so it’s been a bit of an adjustment, making sure that everybody has their own workspace and making sure we don’t kill each other, but it’s all gone so far so good. We’re still here and we’re still all able to do our work, so it’s working okay when it’s nice out.
Meg:
All still alive and functioning together as a cohesive unit. That’s a good start, that’s a good start. To transition a little bit into your leadership and your leadership at the GSA, how is the GSA supporting the remote workforce and what has your role been in that?
Allison:
GSA has always been a leader in this. We already had, I think it was 85% of our workforce was already telework-ready, and by that I mean they had the training and they had the agreement in place to telework, so for us, we already had the majority of our workforce that at least teleworked occasionally, some all the time, so we had the technology and the tools necessary to make that jump. We had never tested it to the point of having over 11,000 employees teleworking.
Actually, about a week before we went to mandatory telework, and we were one of the first agencies, or were the first agency to go to mandatory, we did a practice day. We wanted to try to break the system to make sure that if and when we would be ready to go to a full telework culture and nothing broke. Everything worked as it was supposed to. We needed to do some tweaks, but we knew once we had done that practice day, that we were in really good shape if and when the decision was made to go to mandatory telework, so about a week later when we made that decision, it was a pretty easy transition for everybody. The biggest change, I would say, is really at the management level. At GSA, most of the leadership had not teleworked on a regular basis, so it’s been a bit of more transition for us, but otherwise, it’s worked great. We have the technology in place and we’ve invested for years to prepare for this moment and it was worth the money and the time to get us here, so it’s been a real success story for the agency.
Meg:
That’s amazing. Anyone who is in this government sphere knows that GSA has been on the forefront of a whole lot of this. They had done a lot of telework policies, especially when it comes to space reduction and things like that across the government, so no doubt GSA has been on the forefront of this, but it is also just an incredible foresight and use of time to test it, to really try and break the system before you actually need to have everyone go online. Were there any particular lessons learned coming out of that test?
Allison:
We had to tweak some, like for instance, VPN, which we had never had that many people trying to access it at once. When you have parts of your workforce out trying to get into a secure system, we had tested that over and over again. But to have all 11,000 people trying to get on at the same time, they were a little concerned about that. What we realized is not everybody needs to be on VPN all day long. In fact, almost nobody does, so we had to engage that once we were into the mandatory telework phase. We’ve had a constant communication going out from our CIO David Shive reminding people that you don’t need to be on VPN all day long, just for certain tasks, giving people different tools to use depending on what they’re trying to do, so we’ve had daily communications going out, educating people on the best way to work from home, and if they’re having problems with their internet, those types of things, so it’s been a constant iteration as we’ve gone, and we really haven’t had any serious problems.
Meg:
That’s so interesting. The constant communication is so important, right?
Allison:
Yeah, yes.
Meg:
As we transitioned, as Dcode transitioned into the remote work environment, we were running, we were just about, it was a Friday before we kicked off a government training for DHA through DAU and we had to do a lot of stress testing and making sure that the government could access with the tools that we were providing them, even outside of the context. But the communication part just seems so key. I want to get on some of those emails so that I know the tips and tricks. I had someone tell me recently that if you’re just taking what you did in the office and “ripping and replacing” it to do it at home, you’re probably not doing it right, so have you seen places where you’ve been able to be more effective, be more efficient, even in your own work as the deputy administrator?
Allison:
In some ways, there’s less distraction, but in other ways, it’s a much longer workday, so I’d say trying to pace ourselves has been a bit of a challenge. The first week, if we would’ve kept going at that rate, we would’ve all just fallen over. We were finding that we were working 12 and 14-hour days and that the chats and the emails and the texts were not stopping at any point and so we actually had to take a step back and say, “Okay, we’re probably not going to be on our normal schedule, but we can’t keep going at this rate,” and so we kind of… Everything’s still going to be there in the morning. It’s a lot harder to walk out of your dining room than it is to walk out of your office, so it was just thinking about that mindset, and especially for the leadership team because we were not used to doing this.
Meg:
Yeah, and it provides a whole host of additional challenges for a leadership team, communication just being one of, I think, many. One thing on the Dcode side that we’ve seen a lot is a lot of companies rising to the call, so companies saying, “Here, use my software, it’s going to help you,” things that, for example, obviously, as you implement telework across the board, there’s the need to have a cyber posture for that telework in different places, and so we’ve seen a lot of solutions that have come along that are ready to meet the needs of the government and probably well beyond, so what do you see fast-forward through this? How do you see this technology transformation, this telework hitting so fast and so hard so quickly, how do you see that actually ramping up modernization?
Allison:
For GSA, I’d say it’s same old, continuing on what we’ve already been doing. But I think government-wide, there’s going to be unbelievable amounts of modernization. A lot of the agencies have never had a telework capacity. It’s not something they’ve been interested in pursuing, so this has really reset that. We had agencies that we’ve talked to in various meetings that said that they would never go to telework, that they wouldn’t get the same work product out of their employees, and so they’ve had to.
Meg:
Well, what are they saying now?
Allison:
Well, exactly. I think it’s agencies are understanding that people do work, they sometimes work better. Not all jobs are able to be done remotely. We do have at GSA a small number of employees that are having to continue to go into the workplace. The Federal Protection Service that does a lot of work at GSA, they have to come in and they have to make sure that people aren’t accessing the buildings. We have buildings that have a leak. The leak doesn’t care that COVID’s going on, so we have lots of people that are continuing to have to be in the office and they’re exposing themselves. We’re concerned about their safety, but unfortunately, it’s part of their job. Most jobs can be done, at least most jobs at GSA can be done remotely, but not all, and there are going to be some agencies that have similar restrictions just based on maybe they need a skiff for 90% of what they do.
But I think there’ll be a government-wide move towards a more telework-ready workforce. For instance, almost all the agencies now have ordered tons of laptops. In fact, there was a laptop shortage because not all agencies had laptops for a lot of their workers and you don’t want them using their home computers all the time because it’s not secure, so there’s been already lots of money spent to make people ready, but it’s going to be a continuing thing for, I think, as long as we can imagine because we’ve seen the value in it and people are going to need to make those investments.
Meg:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That’s so funny that there’s a shortage in laptops.
Allison:
Yeah, laptops and mobile phones. In fact, even at GSA, we were concerned about bringing on new hires. I think for our first onboarding, we didn’t have enough computers, so there was a back order, but I think we’ve started to get more supplies in.
Meg:
Let me transition into exactly onboarding. Dcode has onboarded a couple of people remotely that we did not expect to onboard remotely and we’ve definitely had some lessons learned and overcommunicated as much as possible on a lot of it. Have you been onboarding people? How have you been onboarding people? What have you seen as best practices there?
Allison:
We had never done a virtual onboarding. I don’t know that anyone had done that in the government and we knew that we had, I think, about 26 or 30 people starting about two weeks after we went into the telework mode, so we did have that leeway to come up with a plan. But there were two issues that were standing in our way. One was the need for a wet signature and then the second was to take the oath of office face-to-face, so we worked with OPM and OMB to get beyond those two, and we had everything else in place so that first Monday when we were prepared to onboard, we were able to do, I think, about 40 people.
We are now up to 126 people now. We’ve done three onboarding days and OPM and OMB worked with us and with other agencies where we’re allowed to now get signatures and do the face-to-face oath later once we’re back into the office and so it’s allowed us to continue to hire people. Otherwise, we’d be putting it off and possibly losing really good candidates and we still have work ongoing, so we still need to hire, so it’s allowed us to keep going. Business as usual.
Meg:
Well, just hacking through the bureaucracy of digital signatures, I think if one thing… I’m sure many, many, many things will come out on the other side of this, but man, moving to digital signatures and not ink on a page, that is a huge bureaucratic win and something that should have happened long ago.
Allison:
Yeah, I mean, we actually at GSA adopted digital signatures probably, I don’t know, at least three years ago. I’ve been at GSA for three years and I don’t think I’ve signed more than two documents with an actual signature. But apparently, the rest of the government hasn’t operated that way. People talk about the government moving so slowly, but it takes a crisis to get things to move forward, so I feel like we’ve made a lot of progress just in the last eight weeks and in areas that we won’t go back. Out in the private sector for real estate and other transactions, you don’t need to have a wet signature anymore, so there’s no reason that we can’t do the same in the government.
Meg:
… Yeah. I would love to continue on this thread and talk about some areas that you won’t go back. What are some of the cultural shifts that you think have occurred in day-to-day work that you think might outlast this period of quarantine?
Allison:
I would say that we joke that you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. There’s going to be a lot of people that just want to continue this full-on telework mode, so I think we’re going to have to adapt to that. There are a lot of people that really like this flexibility. It also really helps GSA and our recruitment, particularly at the entry level because you have college grads that don’t necessarily want to work in an office every day, so I think we will adapt to that. I’m not saying that certain individuals aren’t going to go into the office and there are people that want to go to the office. They aren’t really enjoying the time home with the families and the dogs and everything else or who are home alone and are looking for somebody to talk to other than a wall, so I think one thing that will probably remain is that is a higher level of regular telework at the agency.
In terms of other factors that’ll stick, I don’t know. In a lot of ways, it’s a little lonely for people, so I would imagine that people do enjoy actually being in meetings with each other, but from the sounds of it, that’s going to be a long time coming where we can all sit in the conference room, 20 people, so I think we need to remain connected. The virtual videotaping and video, like what we’re doing right now, I think keeps people connected to each other, so I think it’s really important, and I think that will continue because if we are going to have more people teleworking, you still want to have that face-to-face connection, so I think we’ll probably utilize that a lot more. I’m trying to think something else that might stick. That’s probably, those are the only two things I can think of right now.
Meg:
I want to dig in a little bit more into that recruitment, retention. You said that there are likely places where people who are graduating college right now don’t want to just go into a general services office building every day and sit at their little cubicle and yadda, yadda, yadda. Can you talk a little bit more about some of these things …? I mean, this was obviously GSA’s roadmap years ago and recruitment had to be part of that years ago, but how this will impact that, and then also, I know you and I talked a little bit about the Emerging Leaders Program and how that has developed with COVID.
Allison:
I hate to say we’re taking advantage of COVID, but there are lots of really great college grads who have unfortunately lost their job offers and there are also a lot of really great Peace Corps returnees who we’ve had to pull back to the United States who are looking for something to do. We’ve had two recruitment efforts for the Peace Corps and we’ve been reaching out to colleges to see if there are grads that are looking for jobs, so we are trying to really pinpoint those entry-level college/grad level group because we need them and they’re looking for a job, so it’s a great time for us in terms of recruitment.
In terms of the Emerging Leaders Program, that’s a program that was really strong at GSA a couple of years ago and had actually kind of gone by the wayside. When I came in as deputy administrator a couple of years ago, after talking to a lot of people in the agency, we decided to bring it back. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a two-year training program and you come into the agency and you rotate throughout all the different functions and then somewhere during your second year you decide what your interest is and then you focus on that for your second year, kind of like a major, and then you’re placed into that business line when you graduate the program.
It’s been a super successful program for us in the past, and I’m not sure why they decided to let it go away, so we decided to bring it back. We’re really excited about it and we have a much smaller program right now, but we’re going to, I think, triple the number of kids coming in and we’re continuing to work on that program and get it going in the middle of COVID. Again, for GSA, it’s been business as usual the whole time, and we’re continuing to push and do new things as much as we can.
Meg:
GSA, open for business, business as usual, we’re hiring, and we have already had a really forward-leaning workforce on the tech side. Moving a little bit more into the tech side, I know that when we were making everything virtual, including some of the trainings that we do for government, it was a huge back and forth on what we could use, how we could use it. Can you talk a little bit about the tools that GSA is using and what’s working?
Allison:
Yeah, so we had already gone to email on the cloud, I want to say a couple of years ago, so that’s helped. We have a whole suite of online stuff that we use that makes things much easier to keep track of documents. For instance, right now for COVID, we’re using Trello, which has been a really great product where I can have all different kinds of work streams going on and all the different documents in a reading room, so we’re using lots of different tools that have really helped us.
Being able to have these virtual meetings has been key. It not only makes people feel like they’re a part of something, but if I see somebody on a video chat that doesn’t look so great, I can say, “Hey, are you feeling okay? Maybe you need to go call your doctor,” so it’s enabled us to not only stay connected but also help people if they need it. We’ve done multiple surveys to our workforce to make sure that they have all the tools they need, and if there’s something that’s not working, to let us know, and so we’ve been able to send out wifi. I don’t know what they’re called, but it’s like a MiFi, I think, to help people if they don’t have great connectivity.
We’ve set up some other security-type functions for people. We’ve always had lots of collaboration tools. I think David Shive, our CIO’s continued to look at other options that we could be using. One in particular that a lot of people were using has had some issues, I won’t mention it, but we’re working on giving people options. Like I said, we have the digital signatures, so we have lots of tools in place and we’re continuing to explore other options that’ll make people feel connected and be able to get your job done effectively.
Meg:
Yeah, definitely. I want to take a brief moment and let you all know that I will be turning to a whole bunch of the questions that are coming in via chat here very shortly, so keep providing your questions. If you ever thought, “I would love to ask the deputy administrator X, Y, or Z,” now is your chance. I’ll get through as much of them as I possibly can, but please keep throwing your questions in there.
Allison, one more from my side of the house would be, what is something that’s really surprised you about the resiliency of your workforce, about how they’ve taken on this new challenge? Can you just talk a little bit about something that’s surprised you in this kind of strange time?
Allison:
I would say the biggest surprise is how easily the agency adjusted to the new norm and the fact that we’ve been able just to continue to do our job without missing a beat and also just the resiliency of the GSA workforce. There were a couple of days where people were really like, “Oh, my gosh, is this happening?” Then it was, “Okay, buckle down, get your job done, continue doing what we need to get done. There are other agencies that are really dependent on us and we have to continue to meet our mission,” and so I think that’s been the best surprise and the biggest surprise is just seeing how great the agency has done and how hard everybody continues to work.
Meg:
Yeah, absolutely. If I put my chief strategy officer hat on here, back to work. Are you doing contingency planning right now? Are you planning what that looks like? The day, the week after D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Lyft, whatever orders they have, are you thinking through those things now, and what do some of those conversations look like?
Allison:
We’ve had a couple of brainstorming sessions where we basically invited anybody in the agency that wanted to participate. We wanted to make sure that people’s concerns were heard and that it also gave us lots of ideas of things that we should be thinking about and different ways of approaching it. We formed a task force last week, which actually had its first meeting this week on Tuesday, and we’re working through what the plan will look like. We’ll be following the president’s phases, phase one, two, and three. A lot of it for GSA, we have 11 regions, so a lot of our return to the facility work is going to be done not even regionally, really locality by locality, state by state, and we’re going to give a lot of the decision-making authority to our regional offices because they know best what’s happening in their regions, but we’ll give them guidelines to follow.
You have to look at, is public transportation offerable? If it’s not, are there places for people to park? Is daycare open? Are schools open? Are camps open? Because you can’t leave the kids at home alone. We’ve got our restaurants open because one of the things we’ve been hearing is you don’t want to have your kitchens and community areas in the building open, so if you can’t do that and bring your food and you can’t get food externally, then that’s going to make for a really long day without anything to eat, so just looking at all those different options and trying to figure out what’s the safest way. We’re not in any hurry at GSA. We can do this remotely. We’ve done it remotely now for going on eight weeks, so we’re not going to just bring people back in just to do it, so it’s got to be right, and it’s got to be safe for our workforce.
Meg:
Yeah, and GSA has such a large footprint, and many federal agencies do across the country. It’s not just in the D.C./Maryland/Virginia area, but really spread out across the country, so it’s a really good point, and pushing that to more of that local level I would say is very interesting. I’ve been in the GSA building on 18th and F in D.C. lots of times for lots of different reasons, but if you haven’t been in that building, it is a fairly open work environment. You can correct me if I’m wrong, but you generally don’t have your own workstation. It is, you come in, and I believe you sign in and you pick a workstation for the day. You get your stuff, you work at that station for the day. Does GSA think that there might be any shift more towards a cubicle-based or something different in the physical space side?
Allison:
We’ve been hearing from a lot of our agencies asking the question, “What can we do to change our workspace?” Of course, we’ve just done this for a lot of government buildings, they’ve asked for that concept, so we’ve gone in and done it. It also saves government an unbelievable amount of money to shrink the footprint and it also does force telework a little bit. If you have a building that used to fit 5,000 people and you are trying to get all those people under two floors, you can open it up for other people to come in, so you no longer have seats for everybody. We’ve already done that at GSA. We have an open concept. We have hoteling where people come in. They don’t usually sit in the same… Well, they try to sit in the same area, but they don’t always have the same desk.
Those are all concerns for us and making sure that, because we don’t necessarily have the unlimited funds to clean every single workstation every single day after somebody leaves, because then you have a second person coming in the next day, so we’re looking at all of that as part of our task force. It may be that we remove chairs from tables, we remove chairs from conference rooms, maybe that we alternate workspaces, we alternate floors, so we’re looking at that just internally for GSA, but we’re also answering those same questions throughout the federal government who have the same concerns. There are certain agencies, and we even have certain regions where it’s more office-based, and so it’s a little bit less of a concern. You still have your common areas, your elevators, places like that, and those are going to require more cleaning going forward, but in agencies where they are office-heavy, they can probably have most of their people come in. But for GSA at least, it’s going to be a struggle to try to balance that.
Meg:
Yeah. We have a whole bunch of questions about employees. Obviously, one of the most important parts of a leader’s job, they’re employees, so can you talk a little bit about what is being done to accommodate employees with disabilities? How are their needs for information being accommodated and how is that translated into a remote workforce?
Allison:
At GSA, most of our technologies are 508-compliant, and in fact, I’m a member of the US Access Board, so I attend their meetings. We have one actually coming up this week, so we’re very conscious of that in our design on the public building service side, and in terms of acquisition, our computers, everything. But I am sure there have been some challenges government-wide, so if anybody on here today has experienced any issues since I do have that board meeting this week, please send them my way, and I’d be more than happy to bring those up to the board. But I’m sure that there have been some challenges, especially because it’s been such a quick overturn to the virtual systems. Not all agencies are probably set up to meet all those limitations just to do what we need to be doing in that space.
Meg:
Absolutely. If you do want to take the deputy administrator up on that offer, feel free to either drop something in the chat, reply to the follow-up email, we’ll make sure that she gets all that information and that she can provide a voice to the council writ large.
A couple other questions I have are about, we talked a little bit about how wonderful I guess it is for recruitment purposes and how nice it is to be a telework-ready. Can you talk a little bit about how that affects an older workforce and if there are any either accommodations or any thoughts to how to keep and retain a current workforce that might not be as young as you might like it to be?
Allison:
I think, and I can only speak to GSA because it’s where all of my government experience has been, we have a huge variation in our agents of people that work there and everybody is very tech-savvy and if they’re not and they want to be, we have so much training available that if there’s anything you want to learn, you can learn it, so I’d say that people have adapted. I haven’t seen any challenges in that respect.
We started doing a lot of work in RPA a couple of years ago and our CFO’s running the program and he offered to re-skill anybody that wanted to in that area because rather than going out and hire contractors, he wanted actually to do this internally, and I think we had, our volunteers were all across the spectrum. At GSA, it doesn’t matter your age, it’s really what are your interests and what challenge are you up ready for, so it’s been a great story there. In terms of other agencies, I can’t really say, but I’m sure that there are people who aren’t having to do this kind of interaction all the time on a computer that have been challenged. But I mean, it could be any age, really.
Meg:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, another question from the field is, how will GSA manage remote versus physical work for the transition? This is not transition back from quarantine, this is more the presidential transition team. In the past, GSA has made space, devices, all of these things available to both candidates and both major parties ahead of the election. How do you anticipate this year being different?
Allison:
The presidential transition team is run out of GSA, has been for years, I think since 1963. We were given that mandate in legislation. We have the federal transition coordinator. Mary Gibert is a GSA employee who we put in that position. She’s got a lot of experience in this area and part of our mission is to set up for two campaigns and then post-election for one campaign, one transition group to get them through till Inauguration Day, and then we also provide space for the inauguration committee. We started working on this about a year ago. We have this space that’s being built out and is continuing to be built out during COVID. The only thing that has changed as a result of COVID is we are looking at the space that we have and wondering whether we’re going to need to reevaluate how much space we’re providing per person.
We’re a little bit constricted because of the space that we’re using, but it may be that they have to do what a lot of other agencies are thinking about, which is alternating times groups that come into the space to utilize it because I don’t know that we’ll be able to get more space. We’re looking at things like screeners, but we’re looking at that for across the federal government. Anything that we’re doing to bring the federal workforce back into the workplace, we’ll be doing the same for the space that we’ve put aside for the transition. We provide the computers and all the mobile phones and all that kind of stuff, so none of that’ll really change unless we continue to have problems getting those. But as far as we know right now, it’s business as usual. We’ll have the space ready to go and we’ll be ready to do whatever they need us to do.
Meg:
Excellent. I have one additional question that’s come in on, does GSA do anything with the private sector real estate, the real estate world? As companies are going remote, how does the government plan to help a whole bunch of those private sector real estate companies as this transition is kind of happening across the country? Might be more of a Congress thing than a GSA thing.
Allison:
Yeah, I mean, we don’t do anything for the private sector. We work with the private sector, so I could see us coming up with different ways to work better together to partner together. I don’t see us doing anything in particular for them because they’re not our ultimate customer, they’re more of our partner, so I can see us jointly coming up with some technology that we can utilize that maybe makes things easier from a virtual standpoint. They’ve already been working on those over the last couple of years, so I would imagine that that work would continue.
Meg:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to thank everyone who has joined and thank you for joining, thank you for the questions, and I want to thank our guest, Deputy Administrator Brigati so much for joining us today and really, really appreciate the time that you have given such thoughtful, amazing answers that are citizen-focused, that are employee-focused, and I think that we can all learn from across the board.