OPM has told agencies that it will be gathering information from them on the impact of the Trump administration's cutbacks of telework and DEI initiatives, two of its earliest changes to the federal workplace to practices that had been a priority of the Biden administration. "We will request information regarding your Agency's actions to end DEI/DEIA programs and have employees report to an office," says a memo telling agencies to designate a point of contact for the information collection.
It was a phenomenon that Nilles, a U.S. Air Force veteran turned NASA consultant, dubbed the "telecommunications-transportation tradeoff." Viewing remote work as a potential substitute for commuting, Nilles sought to gauge telework's effectiveness by partnering with a major national insurance company (whose name he still can't divulge for legal reasons). A group of employees worked from local centers equipped with "minicomputers" that transferred data to the company's mainframe. In the 1974 pilot study, Nilles concluded that this approach resulted in higher productivity and reduced turnover.
The language of DEI may be currently out of favor, but a new report from the country's largest human resources trade association, SHRM, suggests that the American workforce is far more diverse since the Covid pandemic effectively ended in 2021. The surprising change happened almost by default, but SHRM's data show that there's been a huge surge in the numbers of people with disabilities participating in the workplace - partly thanks to the shift toward hybrid and remote working.
The British Columbia government has unveiled details of its last offer to striking public service workers, ahead of the expected expansion of job action by the B.C. General Employees' Union. The Finance Ministry says the government is proposing a 4.5 per cent compensation increase over two years, made up of both general wage increases and cost-of-living allowances. It says the union wants 15.75 per cent, while BCGEU President Paul Finch has
To hold telework solely responsible for such issues is inappropriate. Given the need for supervisors to assess the portability of an individual employee's work, I am not convinced there should be an arbitrary six-day cap.
