This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/half-of-wisconsin-state-employees-may-be-working-from-home-though-no-one-has-a-complete-count/

‘There has been no productivity analysis, no data,’ says lawmaker pushing for return and accountability.

More than half of the employees in the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development and more than 40% in the Department of Administration still work remotely, five years after COVID sent them home.

Numbers collected by the Badger Institute suggest that as many as half of Wisconsin’s 29,000 state employees do not work at all in a state office and that more than 24,000 work either full- or part-time from home.

Those are only extrapolations. No one — in Gov. Tony Evers’ office, the Department of Administration responsible for tracking the state workforce, or the heads of the state’s nearly three dozen agencies — knows how many state employees work remotely, state Rep. Amanda Nedweski says.

Nor do any of those state officials have any idea whether what was intended to be a temporary emergency measure in 2020 is a good idea today. Until they do, Nedweski is proposing that all state employees come back to their offices.

Evers has promised to veto Nedweski’s Assembly bill 39 or the companion bill, Senate bill 27 from state Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee), if they pass. Many state workers are bitterly opposed to the measure.

Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie) has repeatedly said she is not opposed to some remote work for state employees.

In theory.

“What we’ve learned is what was an emergency situation just became permanent, with no framework in place for telework,” Nedweski told the Badger Institute. “There has been no productivity analysis, no data to support telework. From the agencies we’ve talked to, they can’t tell where an employee is on any given day.”

Nedweski cannot tell you how much of the state workforce is at home because the agencies have not kept the numbers. In January, the Badger Institute requested counts of remote workers from the six largest state agencies, which employ more than 23,000 of the state’s workforce.

The departments of Administration and Workforce Development provided data. The Department of Health Services said it could find no records pertaining to remote work. Three other agencies did not reply.

Of Workforce Development’s 1,463 employees, 749, or 51.2 percent, work remotely full-time. Another 542 work at home at least some of the time. A total of 1,291, or 88.2 percent, of the department work either full- or part-time away from the office, according to its data.

Administration allows 528, or 40.2 percent, of its 1,312 employees to work remotely full-time and another 518 to work remotely part-time, a combined total of 79.7 percent of its total staff, according to its data.

Nedweski was surprised at how high the remote work percentages were, but said it’s entirely possible that they could be consistent across departments. At 50 percent, roughly 14,500 state employees would be working from home all the time.

“We have no idea,” Nedweski says. “Nobody had numbers to give us.”

With the health emergency long over, the state’s remote work arrangements are currently in conflict with human resources policies for state and UW System employees.

Those policies call for agency or department monitoring of remote work and for documented remote work agreements between departments and each employee working remotely. Reviews show that neither has been done, Nedweski says.

“There was no framework in place for telework, and maybe that was because of the emergency,” she says. “The trouble was no one told them they had to do it.”

The pushback from state employees to going back to the office is particularly troubling, Nedweski says, because it suggests employees have begun to see working from home as an entitlement.

“Nothing in this policy creates an entitlement or right for an employee to engage in remote work,” the state Human Resources Handbook says. “Because the circumstances may vary depending on the employee’s situation, each request will be handled on a case-by-case basis.”

State officials were first alerted to the lack of accountability for remote work by a report from the Legislative Audit Bureau in December 2023. State auditor visits to 15 agencies in the summer of 2023 found that in some cases not a single workstation in an office was being used and no more than 35 percent of them were being used on any given day.

Employees at 12 agencies were on average using their key cards to get into their office buildings no more than two days a week and, in the case of three agencies, less than one day a week.

Yet little of this remote work activity was documented, according to the audit. Auditors said little attention was paid to cybersecurity issues with so many people working outside the office.

The Audit Bureau recommended wholesale documenting of the work, proof of remote work agreements, and an overall review of office space requirements.

Such a review would provide crucial information as the Department of Administration continues a planned reduction of more than 600,000 square feet of state-owned office space as laid out in its Vision 2030 plan.

An Assembly committee hearing in March established that little had been done to meet those recommendations, Nedweski says. At an April 2 hearing to present her bill, Nedweski told the State Affairs Committee that a new law was necessary because the Evers administration refused to review or reform current remote work policies.

Evers has not commented on Nedweski’s bill. However, Evers said in December that he would refuse to sign a state budget that included any return-to-work legislation.

“I think it’s important for the state to be open to having people working from home, especially in parts of the state that haven’t had a chance,” Evers said at the time. “Not all the good workers are in the Madison and Milwaukee area.”

Evers is paddling against a stiff tide — even within his own party — on state employees going back to their office. In January, with a new Republican governor, Indiana ended remote work altogether. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, ordered employees to go back to their offices beginning March 17.

Gavin Newsom, one of the country’s most progressive Democrats, ordered that California state employees must work at least four days from their office beginning July 1.

“In-person work makes us all stronger — period,” Newsom said. “When we work together, collaboration improves, innovation thrives, and accountability increases. That means better service, better solutions, and better results for Californians, while still allowing flexibility.”

The equally progressive Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota risked considerable public union backlash late last month when he set June 1 for all state employees to work in-office for at least half of their work week. 

Nedweski, a second term Assembly member with a long technology and business consulting background, says she came to Madison with a mission to make state government leaner and more efficient. An accounting of the state workforce is overdue. “I want to say again that I do not oppose telework and believe that under some circumstances it has its place,” Nedweski says. “But we have no idea what is working and what isn’t. This bill gives us a starting place. Our first obligation, I think, is to the taxpayers of Wisconsin.”

Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute.

Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute President Mike Nichols at mike@badgerinstitute.org or 262-389-8239.

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