KY state employees need flexibility of remote work, personnel chief tells lawmakers
Remote work offers valuable professional and personal flexibility for thousands of Kentucky state government employees that should not be eliminated by the General Assembly, Personnel Secretary Mary Elizabeth Bailey advised lawmakers last week.
There also are questions as to whether the legislative branch can dictate how the executive branch manages its workforce and how much extra office space might be needed for everyone to return to the workplace, Bailey said.
“We believe the current hybrid plan we have is the right mix now. It is similar to what is used by the majority of private businesses in the U.S.,” Bailey wrote in a Feb. 18 letter to state senators.
Two days later, the Republican-led Kentucky Senate approved an amended Senate Bill 79, which would prohibit telecommuting for most of Kentucky’s roughly 33,000 state workers and require them to report to their government offices five days a week.
The bill is now with the state House, also dominated by a GOP supermajority.
At present, 33% of the state executive branch’s employees telecommute from home no more than two days a week, according to the Personnel Cabinet, while 11% telecommute full-time because of disability accommodation, office renovations or because they hold certain information-technology jobs.
Fifty-six percent of executive branch employees work full-time in state offices, which remain open five days a week, the cabinet told the Herald-Leader.
In her letter, Bailey said requiring state employees to work out of offices ends the flexibility that currently allows some of them to be responsive from other locations at night and on weekends or while they are out of the office for illness, vacations, meetings, court appearances, travel or other reasons.
Not every state employee can be expected to sit at a desk in a fixed place, Bailey added.
“For example: limiting the ability of social workers to work from a remote location will dramatically curtail their ability to meet the needs of our most vulnerable citizens,” Bailey wrote.
“It will also harm the retention and recruitment of social workers that we have worked so hard with the General Assembly to improve,” she wrote. “In a recent report on social worker caseloads, many of them responded in a survey that the hybrid schedule was a key reason for staying with the job.
“Essentially eliminating that option from state employment will harm our recruitment and ability to retain the best employees.”
The Senate bill included a few exceptions to its return-to-the-office mandate, including Kentucky Supreme Court justices and state workers whose jobs regularly require them to be outside of an office setting, such as Kentucky State Police, inspectors and information technology workers.
Employees also could be exempted as appropriate under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Thousands of state employees shifted to telework after the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily shut state office buildings in 2020.
Five years later, the practice remains popular nationally as Americans seek a better work-family balance and an end to gas-guzzling commutes. Nearly one in four U.S. workers telecommuted at least part-time in January, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But Republican senators said Kentuckians have been poorly served by half-empty state offices with too few people responding to their requests for assistance.
“You call, you call, they don’t pick up the phone,” state Sen. Phillip Wheeler, R-Pikeville, said on the Senate floor last week in support of the Senate bill.
“I’m not saying there’s not a place and time for remote work under some circumstances,” Wheeler said.
“But there’s a certain amount of camaraderie, relationships, interdependence that builds in the office as well. You know, when somebody’s sitting next to you and your job depends on them getting their job done and you can look them in the eye — that doesn’t happen so much with remote work,” he said.
