So What? Federal News Roundup on Remote Work with Elizebeth Varghese

Join us on Tech Transforms Federal News Round-up segment, So What? Hosted by Carolyn Ford and Tracy Bannon. This week, we talk to Elizebeth Varghese, Global and Americas Leader – HR Transformation Client Offerings at IBM about one of the biggest topics in federal news: remote work. Listen in to find out how agencies can implement a smarter protocol, how remote work impacts the trust equation and the role technology can play in the workforce culture.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:40] The Future of Work for Federal Employees
• [11:28] Work-Life Balance Expectations in a Remote Work
• [19:01] Big Push in In-Person Protocol
• [26:12] Do You Need a Home Office for Remote Work?
• [32:01] Provide Options to Persuade People to Stay and Junk Remote Work
• [39:04] The People Who Are Not Approving Remote Work

Episode Links and Resources

• Elizebeth Varghese
• IBM
• South Asian Youth Action
• Three Ways the Future of Work Must Change for Federal Employees
• Hybrid work for many is messy and exhausting
• Welcome Back to the Office. Isn't This Fun?
• Thousands of employees are testing a 4-day workweek starting today: ‘It’s inevitable we’ll see bigger companies doing this
• Super Better by Jane McGonigal
• [Block] Chain Reaction

The Future of Work for Federal Employees

Carolyn: This month, we're hosting Elizebeth Varghese, Global & America's Leader: Client Offerings in Talent and HR Strategy at IBM. And outside of IBM she's an active board member at South Asian Youth Action, a nonprofit providing after-school programming, education, and college support.

She was recognized as Global Top 100 Influencer in HR for 2020. And we are glad to have you joining us today, Elizebeth, to discuss returning to the office, the great resignation, and companies potentially switching to a four-day workweek hybrid, all of that. Welcome Elizebeth, how are you?

Elizebeth: Great, thank you so much, Carolyn. Wonderful and delighted to be here. Great to be back on here with Tracy as well, friend from a couple of years ago as we've been going through some of these pandemic podcasts. So thank you for inviting me and I am looking forward to this.

Carolyn: Yes, well this one's going to be a fun one and it might get a little heated. I've already seen some stuff on LinkedIn. I'm like, oh, that gets my blood boiling about returning to the office. And I want to start off with a question, there's an article called "Three ways the future of work must change for federal employees."

The article states that at the end of the day, we need to have an IT and HR Alliance. This was due to exceptional communication between the agency's chief information officer and HR functions. In your experience, is the relationship between IT and HR something government agencies need to improve on? And industry too?

Does the Relationship Between IT and HR Need Improvement?

Elizebeth: Now what we've seen, the pandemic is highlighted so nothing new. This was happening for a while. I have to preface it with that. Because I think in lots of our conversat