Policies around remote work are ever changing since companies sent employees home in March 2020. Increasingly, people are expected back in their offices – and that includes those employed by the state of Texas after Gov. Greg Abbott in March ordered state agencies to bring workers back in-person.
This order inspired a piece of legislation that would create rules for how state agencies can allow employees to work remotely.
Karen Brooks Harper, a senior politics reporter at the Dallas Morning News, said this bill is intended to standardize remote work practices across various state agencies.
“What this does is just kind of put some protections into place in the state code for employees to be able to enter into these telework arrangements. And basically, the bill asks for some accountability,” she said.
“If an employee enters into a telework agreement with their bosses at the state agency, it has to include the reason telework is being authorized, the terms under which they may be revoked, and it needs to be renewed at least once a year after the employee begins. To make sure that it’s working, there needs to be a way for the agency to decide if the employee is doing their job productively in the telework arrangement.”
» RELATED: Texas employees say return-to-office policy will make workers quit – and services will suffer
The bill also specifies that the employee can be called into the office for special meetings and events, and that telework can’t be a condition of employment, since the arrangement is always conditional.
Brooks Harper said this bill does not contradict Abbott’s back-to-the-office order, but rather clarifies it.
“What Abbott did was call the agency heads in with his staff, basically. And they were instructed to start bringing your employees back as soon as possible, as many of them as you can,” she said. “It wasn’t a blanket directive — that all 150,000 state employees have to come back to the office. But it was a ‘start looking at your policies, and be ready to defend them.’
Most of the 150,000 employees already work in the office. And certainly the vast majority of them work in the office or if they have telework, it’s just partly telework. I think what he was trying to do… The goal, as stated to me from his office, is just to make sure that pandemic-era telework policies still fit the current work environment five years later.”
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
This bill still gives state agencies a lot of authority to come up with their own policies.
“It doesn’t ban teleworking, which I think some people would like to do. And it doesn’t allow blanket telework for anybody who wants it,” Brooks Harper said. “But it establishes parameters so that the agencies can continue basically doing what they’ve always done, which is entering into telework agreements with various employees.
It became much more permissive and lax during the pandemic for obvious reasons. But now, so you’ve got these policies that they’ll go into place, it won’t be a blanket ban or a blanket allowance. It’ll give these agencies a framework to establish some more consistent policies.”
This bill passed the House 132 to 11, with no discussion on the floor. Brooks Harper said she expects it to pass the Senate as well.
“I don’t see any real resistance to it,” she said. “I mean, we’re looking at deadlines now. This session will be over in a couple of weeks. So it’s not dead. And if it can get past the deadlines, it should be in pretty good shape.”
