State Department of Education Modernizes Telework Process in Less Than Six Weeks

A state's department of education supports a public school system serving over one million students, with 600 employees, including teachers, field service specialists, IT staff, legal professionals, and administrative personnel, keeping it running in an "always-on" capacity.

At the end of the school year, the department set out to implement a new hybrid telework policy allowing employees to work from home two days a week. With several layers of leadership required to approve and coordinate schedules, senior management and division managers needed a way to balance remote flexibility with guaranteed in-person coverage, all while rolling the policy out during the two-month summer break.

• Give several hundred employees telework days while maintaining optimal in-office staffing
• Streamline approvals through senior management and division managers, the department's actual chain of command
• Deliver a fully functional system in less than three months, before the start of the next school year

• Intuitive form with an employee dropdown, integrated with Active Directory, so users can also tag their direct manager
• Automated workflow routes each request from supervisor to division head for final approval, with auto-generated email alerts to keep it on track
• HR uses dashboards to allocate remote days evenly across the week
• The commissioner's and governor's offices can download spreadsheets to confirm adequate in-person coverage at every location

• Processed 450 forms on the first day, 650 in month one
• Workflow went live in less than six weeks
• Submissions reach the commissioner's office in an average of three days
• Centralization ensures no requests are lost or deleted
• Employees were granted the majority of requested remote days while maintaining in-person coverage