The agency’s Coworking Space Demonstration Project, a one-year initiative with two vendors, began Aug. 15 and aims to let county employees from across Southern California reduce their commute times and carbon footprints while potentially improving average vehicle ridership rates and internal communications. Among the takeaways:
• The pilot came out of a May 2018 business plan for a telework pilot written by the county’s Internal Services Department (ISD). Its main goal was to evaluate whether telework could improve aspects of the organization’s work environment including “environmental compliance, employee recruitment and retention, employee attendance and internal communications,” according to an ISD report on the initiative’s first quarter and its departmental results. Mobility topped enterprise IT strategic goals and proposed objectives set forth by the county’s Office of the CIO (OCIO), at an IT Industry Briefing on Sept. 26.
ISD did an RFI in August 2018 to learn about “membership-based shared office spaces,” later contracting with WeWork, one of five respondents, before adding a second, TailoredSpace, via membership agreement in October. In January 2019, ISD created what it described as “a dynamic Geographic Information System (GIS) tool” that helped identify teleworking opportunities by mapping employees’ residences and alternative office locations. Agencies participating in the pilot include ISD, the departments of Human Resources and Public Health; and the County Library. Since launching with co-working spaces in Burbank, El Segundo and Pasadena, the county has added Long Beach, through WeWork; and West Covina, through TailoredSpace.
• During the pilot’s first three months, 142 ISD employees teleworked a combined total of more than 600 days — reducing their commutes by roughly 17,000 miles and saving more than 500 hours. Their average travel time to telework locations was 18 minutes. The staffers reduced CO2 emissions by an estimated 6.9 metric tons or more and saved more than 750 gallons of gas. This, ISD said, equated to “1.5 passenger vehicles being taken off the road for one year,” using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator.
• The initiative has helped L.A. County better understand its needs in two areas — mobile devices and culture, Dave Wesolik, general manager of ITS, told Techwire. Officials realized the agency might need more mobile devices to help staffers get out of the office and would need to look at potentially redefining issues like performance measurement to fit a newly mobile workforce.
“How do you take a manager who spent the last 20 years evaluating the performance of an employee by their presence at a seat at a desk, and change that to what the rest of the world already knows? Which is, what are your results, what are your performance measures?” Wesolik said. “It’s a big shift for local government to do that.”
Going forward, the county hopes to create “hoteling space” within its departments — workspace at which to “host” employees who may be visiting from other departments or locations, Wesolik said.
• County infrastructure accounts for security considerations. ISD maintains a Virtual Private Network (VPN) interface that links to apps and data in the county’s private cloud rather than on a user computer, according to the report. This lets remote workers with login credentials send and receive data securely from county devices. Remote ISD employees can use a desktop or a county-issued or personal laptop. Laptops, ISD said, are “highly encouraged.”
The county takes a layered approach to data security, allowing, ISD said, “for in-depth protection using various technologies to ensure maximum attack detection and prevention.” It also uses a threat analytics managed solution that aggregates attack data to find patterns. ISD technicians visit the co-working centers to provide remote workers with tech support, communicating with support staff at county facilities on more complex issues.
