When the COVID-19 outbreak in March forced most state workers to telework indefinitely, the Department of General Services (DGS) took the opportunity to begin a case study tracking the impacts of working from home.  Executives in the department’s IT and human resources divisions collaborated to develop a telework dashboard to visualize activities across the department.

Using a telework dashboard designed in May to track data and habits from its roughly 1,400 workers teleworking either full or part-time, DGS sought to discover the impacts of working from home that may inform the decision to telework even beyond the state-mandated shutdown.

According to DGS, its workers have saved a cumulative 16.4 years of commute time, 200,000 gallons of gasoline (worth approximately $620,000 at the pump), and 1,761 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

In addition to the positive environmental impact, 80 percent of DGS workers polled in a recent survey indicated that they would like to continue teleworking on a permanent basis.

See DGS’ dashboard here: https://telework.govops.ca.gov/tracking-telework/dgs-case-study/