If he had to show up every day in his office at the Defense Information Systems Agency, Greg Krawczyk says he probably wouldn't be working there. The round-trip commute between his waterfront Pasadena home and the agency's headquarters in Arlington, Va., can take 2 1/2 to four hours - sometimes longer, depending on traffic and weather.
But thanks to the agency's liberal tele-work and work schedule policy, Krawczyk, 48, says he only has to make that grueling drive around congested Washington every other workday. The other days, he's able to sit down and log on to the agency's secure computer network in a modest cinderblock building at Fort Meade, about 30 minutes' drive from his house.
"It's a job saver," says Krawczyk, who helps handle contracts and support agreements for DISA, as the agency is known.
Krawczyk is one of a growing number of Maryland residents joining the defense agency in anticipation of its relocation to Fort Meade four years from now, as part of the nationwide military base realignment ordered by Congress and known as BRAC.
With employee surveys showing that many defense workers say they will quit or retire rather than follow their jobs to Maryland, federal officials are considering expanded telecommuting as a strategy for recruiting workers in the state and reducing turnover. In DISA's case, officials also are hoping liberal workplace policies will help attract more new employees like Krawczyk near the agency's future home. That reduces the risk of losing them later once the agency moves to its $579 million offices planned on what is now Fort Meade's golf course.
"We're very aggressively recruiting in Maryland," says David Bullock, DISA's base realignment executive. "We're doing everything we can in Maryland to let people know that DISA is coming and if you want to work for us now, we'll be happy to have you."
The push to hire Marylanders appears to be showing results. While slightly more than three-fourths of the agency's headquarters workers once lived in Virginia, Bullock says, that percentage lately has slipped to about 71 percent.
The agency is scheduled to move 4,272 jobs to Fort Meade when it relocates its headquarters by 2011, including about 1,500 "embedded" contractor positions. Another 3,000 to 5,000 contract workers who perform work for and with DISA also may relocate.
