7/28/09:  The SEC informed NTEU today that it intends to utilize highly subjective and unscientific opinion surveys as the chief metric for assessing the success of the Expanded Telework Program. These surveys were created "in house" by HR employees at the SEC. NTEU has filed a national grievance to prevent the SEC from utilizing these opinion surveys, or any data derived therefrom, in this fashion. For this reason, NTEU is urging all SEC employees not to respond to SEC surveys regarding telework, as the Union has serious concerns that the data derived from such surveys may be improperly utilized to cut back on the telework benefits that NTEU has fought hard to make available at the SEC.

Under the Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiated for you by NTEU, the SEC may utilize "work product measures of groups of participants" to measure the success of the Expanded Telework Program. Under the contract, however, these metrics are required to be "based upon verifiable and objective standards." The data generated by the opinion surveys created by the SEC could never be considered to meet this standard.

The SEC's surveys are very poorly and unscientifically drafted. Indeed, several questions violate one of the most basic tenets of survey-drafting, because they are slanted in such a way that they reveal a bias that will be perceivable by the average employee taking the survey. For example, asking employees to respond to a statement such as, “I always knew that telework was a bad idea for the SEC,” is extremely biased. Questions such as these raise fundamental questions regarding the real intent of the SEC's surveys.

There are other problems with the SEC's methodology as well. For example, the agency intends to permit supervisors and non-teleworking employees to provide their opinions about their teleworking coworkers on an anonymous basis. Without controls, though, this would allow employees to participate in the surveys more than once. It also would allow supervisors and others to express misleading opinions about the Expanded Telework Program which have no basis in fact, but which the Union would subsequently be unable to test or probe. It is difficult to understand how the agency could view such a survey methodology as likely to create "verifiable and objective" data about the telework program at the SEC. It is more likely to generate subjective data that the agency could attempt to use to cut back on this successful program.

NTEU has tried to work with management to resolve the question of Expanded Telework Program metrics, but management has refused to move on a single issue with respect to its use of fundamentally flawed opinion surveys. The Union urges all employees not to respond to telework surveys that they receive.