You can do a lot in six hours.
Ask Chase Norris. Three days a week, he makes a three-hour commute up and down Interstate 35 from his Hays County home to his Austin office at the Texas General Land Office. Until this week, he was staring down a five-day commute — another six hours on the traffic-prone interstate. He wasn't thrilled.
Earlier this spring Gov. Greg Abbott ordered all state workers — remote or not — back to offices. For some agencies that sent them scrambling to find space for workers who, in some cases, had been fully remote. But last week, state lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill to effectively reverse that top-down mandate, allowing state agencies to set their own remote-work policies. The bill now heads to the governor's desk.
The measure from Republican state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione allows agencies to adopt their own remote-work policies, while setting up guardrails for agency heads to ensure employees' productivity.
Catarina Kissinger, an organizer with the Texas State Employees Union, said the need to regulate remote-work wasn't on a lot of people's list of priorities heading into the legislative session. But the governor's March mandate changed that.
"It's one of those things that feels like it shouldn't be necessary," she said. "But it was made necessary by the governor's mandate, unfortunately."
Kissinger said the order ran counter to a state-backed study that remote work policies were a boon to agencies that had been struggling to hire and retain workers.
"Remote work is one of the few tools that actually improves job satisfaction without raising costs," Kissinger said.
Norris said the governor's policy caused a lot of stress with no real benefit" among his coworkers, with some weighing whether to quit outright and move to the private sector.
"[This] work is hard," he said. "It doesn't pay that much, but we do it because it's good work."
After the bill's passage, Norris said the General Land Office paused its transition to a five-day, in-person transition plan. He's still going to have to make a long commute down I-35, but now it's only three days a week, not five.
He and his wife both work full-time and those three-hour stretches of time on I-35 can take a toll.
"It's hard enough balancing all of life these days," he said. "The two days I work from home help me do that. I don't sacrifice my productivity to do that. It's just the nature of the beast."
The bill now heads to the governor's desk, and Kissinger said its overwhelming bipartisan support in both the Texas House and Senate could bode well for the measure.
"[We] would be pretty surprised if he didn't actually sign it," he said.
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