Telework dashboard earns California Department of General Services an “Innovation in State Government Award” from the National Association of State Chief Administrators (NASCA). This award is well deserved for many reasons, but from my perspective, the two biggest reasons are:

1) Organization vs individual: There are many ways for an individual to track the climate impact of their commute; mileage reports when buying a car, emissions impact from driving vs taking public transit, emissions impact from flights, etc. This puts all the responsibility for action onto the individual human – who may have limited choices depending on their role and the employer’s telework/”remote work” policies. California’s telework dashboard measures the climate impact of an entire organization’s commuting staff and helps inform organizational leadership on whether their organization’s “telework” / “remote work” policies are effective. As far as I know, this is the first dashboard tracking organizational-level commute savings.

2) Annual reports vs live data: Typically in government, people track progress by writing annual reports. These reports take time to write, time to proof-check for errors, time to print (on paper!) and distribute – and finally time to read. Given the weeks of work involved, writing these reports once a year is hard enough. However, these delays add up – making annual reports far less actionable. By contrast, the DGS telework dashboard uses real-world data updated each week. This live data, updated every week, helps leadership track the effectiveness of decisions made in recent weeks, and help make more informed decisions. This is a great example of measure what matters. Oh, and it’s also public.

Congrats to Andrew Sturmfels, Ann Baaten, Gary Renslo, Stuart Drown and many many others for all the hard work leading up to making this live tracking dashboard a reality. The award is well deserved. With any luck, the first of many awards for this innovative work!