COVID-19: Office and/or Work from Home Schedule

[Steve Everist]

How has your agency responded to staffing during this time.

Washington is under stay at home orders (with the standard caveats) until May 4th (currently). Our office has responded by allowing us to all go to 4/10's and work 20 hours at the office and 20 hours from home. The few people who have stayed on 5/8's work 24 hours at the office and 16 at home. This currently is extended through the end of April.

[SLMeek]

For those of you who are working from home, what type of work are you doing?

[Steve Everist]

For those of you who are working from home, what type of work are you doing?

We've been set up to VPN into our desktop computers. So, we can do most anything we can do at the computer as long as it's in the computer, and it keeps us from saving any case-related files in our home computers. Any casework including lift cards would require they be scanned during our time in the office. We can access our DIMS, Photoshop, as well as search our local (county) AFIS database. We're unable to launch searches to NGI or WIN until we're back at the office.

We're also using this time to clean/organize our files, emails, etc... (I had 20+ years of emails thought to be important to review and clean up). Our county has approved E-learning courses that we can access and take. We can review different articles, studies, court cases, etc... that we keep setting aside, thinking we'd have time to read them. We can work on papers, presentations, workshops, in-house training classes, etc... We can review our SOPs, various manuals, etc... and look to update them. Some people are working on updating controlled documents, the training program (now that we don't have anyone in training). Other webinars, videos, etc... that are relevant to the work we do. Since we process evidence and do our own photography, we can watch instructional videos to improve our skills.

At some point, since this is extending through the end of April, it may be nice to do an office meeting just to pull things together. Not sure if this will happen, though.

Doing this 20 hours/week, we may run low on resources. As we start to move down the other side of the curve, this will be reduced. But, it has shown us that there are aspects of the job that can be accomplished from home, which is something we weren't sure could be done.