The General Services Administration

Building the Federal Workplace of Tomorrow

The General Services Administration (GSA) is the independent governmental agency that’s responsible for serving federal agencies’ essential infrastructural needs, from office space to technology and transportation. When the widespread transition to remote work began in early 2020, the GSA, which housed approximately 1.1 million Federal workers and contractors in nearly 10,000 facilities, faced a highly complex recalibration process. The urgency of a broad workplace restructuring meant that the agency had to approach the evolution of work from two separate but overlapping angles: as an employer of its own national workforce and as a provider of services, including space, for other federal employers.

Thankfully, the GSA had prepared for this moment. Their client engagement tools, deployed most recently during 2019, provided an extensive array of workplace-related survey data and feedback that could be used to shed light on the needs and preferences of all Federal workers. PLASTARC was brought on in early 2020 to help analyze this data through the lens of emerging workplace trends, and to conduct ongoing research that would help the GSA understand and prepare for the future of work. The GSA had resolved that the nature of its provided services would have to evolve to reflect the changing needs of its clients, and PLASTARC was responsible for creating a holistic framework through which leadership could evaluate those shifts and respond accordingly.

In conjunction, the 2019 survey data and visioning workshops with leaders of client agencies provided a comprehensive overview of the Federal workplace of the future. After synthesizing this data and making statistical predictions regarding the future of federal work, including one projection that GSA’s physical footprint could be reduced by 40-80% by 2030, PLASTARC put forward a suite of 19 services that the GSA could expand or introduce in order to better serve its clientele. With the understanding that most Federal work can now be done anywhere, at any time, PLASTARC used this proposed suite of services to advocate for a new emphasis on technology and work support as the centerpieces of the GSA’s mission. The GSA accepted several of these recommendations and began implementing pilots as the first major step in its Workplace 2030 strategy.