When Brendan O’Brien was offered a job with the State of Vermont nearly three years ago, a big part of the position’s appeal was the opportunity to work from home. His work as an environmental consultant had required lots of out-of-state travel, and now he wanted more time at home with his wife and daughter.
He accepted a post with the Department of Environmental Conservation managing grants to upgrade drinking water systems that would more effectively remove pollutants.
The money wasn’t great, but the benefits were decent. And working full time from his home in Buels Gore, a remote unincorporated area in the mountains south of Camel’s Hump, saved him money on gas and other car expenses.
So O’Brien felt blindsided when Gov. Phil Scott announced in August that he will require all state workers to return to the office at least three days a week beginning December 1.
“I consider this a total betrayal of the terms under which I accepted my position,” O’Brien said.
He’s not alone. Many state workers are livid about Scott’s order, denouncing it as a politically motived decision that ignores what they say are the efficiencies and improved job satisfaction that come with remote work. They predict that the mandate will lead to mass departures from state service, particularly of younger workers who have embraced remote work as a normal part of modern employment.
“The world of five or six years ago is not the world that we live in today,” said Steve Howard, executive director of the Vermont State Employees’ Association, which represents about 6,000 people in the state’s workforce. More than 3,500 union members have signed a petition opposing the governor’s order, and Howard has blasted Scott for pursuing a top-down policy Howard says makes no sense.
“It’s not hard to see that something has been lost when we only see each other on the screen.”
Gov. Phil Scott
The state’s most recent employee satisfaction survey, released in September, shows that workers appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home. Roughly nine out of 10 employees agreed that working remotely improves their job performance and promotes work-life balance and also indicated they can collaborate with colleagues well from home.
“Why do an employee-engagement survey if you’re just going to ignore what your employees are telling you?” Howard asked.
Scott has been clear about the reasons he thinks most state workers ought to spend at least a few days a week in a state office building. That will bring more “consistency and predictability” to the organization, he said in a video message to employees.
“The reality is, we need to get together more in person across departments and agencies,” he said. “It’s not hard to see that something has been lost when we only see each other on the screen.”
Scott’s leadership team has been working overtime to quell the revolt and convince workers and the public that the new requirement is in everyone’s best interests.
“This approach will provide a consistent balance across agencies and departments and increase interactions between teams, and result in more effective collaboration, communication, and connection,” spokesperson Amanda Wheeler wrote in an email.
Administration Secretary Sarah Clark, who is largely responsible for implementing the change, told employees the new hybrid schedule sought to strike a balance between workers’ preferences and the expectations of the people they serve.
“Vermonters value access to their government, a visible presence in the communities we serve, and insight into how we work collectively in service to them,” Clark wrote.
In his video message, Scott stressed that he didn’t make the decision lightly and values the flexibility remote work offers employees. That’s why he’s allowing a hybrid schedule instead of ordering everyone back to the office full time, which was the expectation before the pandemic.
But even three days in the office is too much, many workers say. They have gotten so accustomed to the rhythms and benefits of remote work that they recoil at the prospect of returning to the office even part time.
Adam Jacobs, an energy analyst in the Department of Public Service, said Scott’s order has prompted him to consider looking for other work. He lives in Winooski and views remote work as key to achieving a work-life balance. Scott’s back-to-office mandate is a “one-size-fits-most policy” that doesn’t suit his growing family, he said.
“We have a 3-year-old son with another on the way in February, so a 40-mile commute isn’t going to work for us,” Jacobs said.
The time wasted commuting and its environmental impacts are the most common complaints. For others, it’s not the commute so much as the office environment awaiting them.
A data manager for the Agency of Human Services who only goes into the office once a week says spending two more days a week there isn’t going to make her more productive or collaborative.
The manager, who asked to remain anonymous because she fears retaliation, now reports to the Waterbury State Office Complex. But the work environment there is far from ideal. She works in one of the large, open circular spaces she calls “the turret.”
The room in the historic former hospital has high ceilings and horrible acoustics and is in disarray, she said. “Pretty much our turret is just full of broken chairs and broken office equipment and piles of trash,” she said.
Most of her work is done through videoconference meetings on the Teams platform with the people she manages and other members of state government, she said. Driving to Waterbury won’t accomplish much in the way of team building, she said.
“I’m just going to be sitting there with my headphones on in Teams meetings in that loud turret all day,” she said.
Other workers question whether the state has enough office space, given the sale or pending sale of properties such as the Zampieri State Office Building in Burlington, which once hosted more than 400 workers but is now empty.
The new policy creates a particular conundrum for full-time employees who live outside Vermont. Their numbers have risen 42 percent, from 528 in 2020 to 753 in 2024, according to data from the state Human Resources Department.
It’s not clear how many of those workers were hired with the understanding they could work remotely and how many were longer-term employees for whom expectations changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A large number of out-of-state workers live in adjacent states: 289 in New Hampshire, 230 in New York and 52 in Massachusetts, according to state data. Many live just over the border from Vermont.
Dozens of workers, however, live in more distant states, including California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Florida and South Carolina. They obviously will not be able to comply with Scott’s order without relocating, said Doug Farnham, the state’s chief recovery officer. Farnham is leading a task force of agency managers trying to iron out details of how the return-to-office mandate will affect individual workers.
One question is whether to create exemptions for employees facing long commutes, he said, either in terms of distance or commuting time. The state will likely exempt workers from the in-office requirement during bad weather or when workers are not feeling well but are healthy enough to work.
But for workers in distant states, Farnham sees a bigger challenge. Vermont is unlikely to give these employees a blanket exemption, although they’re likely to be given more time to comply with the return-to-office order. For future hires, a system could be implemented to ensure state jobs are offered to Vermont-based workers first, Farnham said.
“We do strongly feel that you should have a connection to Vermont if you are going to serve Vermonters,” he said.
Some lawmakers are getting an earful from constituents. Rep. Tom Stevens (D-Waterbury) said the rollout of the policy was botched and called it the latest example of the administration’s “habit of shooting first and aiming later.”
“With a large number of employees having been hired as remote workers, one might think to ask them what the financial and familial challenges would be before announcing such a change,” he told Seven Days.
Howard said he’s frustrated the new policy was announced without consulting the union and that potential exemptions are being decided by a group of managers without union input. The secrecy around the process has deepened workers’ distrust of the administration and spawned speculation about the real motives behind the effort, Howard said.
Some feel that Scott may just be following the lead of Donald Trump, who ordered most federal workers back to the office in one of his first acts as president, or Elon Musk, who has strict office work policies at his private companies Tesla and X. Others feel Scott may be trying to prompt state employees to quit ahead of tighter state budgets on the horizon.
Another theory holds that Scott is listening to business owners in Montpelier and other cities with state offices who want workers back to boost local businesses. Some also speculate that Scott is just trying to fill empty state office buildings.
Farnham, the recovery officer, said floods that damaged state offices in 2023 and 2024 delayed return-to-office efforts. But in planning for the return-to-office initiative, managers discovered that remote-work practices varied widely among departments and even among people with similar job responsibilities, he said. Further, the state has no way of knowing how many people work remotely or how often.
Farnham declined to say whether some employees have abused their remote work privileges, but agreed the workforce’s productivity overall was “excellent.” He did note, however, that some remote workers haven’t been to their office for more than a year, which makes team-building tough.
While some supervisors have embraced remote work, others believe in-office work is more valuable.
“That’s why we wanted to set something in the middle,” Farnham said.
Farnham said he is a bit of an introvert and values the quiet time he spends working from home. But there have been plenty of occasions when he needed in-office mentoring from colleagues, such as when he worked in the tax department and someone had to look over his shoulder to explain complex corporate tax forms. The compromise policy is meant to allow workers to benefit from both work environments, he said.
For O’Brien, the DEC environmental analyst, that middle ground doesn’t work. As it is, he travels to Montpelier once a month for meetings with colleagues. To go in three days a week, he’d have to buy a second car, he said. O’Brien said he and others might support the new plan if they felt more in-office time would improve their performance, but they do not.
O’Brien said he knows some might see employees’ position as self-serving, but he just wants to be financially able to do a job he loves that is important for the environment.
“It’s not about being able to show up to work in your pajama pants,” he said.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Remote Control | State employees push back against Gov. Scott’s plan to make employees who work at home return to the office”
This article appears in Oct 1-7 2025.
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