More than two-thirds of West Penn Power Co.’s employees at its Greensburg headquarters likely will be reassigned to other offices in the utility’s service area in the next few years as the company reevaluates its use of the building, a company spokeswoman said Wednesday.
Many began working remotely since the pandemic began three years ago and continue to do so, the company said.
Changing the “home office” for those remote workers to other service centers in Latrobe or along Route 30 near Jeannette will not mean a change in their employment status with FirstEnergy Corp., parent firm of West Penn Power, the company said in an internal statement.
During the work-from-home mode, “it became clear that having a large mobile workforce provided the company with an opportunity to reevaluate its office space needs,” said Jen Geyer, FirstEnergy’s director of administrative services in the statement.
The utility wants to assign remote employees to a service center near the area where they live rather than requiring them to relocate to keep their jobs, said Jennifer Young, a spokeswoman for FirstEnergy at its Akron, Ohio, headquarters. Any employee whose company office is moved to another location will be given prior notice, the company said.
FirstEnergy has about 480 employees assigned to the Greensburg location, yet about 70% of that workforce has been working from home and does not report to the office, Young said. Based on pre-covid underuse of the building and the future mobility of its workforce, FirstEnergy expects 60% of the building will be vacant, if the current numbers are maintained.
Distribution control to remain
While much of the FirstEnergy workforce based in Greensburg can work remotely, the company’s distribution control center in Greensburg is expected to remain, Young said.
That center manages the flow of electricity across portions of Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland, Young said. The operators monitor the different circuits of distribution lines that serve some 720,000 West Penn Power customers.
The evaluation of FirstEnergy’s office space in Greensburg is part of an overall strategy by the utility to align its real estate cost-saving initiative with the greater flexibility of the workforce in terms of where they perform their job, the company said.
The corporate headquarters in Akron, an office in a Cleveland suburb and one in Morristown, N.J., are subject to that review process.
Part of a trend
FirstEnergy’s restructuring of its workplace rules to allow employees to work remotely is part of a growing trend in the nation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Business Response Survey for July to September 2022 by the Labor Statistics bureau found slightly more than one-fourth of all private-sector businesses — 2.5 million — had employees working remotely some of or all the time. The Business Response Survey for July to September 2021 found 13% of all U.S. private sector jobs involved teleworking full time and 9% involved teleworking some of the time.
Joe Napsha is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Joe by email at jnapsha@triblive.com or via Twitter .
