Recent Job Listings
By Robert Tirloni, La Fleur’s Magazine
When the pandemic broke out in early 2020, millions were sent home to work. Five years later, more and more employers are asking workers to return full-time. What changed?
It could be politics. On January 20, 2025, the White House issued a Presidential Action memorandum titled Return to In-Person Work. The directive instructed federal departments and agencies to “terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis.”
However, the federal government’s stance reflects a broader national trend. Over the past year, many private companies, such as The Washington Post, Amazon, AT&T, and more, have removed their hybrid policies for most of their staff.
A survey of U.S. workers conducted in October 2024 by the Pew Research Center illustrates that “among those with teleworkable jobs who say they’re not currently working from home all the time, 75% say their employer now requires them to work from their office, workplace or job site a certain number of days per week or month. That share is up significantly from 63% in 2023.”
States across the map are now pushing for more days on-site, with several governors urging full returns. For U.S. lotteries, the picture is mixed: union agreements, space constraints, and fieldwork needs all shape what is feasible. The range becomes clear when you look at state lotteries.
California
On the West Coast, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order in March requiring agencies to implement hybrid telework policies, with a minimum of four in-person days per week. Newsom’s order pointed to research showing that “in-person work promotes collaboration, cohesion, efficiency, and accountability…all of which are critical for effectively delivering services to the public.” A deal with public employee unions, like the engineers’ and attorneys’ unions, delayed the order from taking effect, pushing it to July 2026, in exchange for a reduction in automatic salary increases.
Harjinder Shergill-Chima, Executive Director, California Lottery, recognized that the lottery was understaffed and had been working to rectify the situation. But housing the expanded workforce posed a challenge to returning to the office. “It became clear to us that we were going to have to spend millions of dollars to retrofit our building,” says Shergill-Chima. After reviewing the Lottery Act and determining that they should only expend money to further the mission of the California Lottery, which is to provide supplemental funding to public education, Shergill-Chima was struggling. After discussions with state leadership about the costs and timeline for modifying office space, Shergill-Chima was able to determine what best suited her team, and a schedule of two days in the office per week was established. “That’s where we landed, and it’s been working great,” she says. “We have some staff who like to come in every day, and if that works for you and your management team, that’s totally fine.”
“We really tried to work with and meet our employees where they were,” continued Shergill-Chima. The two-day in-office schedule is primarily for headquarters staff. Many other staff, such as claims, district sales, security and enforcement, and warehouse staff, already work five days on site.
Texas
Prior to 2025, the Texas Lottery ran a hybrid program. Roughly 255 of its 318 employees worked remotely. In an October 2024 response to the Legislative Budget Board, leadership credited telework with better hiring and retention (turnover around 13.3% vs. 18.7% statewide), higher engagement (78% vs. 63.7% statewide), and facility savings from hoteling (about a 10% space reduction).
In early March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott reportedly directed state agencies to end telework and return employees to the office five days a week “as soon as practicable.” The shift was a jolt. Like other agencies, the Lottery did not have office space to seat every employee at once.
In June, Gov. Abbott signed House Bill 5196, which replaces blanket bans with a structured, agency-run telework framework. Telework must be authorized in writing by the agency head, renewed annually, and may be revoked at any time. Agencies must spell out why telework is used (e.g., space limits or flexibility), set performance standards and monitoring, apply the same rules as on-site staff, bar in-person business at a residence, implement security controls, and publish a telework plan on their public website. Telework cannot be a condition of employment. The law took effect on September 1, 2025.
Presently in a standard five-day week, most Texas Lottery staff work three days in the office and may telework no more than two days. This hybrid schedule applies only to positions where job responsibilities can accommodate telework. Onsite presence remains essential for roles involving direct customer service, in-person support, or other operational functions, and those staff may be required to work in the office more frequently to meet business needs.
Ohio
In Ohio, IT enabled roughly 90% of staff to work from home in 2020. By September 2021 the Commission formalized a hybrid schedule for eligible office roles, approved by the Executive Director and the state DAS.
On February 4, 2025, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine directed all state agency employees to return to the office five days a week by March 17. Ohio legislators tried to lock in a permanent ban on teleworking in the 2025 budget. The final bill language would have required every agency to adopt a plan for employees to report to an agency worksite or another designated location, prohibited working from an employee’s residence beginning January 1, 2026, and carved out only narrow exceptions. Gov. DeWine line-item vetoed those provisions on June 30, saying they would undo his February 4 return-to-office order and reduce needed flexibility.
The Ohio Lottery returned to work in-office, full-time in March 2025, and staff continue to work in support of the agency’s mission, according to Michelle Gillcrist, Executive Director, Ohio Lottery. Gillcrist noted that “flexibility that is built within policies that ensure accountability is appropriate.”
Oregon
Some states have not altered their policy. Oregon transitioned to remote work in 2020, and the Department of Administrative Services, which sets policies for most Oregon state agencies, issued a remote work policy in late 2021. While allowing for hybrid work, that policy also enabled fully remote work, with all essential functions of the position performed from an alternate workplace 100% of the time, and with minimal time spent in the actual office—less than eight times per year. The policy permits remote work from anywhere in the United States, provided it is mutually beneficial for both the employee and the agency.
“Like other companies, lottery has found hybrid and remote work, when possible, expands our talent pool and provides greater flexibility for staff,” said Oregon Lottery spokesperson Matt Shelby in 2023. The state of Oregon does not cover travel expenses for employees who live out of state and are required to travel to Oregon; these costs are the employee’s responsibility. Oregon appears to be an outlier, as it has one of, if not the most, unique remote work programs in the country.
Amber Feggans, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner, Oregon Lottery, knows the benefits of working remotely firsthand as she resides in California. “Oregon’s flexible remote work policy opens the door to nationwide talent pools, which allows Lottery to recruit the most qualified professionals regardless of location. Because of this flexibility, we’re able to build highly skilled teams to do meaningful work for the State of Oregon,” says Feggans.
What Does the Research Say?
Remote work has been widely studied. On performance and retention, the strongest evidence points to a hybrid schedule. In a six-month randomized controlled trial at Trip.com (1,612 employees), Bloom, Han & Liang (Nature, 2024) found that two work-from-home days per week did not affect performance grades or promotions, while job satisfaction rose and quit rates fell by ~33%. Notably, after experiencing the pilot, managers’ expected productivity impact shifted from –2.6% to +1.0%.
Field-experimental evidence from Choudhury, Khanna, Makridis & Schirmann likewise indicates that an intermediate number of office days delivers the “best of both worlds”: better work–life balance, broader communication networks, and more novel work products, without a performance penalty.
At the extremes, problems emerge. Detailed employee-level data from a large Asian IT firm show that during fully remote periods total hours rose ~30% (including +18% after-hours), output held roughly flat, and productivity fell ~20% due to coordination and meeting load. The same Pew Research study referenced earlier revealed that 49% feel disconnected from their colleagues, and 34% say that their mentorship opportunities suffered.
What’s Best for Lotteries?
For the lottery sector, all these debates hit close to home. Texas and California are fascinating examples of how quickly the debate shifts from whether to return full-time, to how to make hybrid work for both the individual and state.
Lottery organizations are government agencies and high-security businesses. Executives might not have the autonomy to implement what they prefer at their lottery. No one is going to ignore a governor’s executive order unless they don’t want to be a director anymore. Furthermore, some core functions simply cannot be done from home. Drawings must be conducted at secure, lottery-controlled facilities to ensure integrity. Claims representatives must meet players and validate winning tickets in person. Warehouses must physically receive, pack, and ship tickets to retailers. These tasks are not optional, and they cannot happen from a kitchen table.
But for those executives with a choice, the body of evidence suggests a golden mean to be the best policy. Some days in the office, some days at home. Frank Suarez, CEO, Connecticut Lottery, explains it perfectly: “You need the interaction, the ability to build rapport, to do team building and coaching—it’s much more effective in person than virtually… but as long as you are doing your job and performing well, there is flexibility around the schedule.”