Sandia National Laboratories is one of New Mexico's largest employers, with upwards of 12,500 people working at the labs in the state. But as the federal laboratories work to implement a series of initiatives intended to boost hybrid work, a pair of workforce leaders at the labs told Albuquerque Business First that those moves won't significantly affect its employment impact on the state.
Sandia, which has two primary sites in Albuquerque and Livermore, California, plans to build out more "touchdown spaces" and expand partnerships with institutions across the U.S. to set up "hubs" where employees can conduct classified work. Those touchdown spaces are collaboration centers on-site at Sandia's Albuquerque and Livermore facilities, where employees can do different types of work.
Plans are to establish the first of those hubs at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Texas A&M University and the labs' location in Minnesota.
The goal of those initiatives is to give workers more flexibility in how they work and recruit people who might not have otherwise decided to work at the labs, said Jennifer Gaudioso, the director of Sandia's center for computing research, who helped lead a project to evaluate the labs' hybrid work model long term.
That project kicked off in the summer of 2020 through a more "near-sighted" look at the labs' hybrid and remote work practices in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, said Matthew-Ryan Morrell, manager of strategic site planning at the labs, who helped lead the initial project.
The combined projects resulted in the labs' new hybrid work approaches. The purpose isn't to drive more people to work outside of New Mexico, Guadioso said — the labs are still "New Mexico or our Livermore site first," she added.
Guadioso said the number of people working remotely for the laboratories is about 1,200, or 7% of its workforce. She expects that percentage to stay "fairly stable" between 5% to 10% of the labs' employees working remotely, even as its new hybrid approach takes shape; it was closer to 3% before the pandemic.
"My take on this, and what I've seen with my workforce in my own line, for instance, is it enables them to think more broadly about where they might live in New Mexico," Gaudioso said. "I think it just allows people to live more flexibly in-state."
Sandia National Laboratories' reported 12,581 employees in New Mexico in its 2022 Economic Impact Report. That's about 80% of its 15,533-person total workforce.
Expanding touchdown spaces, building out work hubs with partner institutions and revamping some underutilized office space on-site in Albuquerque and Livermore, California — another hybrid work practice — can also act as retention tools, Guadioso and Morrell told Business First.
"It'll allow us to grow and create a stable, long-term workforce predominantly in-state," Guadioso said.
Living in New Mexico and being able to commute to the labs' Albuquerque site one or two days per week, for example, changes the type of work employees can do, she added.
"The national challenges you can work on are much different if you're on-site full time or a part-time telecommute and can come on-site," Guadioso said. "You get to work on a very different problem set than the problems that you could work on if you're out-of-state and a remote employee.
"[It's] the constraints of classified work and access to experimental facilities and things," she continued. "People come to work at Sandia because of the problems and our mission, and so most people want to move here to have access to that sort of impactful work that they get to do everyday."
While the labs are working on those pilot "hub" projects with partner institutions for out-of-state remote employees to conduct classified work, Guadioso said experimental and classified work "almost exclusively" have to be done on-site, whether in Albuquerque or at Livermore.
Sandia National Laboratories is operated and managed by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Charlotte-based Honeywell Interntional Inc.
