TVA President Jeff Lyash said the agency expects a full return to the office for the workforce in light of an executive order from the new administration.
Officials said more than 70 percent of TVA’s workforce report to a plant or work site and the remainder have the option to report to work from a home office or a TVA facility of their choice.
For the Chattanooga office complex, there have been as many as 1,000 employees daily at the site, which is about a third of the workforce assigned to that location, officials said.
The huge office facility that spans Broad Street has been for sale.
It was one of the options for a new Federal Courthouse, but was not chosen.
Mr. Lyash said in a conference with reporters, "You can appreciate that our workforce moves around quite a bit. We move out to facilities. We move to power plants, and so it's fluid to start with. But we expect a full return to the office with the right exceptions, or the right flexibility to reflect the nature of our business.
"And that's allowed by the executive order, by the way. The executive order contemplates that while your expectation is a full return to work, there may be instances where the nature of your business justifies some exceptions, and we'll just look carefully at those."
Mr. Lyash also said, "We expect to maintain a downtown office presence for the foreseeable future, although, frankly, we made it clear we have more office space there than we need. We've been working on a number of fronts. An example is with the potential federal courthouse and with the city on redevelopment of some of that property. But a significant part of that will remain as our Chattanooga office complex for the foreseeable future."
Mr. Lyash said of the Chattanooga office, "We are in the process right now of a review of our staffing levels and our organization to try to drive some cost out. We announced a voluntary reduction in force. We expect all that to play out over the next three or four months, and then that, combined with this return to the office, will inform what sort of facilities, in terms of square foot in nature, we need.
"I would expect more people in the office complex in Chattanooga, but exactly how many we’ll sort out as we finish up these other in-house efforts."