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Corporate America jumping into telecommuting with both feetBy MARY DEIBEL, Scripps Howard News ServiceTennessee banker Kim Cherry counts herself lucky to have been a trailblazing telecommuter when her son Collin was born seven years ago. "I was among the first, and I'll always be grateful for the time with my son and for not having to choose between him and my job," says Cherry, media relations chief for First Tennessee National Bank, a Memphis financial services firm that routinely ranks in Forbes' and others' "top 100" places to work. Cherry's pioneering ways were followed by the federal government in 1995 when President Clinton ordered federal agencies to adopt telework arrangements throughout the executive branch to save $150 million a year in taxpayer money on federal office rent. Corporate America has jumped into telecommuting with both feet, too, as a way to woo and win employees in the tightest labor market in a generation. The International Telework Association and Council in Washington estimates that 20 million Americans now telecommute, and that goes for 29 percent of the nation's small businesses, up from 25 percent only a year ago. Management consultant Deloitte &Touche's new survey of what "Fast 500" high-tech companies do to recruit and retain top people finds that 50 percent offer the telecommuting and flextime options as a supplement to financial inducements that are far and away the top employment lure. However, the poll also found that fewer than 5 percent of employees at high-tech companies opt for the virtual office for three days a week or better. Why the reluctance? Commercial real estate trend-trackers with the International Tenant Representative Alliance suggest one reason may be that employees who work from home take longer to rise in the ranks. An alliance survey of 250 top executives reports that 40 percent say telecommuting slows employee advancement compared to only 27 percent who thought so two years ago. Time and technology may change that as it becomes increasingly less important for people to live close to their work, demographer William Frey of California's Milken Institute believes. A further factor, says John Challenger of Chicago executive placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, is that telecommuting will free aging baby boomers to work from anywhere they want, whether or not they want to stay on the employment fast track. "We're moving into an era when technology is going to be a tremendous boon for people over 60," Challenger says. Or under 60, especially when a worker has good reason to telecommute. First Tennessee's Cherry says a young co-worker fell so in love with a woman from Nashville that he was ready to quit his job until he was told to telecommute instead. "Telecommuting wouldn't have worked if he'd been a teller at his window," Cherry says, "but it works for what he does, and they've lived happily ever after."
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