Working at Home Pays Off for Firms

"All of our reservation agents work at home," says the founder and chief executive of JetBlue Airways Corp.

Neeleman first tested the idea at Morris Air, which he co-founded in the early 1980s and sold to Southwest Airlines Co. in 1993. Now at JetBlue, which he launched in 1998, Neeleman has become hooked on the concept.

JetBlue has 700 reservation agents working from their abodes (one pictures them sitting there in their robes and slippers, the fridge just a few feet away) with company-supplied personal computers and second phone lines.

To be sure, their wages of $8.50 to $10 an hour are way above the $2 to $3 a day that call-center operators in India and the Philippines often earn.

But Neeleman figures that homesourcing boosts the bottom line in other ways. "With home working you get more mature people who stay with you," he says. "There isn't constant turnover." What's more, he adds, employees who take care of business from home tend to "feel better" about their jobs, boosting productivity by an estimated 25%.

Forest Hills, N.Y.-based JetBlue isn't the only big company that prefers its workers to keep their distance.

Almost 100,000, or 70%, of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s employees work from home part of the time.

AT&T Corp., for its part, reported that last year it "received over $180 million in operating benefit from telework" -- tasks performed away from the office by U.S.-based network planners, human-resources managers, sales personnel and others. With fewer corporate facilities to buy and furnish, real-estate savings accounted for a significant portion of the number.

The notion of working from home isn't new, of course. In the 1980s, as the term "telecommuting" came into vogue, some suggested that office buildings and even freeways might one day disappear from the American landscape. Obviously, those forecasts turned out to be wildly off the mark.

And yet, the trend of working from home has grown, driven by the same sorts of technological advances that are allowing companies to shift work abroad. "A long time ago, employees were tied to the mainframe," says Joanne Pratt, a Dallas consultant on telework. "The personal computer and the Internet has freed them."