Favoring Flexibility

Jane Anderson, director of the Midwest Institute for Telecommuting Education, a telecommuting consulting group in Minneapolis, says telecommuting can be a big help in convincing employees to stick around. Her firm recently completed a national survey that showed that 83 percent of telecommuting employees had started their work arrangement because of a specific lifestyle change or need.

“It seems like a reward [to the employee], but it’s really a benefit to the company,” she says. “I think companies often use telework as a temporary fix for people whose expertise or talent they don’t want to lose. If they have children, for example, they may be able to work from home for a while. Or if they’re a key stakeholder in a particular project and their spouse is transferred to another state or country.”

Partial telecommuting arrangements may be a way to increase employee retention. It may help a person immeasurably to be able to work from home one day every week, for example.

Anderson recommends employers write policies very carefully to ward off trouble with telecommuting. For example, they should make it clear that the arrangement may be terminated by either party at any time, and that there will be no changes to the employee’s benefits or salary as a result of the change.

Lee Hecht Harrison, a Bloomington leadership consulting firm, employs a large proportion of part-time workers. It helps the company to easily reduce or increase its staffing according to fluctuations in business. But more than that, it helps the firm take advantage of the talents of people who might otherwise not be able to work there.

“One of the reasons [for part-time positions] is to be able to get the talent, the people who aren’t interested in working a regular type of 8-to-5 job,” says Nancy Koo, the firm’s Minneapolis-St. Paul practice leader for leadership consulting. “It’s a good practical decision for everybody involved.”

About 10 percent of LarsonAllen’s employees are now on reduced schedules, and the comp-any expects the number to increase over the next five to 10 years—to as much as 40 percent, Schilling says. “People want more flexibility to be parents, or to volunteer, or whatever,” she says. “And we need people in the jobs. If we can stand out as an employer who gets the fact that people want work-life balance, I think we can be an employer of choice.”