Remote working succeeds only at some companies

CHICAGO – Marilu Arce loves her job, but for a time she considered leaving.

The traffic-plagued commute from her distant suburban home to her downtown Chicago office, nearly two hours each way, meant her daughters couldn't enroll in after-school activities because she couldn't get home in time to take them.

Then her employer adopted a policy permitting her to work from home two days a week, and "I feel like it changed my life," she said.

Her stress level has dropped. Her daughters are thrilled that they can play travel softball. She tackles household chores with more energy. She likes her job more.

"It's the best of both worlds," said Arce, an assistant controller in the corporate accounting department at National Equity Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit that brings investors and developers together to build affordable housing through government tax credits.

"If I ever thought about leaving this place, I would think twice."

That's the type of reaction Arce's boss, CEO Joe Hagan, likes to hear as the company measures the success of the work-from-home policy it instituted three years ago in hopes of improving employee retention. So far, it seems to be working: turnover was less than 5 percent last year, its lowest ever, dropping from an average of 8 to 11 percent before employees could work from home.

Those stories "make me vigilant," Hagan said. "I want to see what went wrong there."

The most scrutiny recently has been on IBM, which in May announced it would require some of its remote staff in the U.S. and Canada to work out of regional offices. The change was particularly jarring because the technology giant was a pioneer in letting employees work remotely, and in the software to facilitate that trend. Honeywell, Bank of America, Best Buy and Yahoo have made similar shifts away from remote work in recent years.

Flexible work policies top employee wish lists when they look for a job, and employers increasingly have been offering them. Nationally about 3.7 million employees, or 2.8 percent of the workforce, work from home the majority of the time.

Studies have shown working remotely increases employee engagement, but in moderation because there is still value in the relationships nurtured when colleagues are face to face. The most engaged employees are those who work off-site three to four days out of a five-day workweek, according to a report this year from Gallup.

The key, advocates of flexible work policies say, is to match the environment with the type of work that needs to be done.