Brendan Herron spends his days overseeing acquisitions for Pathlore Software Corp., a software developer. As vice president for strategic development, Herron works long hours, travels a lot and attends countless meetings.
But like a small but growing number of executives, Herron has never spent his time in a glass office at the company's headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.
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When Herron first started at Pathlore, he lived in New York City with his wife and was not willing to move to Columbus. But he never really had to fight to stay put. Instead, the company realized what an asset it would be to have an employee in the bustling city. Herron's apartment was too small, so he worked from an office in Rockefeller Center. "It was beneficial for a Columbus-based company to have an executive in New York to talk to the financial community," Herron said. "We ended up with an investor in New York. That came out of the fact I was in New York and could take a cab" to meet with the potential client, rather than a plane ride, he said.
And when Herron and his wife decided D.C. living would suit them and their future children better, the company agreed. After all, it meant a presence in an area full of technology companies and potential government clients. Herron now teleworks from his house near Connecticut Avenue.
As employers fought to keep good talent in the late 1990s, many employees began to work from home or other places they found more comfortable or closer to home. Many of those workers convinced their employers that teleworking was just as good as driving into the office, and sometimes better. Typically, teleworkers have been the worker-bee types who spend some time at home and some time at the office and have to persuade the higher-ups to let them work that way.
But that is changing as top-level employees -- chief executives included -- are taking on teleworking. At Pathlore, four of the company's seven top executives work from home or from remote offices. Teleworking is considered an asset. If an executive or employee asks to work from home in San Francisco, that's just another market in which the company is available in person to potential clients.
"With technology and e-mail, people have no idea where you are," Herron said, parroting what teleworkers have said for years.
According to a study released this month by the International Telework Association & Council (ITAC), more companies are going the way of Pathlore. The number of people who performed any kind of work from home, from as little as one day a year to full time, grew from 41.3 million in 2003 to 44.4 million in 2004, a 7.5 percent increase.
Teleworkers who worked at home during business hours at least one day per month increased in the past year from 23.5 million to 24.1 million, a 2.6 percent increase.
Part of that growth is from employees who have been emboldened to ask to work from home or elsewhere.
