SiliconBeat

Telecommuting has been a workplace topic for at least a decade now, but we suspect that its adoption by a vastly larger number of employers and their employees is just a matter of time, given the steep spike in gas prices recently coupled with the increasingly dire information about climate change. We were intrigued by a release put out today by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an executive outplacement firm known by us mostly for their periodic reports on lay offs in the U.S., that conducted a survey on employer responses to the soaring price of gasoline faced by their workers.

Telecommuting could soon rise to the level of (already be?) a national security issue:

According to a study by independent researchers, Kate Lister and Tom Harnish, 40 percent of Americans have jobs that can be done remotely, yet only four percent of the workforce currently works from home. If all of these workers telecommuted, they conclude it would annually save 625 million barrels of oil, reduce greenhouse gas pollution by 107 million tons of CO2, and save almost $43 billion at the pumps. Other results of the study revealed that increased telecommuting could reduce Gulf oil imports by 80 percent while significantly reducing pollution.

Results of that survey can be found at Undress4Success.com. (After overcoming our fear of typing that particular URL into our browser at work, we soon discovered it’s a work-from-home advice site.)

One other tidbit we found remarkable: The release says that AT&T was, at one time, at the “forefront of telecommuting trends.”

In 2005, it reported that about 90 percent of its management employees telecommuted, including 30 percent who worked full time from locations other than an AT&T facility. Another 40 percent teleworked regularly, while 20 percent worked from home occasionally when required for business continuity reasons.

However, since its 2005 acquisition with SBC, a company that is not as liberal with its telecommuting policies, the company has drastically cut the number of workers allowed to work remotely. In an interview with the trade publication NetworkWorld, Chuck Wilsker, president and CEO of the Telework Coalitions, said some estimates put the number of full-time teleworkers affected by the policy change between 10,000 and 12,000.

Could this be true? Have we any AT&T employees among our dear readership to help confirm or deny?