The number of Americans who are teleworking – working independent of location – is on the rise across the nation, but locally, companies are divided on how they rate the need for making such programs widely available to employees.

Teleworking, or telecommuting, can mean a lot of things, ranging from working from home, out of a client’s office, in a satellite office or on the road. The number of Americans who teleworked, with a frequency from one day per week to full time, grew 7.5 percent between 2003 and 2004, with a 57 percent increase in medium-sized businesses, according to a study released this fall by the International Telework Association and Council.

Some companies, such as Farm Bureau Financial Group Inc. in West Des Moines, have employees based in different states as well as Greater Des Moines, who rarely report to the local office. Dan Pitcher, Farm Bureau’s vice president of information systems, oversees most of the company’s telecommuters, and says the alternative work schedule has benefited his department..

“We probably have what I consider to be three classes of remote usage,” Pitcher said. “We have some full-time telecommuters, others whose primary job is working from home, and people traveling.”

Farm Bureau’s full-time telecommuters are based in Denver, Colo. Pitcher said those employees were ones the company decided to retain when it closed its office there.

“We had some valuable programmers that we didn’t want to lose, and when the company decided to close that office we had to look at finding alternate office space for them or look at ways for them to work from home,” Pitcher said. “Having the employees work from home made the most sense.”

Pitcher said the nature of the work, which can be measured in what the employees produce, makes telecommuting a viable option, even for people who live near company headquarters. For that reason, he has employees who work from home most days, maybe reporting to the office once a week.

“In this line of work, it’s well-documented what should happen and the time it takes,” Pitcher said. “You can really develop a case that for people who are really focused on programming, their homes can be a productive work environment.”

Supporters of teleworking say it can result in increased productivity. The American Telecommuting Association’s Web site says that studies during the past two decades have shown that teleworking employees consistently produce 10 to 15 percent more work than when working from the office. Several factors may account for this, including a heightened sense of control over one’s life and the elimination of the time and stress of the physical commute to work.

Pitcher said Farm Bureau has created a set of teleworking guidelines to ensure that employees are in work-conducive environments. According to the guidelines, an employee cannot provide child care while teleworking, and the majority of the employee’s work is done during “common time” with the company’s traditional employees.

For accounting firm Ernst & Young LLC, not only has productivity been high among teleworking employees, but so has employee retention, according to Steve Marlow, an audit partner with the company.

“We use telecommuting as one of our tools to promote workplace flexibility in trying to meld the two-way street between employer and employee and in trying to keep our strongest employees with the firm over time,” Marlow said. “We often find that telecommuting is one of the things that can help create the balance with our employees’ lives that would help them stay with the firm.”

Marlow said teleworking is usually reserved for people who have worked with Ernst & Young for a long time, and who have developed circumstances that affect their ability or desire to report to the office each day. Instead of leaving the company, employees find it reassuring to know that they can try other avenues, he said.

“We can work out an arrangement with them that will fit their lives,” Marlow said. “One of the leaders in my area telecommutes on Fridays because of child-care reasons. We recently had a person whose spouse accepted a job that required them to move. We had a large client near the location where she was moving, and we said, why not stay with the firm and have their primary responsibility be that client.”

Marlow said in any case where teleworking occurs, employees have set expectations for what they need to accomplish for the arrangement to continue. As long as the individual’s goals are compatible with the goals of the employer, the flexibility will continue, he said. So far, teleworking has worked in favor of both parties, he said.

“These aren’t programs that have been around for a long time, so I think our people are very anxious to make it work,” Marlow said. “There seems to be a lot of consciousness about making it work, and because of that, productivity has been very high.”

Marlow said he has seen teleworking function as an option not only for accountants, but also for someone who focuses on recruiting and hiring, whose job “requires a lot of time on the phone and not necessarily face time.” But, both he and Pitcher acknowledge that teleworking is not suited for everyone. Likewise, entire companies, such as Wellmark Inc. and Meredith Corp., say that teleworking is not a long-term solution for their employees.

“Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield does not have a defined recruiting strategy offering teleworking, at least at this time,” said Angela Feig, a spokeswoman for the company. “There are some individual situations where a leader has created some additional flexibility for a staff member for a defined period of time based on business need and the need to retain a specific skill set or expertise.”

Meredith employs a large network of freelance writers and field editors who work from remote locations, but company spokesman Art Slusark said the publishing division would not be as strong as it is if its editors teleworked full-time.

“Teleworking is not a formal process that we have,” he said. “We’ve looked at it and concluded that a lot of good comes from having our creative teams together.”

Slusark said editors tend to spend a lot of time traveling for photo shoots and writing assignments, which makes it especially important to have them present for “the creative process” when they are in town. He is aware of special circumstances where managers have granted approval for working from home, but says it is “not the norm, nor is it something they would do on a permanent basis.”

Whether companies view teleworking as a reward for skilled employees or a last resort for special circumstances, technology is changing the way employees can stay connected with their companies. “Technology just keeps making the world smaller,” Pitcher said.