AT&T at Home

Large numbers of AT&T employees are moving out of traditional offices and into virtual offices as a way of increasing productivity, work/life balance and their quality of life. They rely on a structure that is more and more “net-centric” - organized around networks instead of buildings.

All of these advantages relate directly to job and career satisfaction, increasing teleworkers' organizational loyalty. About 2 out of 3 teleworkers (67%) report increased job satisfaction after beginning to work from home. Approximately the same proportion (64%) report increased satisfaction with their career. Roughly half (47%) of teleworkers who had received competing job offers factored the ability to work at home into the decision to stay with the company. If teleworkers were told they could no longer work from home, two out of five (43%) say they would seek another position that supported telework, in or out of the company.

According to a 2002/2003 employee telework research, 17% of AT&T managers now say they work in a full-time virtual office (or “VO”, defined as working all of a standard work week at home or from a customer location). This is almost double the 9% VO reported in 2001. Another 40% report less-than-full-time telework patterns including working from home, office sharing or hoteling arrangements.

Shifting to a frequency-based view, about 33% of AT&T managers now telework at least once a week, over four times the 8% who did so when our research first began in 1992.

AT&T has been conducting employee telework research since 1992. The objectives are to:
Quantify the benefits of this new operating model to society, the enterprise and employees,
Identify barriers to broader, more effective participation,
Enhance our products and services, and
Provide strategic guidance to our customers and clients.

2002-2003 results are based on a representative survey of 1200 AT&T managers. Confidential at-home telephone interviews were conducted by a leading independent market research company, using stratified random sampling techniques.

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