Work-at-Home to Grow in New Year: Chattanooga Times Free Press

Chattanooga, Tennessee can be considered a bellwether city. The city proper is small: some 171,000 inhabitants surrounded by sprawling suburbs resulting in a metro area of nearly 520,000 residents. It has a broad mix of manufacturing, distribution, and service industries plus institutions and tourism, the latter capitalizing on its scenery and the famous Chattanooga Choo-Choo song tapped via the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum.


Chattanooga is also a success story. Like many others across the U.S. it had lost population in the 1970s and 1980s but unlike the others it has bounced back. Wikipedia reports that Chattanooga has become the only major American city to regain growth in the two decades since. This is thanks in part to corporations and governments working together to revitalize its downtown and riverfront areas and to attract new companies to the region, such as Volkswagen’s new plant.

So in such a city with everything going it there would be no need or interest for work-at-home, right? Wrong.

A Dec. 29 Chattanooga Times Free Press article reports more area employers are enabling their employees to telework. BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, the city’s largest employer wants to double its telecommuting staff from 400 to 800 in the next year, according to Jeff Wakefield, director of administration and process improvement for the insurer.

“So far, the program is working very well with all types of jobs in our business,” Wakefield said. “We’re able to communicate with and monitor the activities of our at-home workers throughout the day, and many have found such an arrangement to be more productive for them and us.”

Most of the 4,200 employees of BlueCross moved this year into the company’s new $300 million corporate campus atop Cameron Hill in downtown Chattanooga, says the article. The firm still leases other office space around town, and Wakefield said workers who perform their tasks at home help save BlueCross the expense of maintaining office space and parking for such workers.

Employers usually provide the computer and phone connection, and BlueCross even gives its at-home workers an ergonomically designed chair and desk. Even with those costs the healthcare firm estimates employers like it can save, on average, up to $20,000 per employee a year by at-home work arrangements.

 

 “It’s not for everyone, but we see tremendous benefits from this trend,” Wakefield said.

 

Another firm, Unum now has nearly 1,000 employees who work at home, including 300 full-time and 75 part-time workers in Tennessee, company officials said.

 

Unum spokesperson M.C. Guenther told the newspaper that insurance company continues to expand its use of work-at-home options for the growing number of employees who volunteer for such jobs. One of these individuals is Lori Holcomb, a customer service specialist.

 

“I don’t have all the expenses and time involved in driving back and forth to work, and I found without all of the distractions of the office, my productivity went up nearly 20 percent when I started working from home,” Holcomb told the newspaper.

 

As Chattanooga goes, so goes the rest of the country predicted experts.

“The Industrial Revolution (News - Alert) moved people from an agrarian society where people worked at home on the farm to a mass-production economy where people went to a factory to work,” said Chuck Wilsker (News - Alert), president of The Telework Coalition told the paper. “In the information age of today, people are able to do their work most anywhere, and many of them are choosing to stay at home.”