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Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting firm, conducted its own survey of 936
large companies. Its results showed that 32 percent of these companies offered telecommuting
opportunities in 2004. It was a 1 percent increase over the prior year.
Sun Microsystems operates its own telecommuting program called iWork. With it,
workers can work from home, or if they need to they can drive to a flexible work center
when they need an office. Around the world, Sun has 115 flexible office locations.

Sun Microsystems
headquarters

Sun Microsystems
telecommuters can work
from home, or if they need
more of an office
environment without
actually going to the office,
they can go to one of 115 Telecommuter’s
Flex office flex offices. home

NOTE Sun employees have identification cards with Java encoding. When they insert their card into
a workstation, it instantly sets up the user’s personal preferences.
Although this is a nice arrangement for employees, Sun isn’t missing out on any cost
savings. Sun says this setup has saved the company $255 million over 4 years. It has
reduced its cost for real estate by eliminating 7,700 seats. The company also saves money by
not having to pay so much for electricity and not having to upgrade computers.
However, telecommuting isn’t as simple as sending a worker home with a company-
issued VPN client, a username, and password. In order to make it work, companies need to
determine which job categories should be eligible; then guidelines and performance goals
need to be established. The company also needs to decide what equipment it should
provide and develop training for employees and managers.