Yes, people who work at home really do <i> work</i> . Just ask the growing number of happy bosses. : House Calls

Alison Holt Brummelkamp knew that switching from her daily office job to telecommuting two years ago was going to mean a huge change: She’d have to set up a home office, deal with co-workers and clients by phone, and juggle family and work all under one roof.

But Brummelkamp, a media specialist with Golin/Harris Communications Inc., found that she also had to deal with low-grade attitudes toward working from home that hadn’t quite caught up with the high-tech age.

“New acquaintances or people at work I wasn’t that close with would say, ‘Oh, how nice, gee, you’re working from home, isn’t that great . . . ‘ “ the implication being that she’d be sprawled on the sofa all day sipping a double latte and watching “Oprah.”

Even Brummelkamp’s mother thought that her daughter would have much more time on her hands.

“My mother’s been very supportive, but I think she hoped that we’d be able to see each other more. She soon found out that I’m rarely available.”

Despite telecommuting’s growing popularity, some people are still stuck in the notion that if a suit is not donned and an office is not driven to, work does not get done. Those who work from home complain of intrusions from family, friends and neighbors who assume they’re available to baby-sit/walk their dog/pick up their mail.

Telecommuting is hardly a brave-new-world notion. Working from home and dealing with the outside world via fax, phone and computers has been a reality for a while, long enough that companies have been instituting formal programs for the past few years.

In the United States, about 9.2 million telecommuters will not hit the roads by the end of this year, according to the research firm Link Resources. That’s a 10% increase from last year.

The trend has also spawned other non-traditional working environments, including virtual offices (using portable equipment to set up shop from cars to construction sites) and satellite offices, mini-set-ups where employees can work.

AT&T; set up its telecommuting program two years ago after experimenting with the concept. Of its 123,000 managers, 37,000 are now telecommuters, while another 12,000 are working out of virtual offices.

AT&T;’s decision to allow such a large percentage of its work force to telecommute came out of “a number of things coming together,” said Susan Sears, district manager in public relations. “The company was looking at helping employees balance their work and personal lives. And telecommuting can also help with reducing the number of commuter trips into the office.”

Overloaded freeways, less than adequate mass transit and epic natural disasters have all worked to make L.A. a trend-setter in telecommuting, said Jack Nilles, author of “Making Telecommuting Happen” (Van Nostran Reinhold, 1994).

Businesses must also comply with traffic reduction laws to meet clean-air standards. Since many ride-sharing and car-pooling programs have gone bust, telecommuting is an attractive alternative.

“I don’t know any place else in the world that’s concentrated on telecommuting efforts as much and as long as Los Angeles has,” Nilles said.

Still, vestiges of old attitudes remain. When Brummelkamp set up her at-home office--an addition to her Temple City home that shares space with the washer-dryer--she had serious qualms.

“I was very sensitive about it. I didn’t want people to know that I was home,” she said. “I was worried that people would think I wouldn’t be working as hard. But now everyone knows I work at home. I finally said you either do it or you don’t do it, and you have to feel secure that it’s acceptable.”

Cathy Brower, executive editor of Home Office Computing magazine, said her readers are familiar with the negative connotations prompted by working from home.

“Some people can’t help but envision a person sitting in their bathrobe watching television and occasionally making a phone call,” she said. “It stems from a time when companies didn’t have formalized work-at-home policies. That stigma is hard to shake. I do feel we’ve come along way, but I think we have a long way to go.”

This transition from office to home is cyclical, explained Paul Edwards, who with wife Sarah is the author of “Working From Home” (Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc., 1990). America has gone from being a society of farmers and shopkeepers (whose businesses were often attached to their homes) to an industrial-revolutionized world of factories, offices, neckties and pantyhose--and now the pendulum is swinging again.

“In the 19th Century,” he said, “Sunday schools were invented to teach people the skills to hold a job since it was believed that most people didn’t have the discipline to show up on time. Now the belief is that most people aren’t suited to [working from home].”

Even some employers have a tough time believing that their employees are hard at work if they can’t see them.

But that way of thinking is “diminishing rapidly,” Nilles said. “There is much less resistance now from management about telecommuting. They’re seeing enough real experience in other companies, particularly if they’re competitors.”

Businesses are quickly realizing that telecommuting offers some great benefits, Nilles added, such as cutting down on office space, producing less auto emissions and generally making for happier, less stressed employees. And it’s supported by increasingly sophisticated technology.

A home office can also be a boon to companies that do business globally on a 24-hour basis. And studies show that productivity actually increases when employees start telecommuting, because they’re eliminating commuting time, have fewer distractions (such as lunch and coffee breaks and talking with co-workers) and more flexibility in structuring work hours.

Contracts between employees and managers put down in black and white exactly what is expected. Advanced technology will soon bring video-conferencing into the mainstream, so managers will be able to see their employees at home.

Nilles said temptations to slack off when the TV and refrigerator are just a few feet away are not the main problems. Of greater concern, he said, is “incipient burnout” by people who tend to work from sunup to sundown because of enthusiasm, guilt or simply because the work is there.

Brummelkamp, whose only client is Seattle-based Nintendo of America, admitted that in the beginning, she often worked late nights.

“I would get the kids to bed,” she said, “and then do some filing and other work at night. I started to get really burnt out. Now, except in a complete emergency, that door is closed (at night) for office work and it turns into a laundry room again.”

Brummelkamp was the first at Golin/Harris to broach the idea of telecommuting.

“Everybody saw the stress level in my life,” Brummelkamp recalled. “It was just getting awful. I would just break down crying at the office, it would get so bad. I was just feeling that I couldn’t do a good job at anything. I never saw my kids [ages 6 and 9]. I thought, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”

Now she makes the 60- to 90-minute commute to and from Downtown Los Angeles only once a week. Being at home more makes it easier on the family, since her husband’s work takes him out of town every other week.

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The experiment worked so well that Golin/Harris has instituted a formal policy about both telecommuting and flex-time for its 60 employees.

General manager Fred Cook recalled that when Brummelkamp first came to him, he was open to the idea, but also had some reservations.

“Certainly it was new for us, so we had some concerns about how it would work. . . . I think it took a little while to get used to the idea of calling her at her home office; I couldn’t just yell out the door and she would be there.”

But Cook is convinced that making different work schedules available is the inevitable wave of the future.

“We have to do everything we can to attract and keep the very best people. If we can make accommodations to people like Alison to keep them working and contributing to our clients, then we realize that that’s smart business.”

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Meanwhile, Back at the Home Office . . .

For those who wonder how telecommuters structure their days, here’s a breakdown of a day in the life of one. Alison Holt Brummelkamp is a media specialist, wife, mother and 4-day-a-week telecommuter.

6:00 a.m.: Get up, get dressed, have breakfast, get daughters (ages 6 and 9) off to school. Scan five newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Pasadena Star-News).

8:30 a.m.: Start work. Make phone calls (calls to the East Coast are usually made first because of time difference).

8:45: Check e-mail on laptop computer that has modem that connects her with the Downtown office. Make more calls to client, co-workers and media contacts.

9:40: Teleconference with Downtown staff for the monthly staff meeting.

10:25: After the teleconference, call co-workers to discuss the meeting as well as strategies for a new program. Fax machine comes to life, starts spewing faxes from the Downtown office.

12:15 p.m.: Lunch (usually a Lean Cuisine eaten at her desk, today she drives to a nearby Carl’s Jr.)

1:00: Back at office to look over faxes and phone messages.

1:05: Walks to nearby elementary school to volunteer at her younger daughter’s class (she does this two days a week for an hour; today she grades papers).

2:00: Checks phone messages, returns calls.

2:45: Conference call with co-workers.

3:45: Takes older daughter to gymnastics class.

4:00: Back in the office making calls, checking e-mail and doing paperwork.

5:00: The work day ends.