Home work: Utah firms accommodate employees' schedules

For office-dwelling employees, slow periods at work may be spent surfing the Internet or walking to get a cup of coffee with colleagues. For Colleen Walker, down time is marked by folding laundry or strolling down the hallway of her Orem home to chat with her husband.

After working for a decade at 1-800-CONTACTS' Draper call center, the customer service agent took advantage of a company program that has allowed nearly half of the company's 300 call center employees to work from home.

1-800-CONTACT's flexible scheduling program has allowed Walker to adjust her schedule almost a dozen times over the past year, most recently settling on weekend graveyard shifts.

The schedule allows Walker to have dinner with her family, bathe her two children and get them into bed before heading into her home office to answer calls and respond to customer e-mails into the wee hours of the morning.

"That's the beauty of working from home — it can look very different for different people," said Walker, whose husband also works for 1-800-CONTACTS.

The company began testing the program in the summer of 2004 with 10 to 15 employees. It became more widely available in July 2006, and now some 150 customer service agents work from their own homes.

"We've always really wanted to try to be as flexible as possible with our different associates and their different needs," said Dave Walker, 1-800-CONTACTS' vice president of operations.

Many of the company's at-home employees are parents, like Colleen Walker, who wanted to spend more time with their children and also continue earning a paycheck.

"We just thought it would be really silly to lose a great employee after training them and after having them do so well for us for a school schedule or for a life-changing event, like having a child or having them move far away," Dave Walker said.

After many years as a manager in the call center, Colleen Walker decided to cut back to part-time work after the birth of her second child. At another company, she said, she may have had to quit working altogether.

By allowing your employees to work from home you get more diversity, because not everyone can work in the middle of the day in the call center," she said.

1-800-CONTACTS has been repeatedly recognized for its efforts to build a supportive environment for its employees, most recently with the Alfred P. Sloan Award for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility.