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Four days a week, Gary Ronnie makes the short morning commute from his breakfast table to his home office, where he develops training materials for his company's computer software products.

Ronnie's job, which would involve spending most of his time in front of a computer screen even if he were at his company's Arlington Heights headquarters, lends itself easily to telecommuting. Once a week, he makes the traditional in-person trip to the office, where he attends meetings and talks face-to-face with the one employee he supervises. His employer, Denniston & Denniston Inc., a 75-employee business that provides time/attendance and labor management software to companies nationwide, saw the value in allowing Ronnie to work partially from home. Ronnie, 52, who was diagnosed about two years ago with multiple sclerosis, was getting worn down by the 65-mile round-trip commute from his home in southwest suburban Riverside to Arlington Heights. But by telecommuting, he's able to continue working for a company where his veteran skills are needed. "It has made my life much more doable," he says.

And, as a side benefit for his fellow suburbanites, Ronnie's arrangement keeps one more car off Chicago's increasingly clogged expressway system.

After decades of futuristic predictions about work-at-home technology that never quite came true, telecommuting -- or "telework," as some people prefer to call it -- is finally becoming a reality, thanks in part to an odd convergence of business and environmental interests. Environmentalists like getting cars off the roads. And businesses like happy workers who are less likely to leave their jobs. "Different reasons, but you get the same result," says Roger Kanerva, environmental policy adviser at the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. After years of pushing by environmental groups, "telecommuting is starting to be popular as an employee benefit. This thing has come full circle."

Indeed, telework has exploded in popularity. Surveys by Cyber Dialogue, a New York-based research and consulting firm, its predecessor FIND/SVP and the International Telework Association & Council show that the number of teleworkers nationwide -- defined as an employee or subcontractor who works at least one day a month from home, but averages one and a half to two days a week -- increased from just 4 million in 1990 to 19.6 million in August of last year.

The number of teleworkers is expected to rise to as many as 23.8 million by the end of this year, meaning about 18.7 percent of the American workforce will be working at least some of the time from home, according to projections by Jack Nilles, an Evanston native and author of Managing Telework, which was published in 1998. Nilles, who coined the term "telecommuting" in the 1970s, sees a point in the year 2030 when perhaps 51 million Americans will do at least some of their work from home.

There are several reasons for the trend. Just as the automobile forced the development of highways and a different way of working than existed in agrarian societies, "now the technology is driving how and where we're going to live and work," says Gail Martin, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based International Telework Association & Council. Steamrolling technological advances eventually will give wide segments of the populace access to faster Internet connections and wireless communications. Further, the growing traffic congestion -- and attendant pollution -- in many U.S. cities, including Chicago, is making the drive from home to work increasingly unpleasant. Finally, the healthy economy and its low unemployment is making employers more sensitive to the issues of recruitment and retention, which can mean helping workers balance careers and family.

"We do not have enough workers in this country," Martin says. "We

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Then PCs came on the scene, making telecommuting even easier. Now, telecommuting is a more widely accepted part of corporate culture.

New Jersey-based AT&T has run a telecommuting program since 1989 that currently includes a couple of thousand Illinois employees. Of the company's 80,000 managers, salespersons and technical professionals, about 10 percent telecommute exclusively, 25 percent telecommute once a week or more and half telecommute about once a month.

The numbers likely will rise as high-speed, high-capacity communications systems become more available. The program began as a response to employees' desires for a better balance between work and home life, says Burke Stinson, an AT&T spokesman. "Working at home seems like an obvious solution." The story is much the same at PricewaterhouseCoopers, a global management consulting firm based in New York that has about 3,500 employees in Illinois. The company has had a formal telecommuting program for about three years as part of a larger flexible work policy. Employees who choose this option sign a contract spelling out their duties, then the company sets up a home office with compatible equipment. The company has about 420 teleworkers, most of whom work from home exclusively or nearly so. The program appeals to workers of both sexes: 40 percent are men and 60 percent are women. More than 15 full partners in the company are telecommuters, proving that working from home doesn't have to hold employees down on the corporate ladder.

The company has found that the changing realities of the workforce demand such programs. "People coming out of college today really are demanding much more sensitivity to be able to choose and control their work schedule," says Ray Lewis, spokesman for PricewaterhouseCoopers. That's fine with his company, as long as customers are happy. "There's a great business case for this. And beyond that, it's the right thing to do."

So why isn't every Illinois company with a white-collar staff running a telecommuting program? Old-school management techniques are the single largest barrier to the spread of telework, advocates say. "From the beginning, the problem was not the technology," says Nilles, who runs his own telecommuting consulting company, JALA International Inc. in Los Angeles. "The primary problem was between the ears of the middle-level managers. That's still the problem."

That was the biggest barrier for AT&T, which faced "traditionalist managers who feel insecure if not petulant when their employees are not in their offices," Stinson says. To counter such concerns, the company studied the productivity of the telecommuting members of the company's sales force. Interestingly, they found productivity rose 20 percent to 30 percent among those who worked at least part time from home, Stinson says.

To raise the profile of its program, the company also held a special work-at-home day in 1994, in which managers from the chairman of the board on down did their jobs from home. Today, thousands of AT&T managers work at least one day a week from home. Some do it because of personal or family needs, but some find it's a better fit with their personal style. "They're kind of cowgirls and cowboys. They like to get out and sell. They don't like the confinement of the office," Stinson says. Nor do they sit on their couches watching Jerry Springer. Studies have shown that at-home workers often are more productive, Martin says.

"Number one, they're more focused and number two, there are less meetings and interruptions." They also tend to want to prove themselves.

One study the Telework Council cites shows that between reduced absenteeism (teleworkers don't have to take a whole day off to deal with a sick child or wait for the cable guy), increased productivity and reduced costs for recruitment and retention, companies can save $10,000 a year on an employee who telecommutes one day a week.

Telecommuting employees don't

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Gary Ronnie, the instructional designer who telecommutes to his Arlington Heights employer four days a week, says he hasn't had trouble staying focused on his job. "I'm not really distracted by things around the house. I just shut the door and the five cats stay on the other side of the door," he says. "There are times when you get into the whole flow state and time passes very quickly and you get a lot done without interruptions."

It also helps that he's a self-described introvert -- and that he reports to a boss who telecommutes from Florida. "Working at home is not a bad thing for me," says Ronnie, who gets enough office camaraderie over the phone and computer. "If I'm missing something and I need to chat, I have the phone. I have the whole thing."

Earlier this year, there was a scare among teleworkers and their employers when an advisory letter from the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration to a Texas business made it look as though the government was planning to extend strict workplace safety rules to home offices. After a firestorm of protests from U.S. businesses, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman withdrew the letter and officials said there was no plan to conduct government inspections of home offices. Still, Martin suggests companies spell out what an appropriate workplace is, what training will be given to employees, what measures will be taken to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome and other ergonomic problems and what hours the employees are to work so that those companies will avoid becoming electronic sweatshops.

Chicago is vying to be one of a handful of cities in a pilot program administered by the Washington, D.C.-based National Environmental Policy Institute, a nonpartisan organization funded by government and industry. That city, with help from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, is putting together a proposal for a market-based approach to encouraging telecommuting.

As envisioned, companies that have telework programs could get "pollution credits" and make money on the already existing volatile organic trading market, in which companies in the six-county high-ozone area around Chicago already trade other types of environmental credits. "[The credits] would become basically a trading commodity," says Rita Athas, director of regional programs in the mayor's office.

"It's encouraging people to basically do the right thing." Chicago doesn't keep statistics on how many of that city's companies have telecommuting programs, but anecdotal evidence suggests they're catching on, Athas says.

Those working on the proposal hope to get federal Environmental Protection Agency funding this fall. Sometime in the future, organizers hope to get federal tax deductions for companies that encourage teleworking. "It's a three-time win, not only for the employees and the environment, but for the employer as well," says Mary Beatty, executive director of the National Environmental Policy Institute.

The trend to telework is beginning to get Congress' attention, too. One proposal by U.S. Rep. Frank R. Wolf, a Virginia Republican, would give a tax credit to an employer or employee for equipment that promotes teleworking in high-ozone areas such as Chicago. Another, introduced by U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat, would establish rural telework centers, especially in such underserved areas as Indian reservations and Appalachia, to train people to work by computer without having to move to an urban area. If it were successful, such a program also could help retirees and single moms in the inner cities become more active members of the workforce, Martin says. "There are job potentials for every type of population."

It appears that whether old-line managers like it or not, telecommuting is here to stay. "The population is growing. The number of roads isn't," Nilles says. "The old guys who didn't know from computers, who thought they need to look you in the eye to know what you're doing, they will all be retired pretty soon."

Stephanie Zimmermann is a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times. Her most recent piece for Illinois Issues, "Chain reaction," which assessed the status of the state's nuclear power industry, appeared in May.

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