COMPANIES OFFER MORE FREEDOMS TO HOLD ONTO WORKERS.

Byline: Maggie Jackson Associated Press 

Come fall, AT&T will launch an experiment allowing employees to roam like nomads from project to project, unaffiliated with old-style departments.

Texas Instruments shortly will offer a second kind of pension plan - one more easily transferred to a new job and more rewarding for employees who quit the company after just a few years.

The aim of the changes? To keep good workers. If that sounds confusing, it often is.

Like suitors who once spurned a lover and are worried about losing another, employers are struggling with how to retain talented employees - and keep them committed - at a time when many bonds of loyalty between them have weakened.

Downsizings, restructurings and vast changes in the way we work have demoralized employees and left them distrustful. Workers have been told - either indirectly or straight out - that they are free agents, responsible for their own careers.

Now, with jobs plentiful, more workers are taking employers at their word and quitting, leaving companies scrambling to rekindle the loyalty that only a few years ago many eschewed.

``We were focusing on the wrong things,'' said Patricia Nazemetz, director of human resource policies at Xerox. ``Employees have asked or expected us to back off'' focusing on ``the concept of . . . no guarantees,'' she said.

Xerox, one of the first companies to realize that making workers feel disposable can cripple a business, now gives bonuses to lower-level workers, makes benefits more flexible and gives workers more of a say in their jobs to help persuade them to stay.

Other companies are shelling out bonuses and raises, making work more flexible - and bending over backward sometimes to such an extent they seem to promote leaving.

``We struggled with whether the new pension plan won't create more ambiguity and uncertainty in the work force,'' admits Brian Gelles, director of compensation at Texas Instruments. Ultimately, the company decided that other new benefits, including a simpler profit-sharing plan, would outweigh the pension plan's mixed message.

Such head-scratching shows how thorny the issue of loyalty can be. It drives to the heart of what a company should be for its workers and what employees should do for their company. It can give security, yet it can be stultifying.

Once upon a time, loyalty meant ``sticking around for as long as the company would have you and doing whatever they want,'' says Faith Wohl, a work-family specialist who works for Vice President Al Gore. ``That just doesn't seem appropriate in the 1990s.''

The old kind of loyalty has been swept away amid a flood of changes from outsourcing to downsizing that often left companies trim and agile but employees anxious.

``I'm hoping for another 10 years with my company, but you never know,'' sighs Kim Ebling, a customer service representative with a Buffalo, N.Y., insurance agency. ``With any employer, there's no security, no matter where you go.''

Workers today mostly are satisfied with their jobs, but don't trust management, studies show. A recent survey of 2,500 workers by Towers Perrin reported 60 percent of workers wouldn't recommend their companies to a close friend.

Amid the tumult has arisen the ``new contract'' - a term coined in academia and embraced by business to describe the changing relations between employers and employees. In the past two years, there has been much jawboning about how companies will train workers to be more ``employable'' but can't promise lifetime employment. To workers, that has sounded mostly like ``you're on your own.''

``The whole thing of `come and work for us for five years and have a great time' isn't working,'' says Patricia Milligan, a principal at Towers Perrin consulting. ``The trouble is that's exactly what people are doing.''

Nearly 13 percent of unemployed people in July left their jobs voluntarily, compared with 10.5 percent the same month a year ago, according to the government.

The Bureau of National Affairs, a Washington, D.C.-based research and publishing firm, has been struggling with the issue of commitment since computerization led to an influx of young hires a few years ago.

The company still has a reputation for stability: Employees joke that if you stay three years, you'll retire there.