Workers choosing to stay home.

Two-and-a-half years after the Northridge earthquake forced a lot of people stuck in freeway gridlock to rethink the way they did business, Southern California leads the nation in telecommuting.

It's estimated that 1 million of the nation's 10 million telecommuters live and work in Southern California. And according to experts in the field, it's a phenomenon that's been spurred not by government action but by new technology and the cost-cutting realities of business in the 1990s.

A study released earlier this summer by the Southern California Telecommuting Partnership indicated that the region's number of telecommuters has grown by 11 percent since last fall.

At least one expert said the increase has been even greater than that.

"The growth rate is closer to 20 percent a year, especially in the past two years," said Jack M. Nilles, a Brentwood consultant who is credited with thinking up the term "telecommute" while stuck in a Los Angeles traffic jam in 1973.

Nilles said that recently passed state legislation that relaxes employer obligations to cut the number of employes that drive to work will have little effect on telecommuting's popularity.

"Telecommuting is happening more and more because of good business reasons and because of the impact on the bottom line, not because it'll make the air cleaner," Nilles said.

A study by the City of Los Angeles found that city workers who worked at their homes one day a week saved the city $8,000 a year each on average, said Susan Herman, chairman of the Telecommuting Partnership, a consortium formed by five Southern California counties, the City of Los Angeles and five telecommunications companies.

Those savings were attributed to an average 12 percent productivity improvement per individual, a reduction in turnover (which saved the city money on hiring and training costs), reduced sick leave, and reduced parking reimbursement costs.

Other studies have found that workers who telecommute are more productive, less likely to call in sick and more likely to get promoted.

In the private sector, the charge into the brave new world of telecommuting is being led, not too surprisingly, by companies that specialize in communications technology.

One-fifth of Pacific Bell's 10,000 managerial-level employees telecommute at least one day a week, said Linda Bonniksen, a company corporate communications manager, from her home office last week.

"Everybody thinks telecommuting is just lot data wonks, but it's not," she noted. "Even brain surgeons can do some of their work from home."

But move the work to telecommuting centers, where employees can log onto company computers miles away and the interest wanes.

Despite considerable publicity about the concept after the Northridge earthquake, it's drawing only mixed success. Upwards of 95 percent of all telecommuting is done from employees' homes.

Connie Warden, who owns and operates the Santa Clarita Valley Telecenter in Valencia, said her five-office, 15-work-station facility was two-thirds full right after the earthquake and remains so today.

"It's going okay," she said. "I'm not rolling in money, but I can more than pay the bills."

A small office at Warden's center, with two computers, a fax/modem and a phone line, rents for $400 a month. The cubicles with one computer rent for $200.

More successful is the Valencia Telecommunications Center, where the occupancy rate is 100 percent. Owned and operated by Newhall Land and Farming Co., the facility rents blocks off offices to larger companies, such as Woodland Hills-based CareAmerica.

But a spokesman for CareAmerica said the company's operation there is a "business resumption site" only. That is, a skeleton crew of three keeps the company's systems running if another major earthquake knocks their home office customer service system off-line.

Pacific Bell provides its employees who work at home with everything but the computer. It also pays the phone bill, and in some cases, installs ISDN transmission - a broad bandwidth line that can transmit data up to ten times faster than the fastest available consumer modem operating on a standard phone line.

Despite the demonstrated cost-savings and efficiencies of telecommuting and its implications for corporate bottom lines, the greatest resistance to the growing trend comes from middle-management.

"They're the number one obstacle," said Herman. "Managers who manage by observation rather than by work product are scared of it."

Nilles, who recently returned from a trip to a number of European Economic Community countries to spread the word about telecommuting there, agreed that management reluctance, especially at older Fortune 500 companies, is a problem.

But managerial resistance aside, interest in telecommuting is at an all-time high. Pacific Bell began offering literature to companies interested in looking into the practice last fall. Demand was so high, said Bonniksen, that the information was put on the company's Web site. There are currently 10,000 e-mail requests for information each month.