Telecommuting booming in popularity, expanding into top jobs

• Globe Staff Photo/Tom HerdeLee Maxey, the chief learning officer at Ohio's Pathlore Software Corp., teleworks from his Duxbury home.
• The arrangement allows him to spend more time with his son Zachary, 15 months (left), and daughters Elizabeth, 3, and Zoe, 4 1/2 (standing).
• The firm said he could telework from the comfort of his Duxbury home.
• Steve Thomas, the chief executive and president of Pathlore, said the learning management software firm realized that it would have better luck attracting the talent it needed if it extended its recruiting net to include the entire country, and offered new hires a chance to work from home.
• Pathlore joins a growing number of US firms now luring executives and top professionals by offering them telework, a work style typically offered to lower-wage employees who don't have to be on-site to be effective.
• One-third of Pathlore's 160-member staff are remote workers, including six key executives and about a dozen managers.
• Thomas Miller, a senior consultant at The Dieringer Research Group Inc., a national market research firm, says many of the telecommuters at mid to large firms are key professionals.
• Virginia Garcia, 33, of Miami, a senior analyst who works for TowerGroup in Needham, works from home two or three weeks a month.
• The arrangement with the Massachusetts research advisory firm allows Garcia to drop in on her 10- and 8-year-old children at school and interact with her 3 year-old.
• "When TowerGroup recruited me, the flexibility was very appealing," she said.
• The ability to communicate remotely - and in real time - would be impossible without broadband, e-mail, and other new technology, say analysts.
• Not surprising, the number of high-speed lines in the United States rose to about 30 million since 1999, up from just under 5 million, according to Business 2.0 magazine.