Bradenton, Manatee County telecommuting on the rise

Telecommuting in Manatee County is on the rise, thanks to new work devices and software, and growth in technology and information industries.

A new statistical survey of U.S. Census employment numbers by telecommuting website FlexJobs ranks Florida as 12th in the nation for the percentage of its workforce that works from home via remote technology. The latest workforce statistics show that telecommuting has grown particularly quickly in Palmetto and Bradenton, which saw that workforce sector grow by as much as 50 percent between 2009 and 2014.

In Bradenton, 4.6 percent of the working population reported telecommuting in 2014. Remote workers in Palmetto were 4.5 percent of the workforce. The state average was 5.4 percent.

Sara Sutton Fell, CEO of FlexJobs, said baby boomers are probably a big part of the growth in telecommuting. Being able to work from home can be an inducement for them to stay in the workforce when they might otherwise retire.

“Telecommuting allows people who need to keep working past the traditional retirement age a chance to earn income without the hassles of a traditional job,” she said.

Improvements in technology, including laptops and smartphones, are another factor. High-speed internet is more widely available, Sutton Fell said, while conferencing software including Skype and collaboration tools such as Yammer make it possible to keep a widely spread workforce producing as if its members are all in the same building.

Other Manatee and Sarasota cities harbor even higher percentages of telecommuters, even though that percentage may not have seen the high growth rate in Palmetto and Bradenton. Census numbers show 8.4 percent of Anna Maria workers doing their jobs from home, up 1.2 percent over the five-year study period. Sarasota saw its workforce telecommuting participation drop from 6.5 percent to 5.6 percent.

Some big employers hiring telecommuters in Florida, according to FlexJobs, include insurer Aetna and hospitality company Sodexo. But small, local companies are also a factor.

Seven years ago, Palmetto residents Kevin McNulty and Pamela Harper started Netweave Social Networking. The company does social network posting and management for about 70 clients.

Because of the strictly online nature of the company’s work, all 10 of its employees telecommute. In-state employees meet in person as a staff a couple times a month, but the company’s work allows it to have employees as far away as Ohio.

McNulty said telecommuting has been Netweave’s business model since the beginning.

“We’ve never actually had a physical office,” he said. “It’s a great way to pass savings along to our customers.”

In Lakewood Ranch, public relations expert Candice McElyea used telecommuting to start her own company in 2012. Although her Three Six Oh PR now has a brick-and-mortar office in downtown Sarasota, she is rarely there. She prefers to work from home so she can service clients there.

All five of her employees work from home at least one day a week.

“As long as my team is getting the work done on deadline, it doesn’t matter where they work from,” she said.

McElyea is seeing telecommuting as being in demand among millennial workers. As these younger people enter the workforce, she said the telecommuting sector will grow.

Telecommuting may not be for everyone. McNulty said he had one employee quit when work demands at night and during the weekends made his work week too long.

“It’s not a 9-to-5 job,” he said. “You have to know when to turn it off.”

The worker numbers cited by FlexJobs are labeled by the Census Bureau as “work from home” in statistical data assembled to show how workforces commute to work. FlexJobs said it considers that designation to be synonymous with telecommuting.

Sutton Fell said top telecommuting job categories advertised on FlexJobs’ site include medical and health, and information technology and software jobs.

This story was originally published May 18, 2016 at 6:10 PM with the headline "Bradenton, Manatee County telecommuting on the rise."