New research shows that if employees see real workplace flexibility including telecommuting options they lead healthier lives.

The Wake Forest University School of Medicine study, titled “The Effects of Workplace Flexibility on Health Behaviors: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analysis,” was published in The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

While workplace flexibility is widely believed to be an essential element of effective worksite health promotion programs, there had been little research to support of this belief before the results of this study were published.

Data for the study came from people who perform a wide variety of tasks within a large multinational pharmaceutical company consistently recognized by Working Mother magazine as among the most family-friendly employers in the United States. The company offers compressed workweeks, flextime, job sharing, and remote or telework.

And managers worry about what telecommuters are doing at home?

Work/life balance and big corporations have seldom gone hand in hand. But an increasing number of companies are realizing that to compete in the global environment, they must have, you know, like, talent available. At the same time, some have recognized that the old-school mentality of expecting employees to work 16-hour days is no longer the smartest way to proceed. Ya think?

Educated, professional women, for example, are leaving the workforce. A study, “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success,” conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, found that 37% of highly qualified women and 43% of women with children had left the workforce.

Keeping them is particularly crucial if companies want to attract younger female recruits out of business school. Why is this a big deal? The number of women with graduate and professional degrees is expected to grow by 16% during the next decade, compared with 1.3% for men, according to the study.

Hey, guys? What’s with you?

The real point is that 93% of those women that left the workforce said they want to return to their careers, but only 74% managed to do it. What’s more, only 5% of highly qualified women looking to return to work want to rejoin the company they left. That number drops to zero in certain sectors, apparently because many women felt under-appreciated by their employers when they left their jobs. Surprisingly, the study disproved the widely accepted notion that women left the workforce to be with their kids and there was nothing employers could do to keep them.

So on one hand, managers were saying that they had to respect women’s decisions to leave while at the same time they were saying they couldn’t find women for senior roles. But 93% want to return to work. Hello?

This is a whole new workforce!

The solution: create opportunities with telecommuting arrangements, put more emphasis on the quality of work rather than the hours in the office, reward output versus hours.

Duh.