AT&T employees have been e-mailing us, lamenting the fact that the company has been reigning in their telecommuting policies. One employee says the crackdown began under the watch of former CEO Ed Whitacre, when "old-fashioned" SBC acquired more progressive AT&T. According to our tipster, the restrictions have tightened further under the management of new CEO Randall Stephenson:According to an article published in the current Journal of Applied Psychology, allowing workers to telecommute is a win-win deal for both employer and employee. Researchers found that telecommuting improves employee morale and job satisfaction while lowering employee stress and turnover. The study also found higher performance ratings by supervisors. This is all before we touch on high gas prices.

Yet back in November, the Telework Coalition's Chuck Wilsker stated that AT&T policies could be bringing some 10,000 to 12,000 full-time teleworkers back into the office. So we asked AT&T what was going on.

"To clear up the first misperception that seems to be driving much of the speculation about the program, the reports that up to 12,000 telecommuters have been returned to physical offices are, frankly, absurd," says AT&T's Brad Mays. "In fact, at its peak, the total number of employees who telecommuted - or worked from home - was probably about half that number."

The company tells us that about 150,000 AT&T employees currently telework -- meaning they can connect to the office network while on the road. The total number of employees allowed to telecommute was 6,000 and is dwindling. They also admit that telecommuting rights have been changing as the company merges the assets of SBC, AT&T, BellSouth and Cingular.

They feel they can't trust us to get the job done if they cannot overlook the prairie dogs in the cube farms. -AT&T employee

"As you can imagine, there are any number of telework/telecommute policy nuances that vary between the companies," says Mays, who insists that bringing them together is not an easy task. "As a result of that realignment, some employees who previously teleworked have relocated into physical AT&T offices, many of them in areas where such physical locations weren't available prior to the merger or where job duties and functions have evolved after the merger."

Mays says they're trying to merge all of these policies into a uniform policy that pleases everybody. However, given the volume of employee complaints that are surfacing around the web, it's pretty clear the new policies aren't thrilling those actually doing the telecommuting. Says one AT&T employee to Network World:Says another:It's possible that the flurry of recent mergers has left AT&T not entirely sure what every employee does -- so they're limiting telecommuting until redundancies are eliminated. It's also very possible that old school SBC executives just aren't thrilled with progressive policies. For the record, AT&T insists to us they're "committed to teleworking and telecommuting" and says more employees than ever are doing the former.

Perhaps additional employees can share their thoughts in in the comment section below.