Homesourcing: An Amazing story about JetBlue Airlines

Jetblue's David Neeleman first started homesourcing at Morris Air, his first venture in the airline business. (It was bought by Southwest.) Morris air had 250 people in their homes doing reservations. "They were 30 percent more productive-they take 30 percent more bookings, by just being happier. They were more loyal and there was less attrition. So when I started JetBlue, We decided we are going to have 100 percent reservation at home", he said.

Neeleman has a personal reason for wanting to do this. He is a Mormon and believes that society will be better off if more mothers are able to stay at home with their young children but are given a chance to be wage earners at the same time. So he based his home reservations system in Salt Lake City, where the vast majority of the women are Mormons and many are stay-at-home mothers. Home reservationists work twenty-five hours a week and have to come into the JetBlue regional office in Salt Lake City for four hours a month to learn new skills and be brought up to date on what is going on inside the company.

"We will never outsource to India' said Neeleman. "The quality we can get here is far superior. Employers are more willing to outsource to India than to their own homes, and I can't understand that. Somehow they think that people need to be sitting in front of them or some boss they have designated. The productivity we get here more than makes up for the India [wage] factor."

A Los Angeles Times story about JetBlue (May 9, 2004) noted that "in 1997, 11.6 million employees of U.S. companies worked from home at least part of the time. Today, that number has soared to 23.5 million-16% of the American labor force. (Meanwhile, the ranks of the self-employed, who often work from home, have swelled during the same period-to 23.4 million from 18 million.) In some eyes, homesourcing and outsourcing aren't so much competing strategies as they are different manifestations of the same thing: a relentless push by corporate America to lower costs and increase efficiency, wherever that may lead."