Teleworking could work for Los Angeles in so many ways. But, most importantly, it works for me.

It’s high time for the Aloha Print Takeover – meaning that more people work from home clad in a forgiving cotton muu-muu.

Teleworking – once known as telecommuting – is really the only viable concept carried over from L.A.’s great alternative transportation boom of the 1980s. Other suggestions from that era include taking the bus – ewww – or pedaling your trusty bicycle to work. The latter may only work if your name’s Skippy and your “work” is a paper route.

Elham Shirazi, the principal of Westwood-based consultancy E-Planning, has been promoting the notion for 28 years in Los Angeles. So far, the benefits – including a greener company footprint; reduced parking and floor space; and the ability to recruit and retain a more skilled, diverse and multigenerational work force – have yet to fully resonate with L.A.’s major employers.

“We need champions, especially at the top management levels, where resistance tends to be strongest,” said Shirazi.

Angeleno work culture remains shockingly behind the curve. Most employers in our town insist that your butt crease the seat of an office chair five days a week. Yet, according to TeleworkSoCal.com, teleworking can result in a 10 percent to 20 percent increase in employee productivity.

Those of us who work from home without distraction and interruption are often willing to work longer hours. As a matter of fact, the intensity offered by teleworking can actually drive some people back into an office setting. Mia Jenner, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Sultra, a Westlake Village-based company that designs and manufactures high-end hair-styling tools, found that working from home every day meant putting in maniacal 90-hour weeks. She made the decision to commute to Sultra’s offices to set a more manageable schedule for herself – like, 60 hours a week.

Management types reading this can only wish for such fiendish, is-nothing-sacred dedication. But rather than offer a work environment that inspires individual accountability (i.e., measurable results) as the benchmark of professional performance, the majority of employers still structure the workplace around the demeaning parent-child power model. Show up on time, you get a cookie. Call in sick, we’re taking away your binky. Is it any wonder that employees in traditional settings steal office supplies, subtly sabotage the system and eventually go postal?

True, a few enlightened firms have made the leap, like L.A.-based Click Communications, a PR firm that specializes in online publicity for studio clients. Click currently leases no office space. Instead, the team gathers for brainstorming sessions at the home of the co-founders, and collaborates at coffee shops and restaurants on an ad hoc basis.

“Working this way does require that a company and everyone on the team be onboard with technology,” comments Jacqueline Cavanagh, Click’s account director. “We all stay connected seamlessly via IM, Basecamp, Yammer, Dropbox and other sharing tools, as well as phone and e-mail. And there has never been a problem.”

At this point, full-time office workers reading this may be the ones wishing. By the way, I haven’t always been the late-rising queen of the bargain matinees, tippy-tapping away into the midnight hour. For two decades, I suited and commuted. In fact, the twice-daily passage from Tarzana to Torrance indelibly cemented my love for Los Angeles. That was when the relationship shifted from just another torrid romance noir into a road-tested marriage. May I add that my car didn’t have a working radio? The silence – broken only by occasional gunfire – allowed me to prove my loyalty, four hours each day on the 405.

But the drive itself is only part of the hellation. Let’s talk about the noise. It’s worse than ever, because of the economy. Business monitors, including Dow Jones FINS Sales & Marketing (April 17: “The Pitfalls of Sitting Too Close”) and the New York Times (May 19: “From Cubicle, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz”), report that nationwide, companies are collapsing cubes, taking down walls and removing doors as a cost-saving strategy, placing employees into open bullpens.

Employees hate it. I should know. I’ve been there. Right now, all over Los Angeles, companies are scrambling to retrofit their workplaces for better “speech privacy.” For instance, a whooshy, sound-masking system called pink noise is being touted for its ability to slightly scramble the audible range of human speech, so we stop listening in and, just maybe, get some work done.

But should maintaining adequate workplace focus be such a challenge? Maybe I’ve been reading too much Pico Iyer lately, but from here it seems that the future has to be mobile and flexible, and not tethered to a desk, anywhere.

Victoria Thomas is a freelance writer. She lives in Burbank.