Life's Work, a column about workplace trends and office culture, appears in Thursday Styles every other week.

"The vast majority of organizations don't have policies in place," said Jennifer Schramm, a workplace trends and forecasting manager at the Society for Human Resource Management in Washington.

Note to Readers: Life's Work, a column about workplace trends and office culture, which has run most recently in Sunday Business, today moves to Thursday Styles.

By 2025 or 2030, he sees current workplace trends in outsourcing, telecommuting and job hopping reaching their logical ends.

Still, Erin Brownfield, a spokeswoman for the Families and Work Institute in Manhattan, said the increase in earlier traffic was consistent with several other workplace trends.

Several workplace trends, not new but still strong, are propelling this expansion.

For them, knowing that more people will lose their jobs will weigh heavily, said John A. Challenger, president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago employment company that follows workplace trends.

According to the FCEDA website, the authority conducts research and stages conferences under the moniker Work/Life to "better understand broad workplace trends that impact businesses in Fairfax County and across the country."

Forty-three percent of human resource executives recently polled by Challenger, Gray & Christmas said that telecommuting would be the most important workplace trend of the 21st century - ranking it higher than any other subject.

Ten years ago, the Bureau of National Affairs, a private company that monitors workplace trends, estimated the cost of domestic violence in lost output at $3 billion to $5 billion a year.