SEATTLE — Five years ago, as tunnel-boring Bertha was about to arrive in Seattle, local transportation officials huddled together to talk about what they could do to ease the traffic disruptions that would inevitably come during the tunnel’s construction.

One of the ideas they came up with: Make it easier for workers to work without going to work. Each person working from home is one less person driving through downtown or taking up space on a crowded bus.

For the last five years, King County Metro has run what it calls WorkSmart, a free consulting service to help businesses set up telecommuting programs for their employees.

“Even though we’re primarily a transit agency, telework is just another way we can support people in getting the work that they need to get done,” said Sunny Knott, Metro’s program manager for WorkSmart. “It supports our interest in mitigating congestion and encouraging people to get to work in ways other than driving alone.”

There is room for improvement. Telecommuting accounted for just over 3 percent of morning commutes to downtown Seattle in 2016, according to a survey of businesses from nonprofit Commute Seattle. Nearly 10 times as many people drove to work alone.

Telework is obviously useless for some. Woe to the construction worker who tries to telework. And a teleworking cook won’t have a job for long.

But as Seattle increasingly becomes a technology hub, with jobs that are less site-specific, telework provides benefits to businesses, workers and the city at large.

“It’s nice to have the flexibility of working in between appointments,” said Chyann Jackson, who works in human resources for Delta Dental of Washington. “And not to have to focus on how I’m going to get home then grab my car to go to the doctor.”

Now, as downtown Seattle prepares to enter its “period of maximum constraint,” with construction projects about to bring traffic to a near standstill, telecommuting is gaining traction among policymakers as a way to help keep commerce keep moving.

Already, King County Metro’s program has helped about 100 businesses set up telecommuting programs over the past five years.

In Olympia, a new proposal in the Legislature would offer businesses tax credits for boosting their telecommuting numbers.

In Seattle, Mayor Jenny Durkan spoke during her campaign and after taking office about working with businesses to increase telecommuting — and of doing similar things with the city’s own workforce.

And nationwide, a little-noticed Obama-era law encouraging telecommuting in the federal workforce has led to increases in government employees who don’t drive to the office every day.

During her campaign last fall, Durkan said she would talk with employers, Amazon in particular, about ways to keep people from commuting downtown during the next few years as a variety of construction projects are going to make it all but impassable.

“You take 20 percent of your workforce and they work from home on Mondays and 20 percent stay home on Tuesdays,” Durkan said last fall. “And I want to do that with the city. I want to say, how do we start having more four-10s or more flex time or work-from-homes; more Skype meetings to literally have people not get in the cars at all and also relieve some pressure on transit?”

A bill in Olympia would offer employers a tax credit to offset money spent setting up a telework program, and a $250 credit per employee who teleworks at least 12 days per month.

The program would be quite limited initially — no employer could get more than $10,000 in tax credits, and the total number of credits given out couldn’t be more than $250,000.

Sen. Kevin Van De Wege, D-Sequim, touts working from home as a win for everyone — employers save money on office space, employees can skip the commute and work more flexibly, and it gets cars off the road, meaning more room for those who still commute.

“It’s probably one of the cheaper things the state could do to decrease traffic congestion,” Van De Wege said.

His bill, SB 6016, passed out of committee last month but has stalled since.

Delta Dental of Washington recently moved its Seattle offices from the relative solitude of Northgate to booming South Lake Union, as the company decided it preferred to lease a new space rather than own and manage its building.

At the same time, the company started working with Metro’s WorkSmart, to set up a program to give its employees the option to work from home.

Before the move, teleworking had been a bit of a haphazard affair at Delta Dental, done only sporadically.

But, since the company set up its telework program, it’s seeing, on average, each of the 200 Seattle employees work from home about once a week. The company is working to set up a similar program in its Spokane office.

“Especially in the Seattle area, the traffic is horrible, so it’s just giving people more options,” said Becky Masters, Delta Dental’s director of compensation and benefits. “It’s a good thing to offer from a recruiting and retention standpoint; employees really value having more flexibility.”

Delta Dental gave every employee a laptop and did training on relevant software like Office and Skype in preparation for increasing teleworking.

There were also cultural changes to get used to. Rolling out the telework program took nearly a year.

“Teams had to go back and talk about what their norms are,” said Jackson, the Delta Dental employee. “… When I work from home, I’m always updating my calendar, making sure to update my Skype, send a note out. We like to overcommunicate.”

Jackson works from home one day a week, usually in her apartment, sometimes in the building’s common room, and sometimes at a coffee shop.

“Being surrounded by people is nice, even though they’re all working on different things for different companies,” she said.