Deborah Cohn Trademark - Telework A Fabulous Retention Tool Deborah Cohn, a trademark expert, became the Commissioner for Trademarks at the United States Patent and Trademark Office on the last day of 2010. "I love it," she says. "It's a great job." She says that one of the things that make her job so great is the people she works with, whom she describes as talented and motivated. And that is throughout the USPTO, she says, not just on the Trademark side. "People like their jobs and they do them well. We do stress [s] collaboration with customers ... our quality guidance includes that aspect of collaboration in certain situations." Deborah Cohn Trademark was an early advocate of allowing employees to work remotely. The tools and technology for that were already in place, and she determined that all it really took was the initiative to get a viable telework program in place. A two-year pilot program was started and was a huge success. "Production and quality are as good as they would be in the office, if not better," she recalls. "I mean, at this point with 90% it's hard to make a comparison. When we started the program back in 1997 and in the years following, we closely measured and monitored the productivity of people who worked at home and compared it to what it was before they worked at home. We compared it to a control group in the office. We did a very involved study. And we found that productivity went up. There was no question about it. It was a clear win. The quality was the same, which makes sense to us. And a customer service survey showed that our users were happy with the interactions they had with teleworkers." Today, Deborah Cohn, a trademark attorney, says that USPTO teleworkers can live anywhere in the continental United States, and the ability to work remotely via the Internet has become a way for the office to hang on to its best people. "We'll be trying to get to a point where, if they live in North Carolina or Florida, they don't have to come in except on rare occasions," she said. "Telework is a fabulous retention tool. We want to keep them; they are good employees." Deborah Cohn is a graduate of American University, where she earned a degree in Psychology. After some post-graduate work at Hunter College she attended the George Mason University School of Law and received her law degree in 1982. To get more information about Deborah Cohn Trademark visit at
http://deborah-cohn-trademark.wallinside.com/