For Jackie Tinsley, the clock was ticking. Her first baby was due any day, but the corporate auditor couldn’t bring herself to ask her employer for the flexible schedule she hoped to have in place after maternity leave. A rising star at Chicago-based Grant Thornton, Jackie, 28, kept hesitating to hit Send on the email she was writing to her boss. With the recession in full swing and mass layoffs at a record high, she worried that by asking for any accommodation, she might jeopardize an impending promotion—and possibly her career at one of the top-five U.S. accounting firms.

In this difficult economic climate, Jackie isn’t the only one fretting. Unemployment is up, company budgets are down, and working parents are worried that they’ll stand out—and not in a good way—by using flextime and other family-friendly benefits. Stories of working moms who have cut short maternity leaves, given up telecommuting or toiled longer hours in the office in the name of saving their jobs and careers are causing much hand-wringing about the state of workplace flexibility. Many are wondering whether the economic crisis will roll back decades of progress.

If taking that flex schedule or working that four-day week is going to make you feel more vulnerable, you’re really not going to take advantage of it,” says Karen Sumberg, vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy, a nonprofit think tank in New York City. And since high unemployment could linger long past the recession, “my guess is employers will not feel a lot of pressure to accommodate people,” adds senior economist Heather Boushey, PhD, of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington, DC.

And yet employers have not abandoned workplace flexibility as an important employee benefit. This year’s Working Mother 100 Best winners, for instance, remain committed to offering—and expanding—such benefits even as the economy shrinks: A majority (72 percent) have systems like tracking, training and dedicated staffing in place to make sure their work/life policies are implemented fairly, and executives at 86 percent of the companies say they continuously look for ways not only to improve existing flexible work options but also to add more. All told, 94 percent of our winning companies say that beyond helping to meet the needs of their workforce, offering flexibility is essential to their business strategy. “I do it because it drives my business,” says Stacey Gibson, senior director of work/life and employee relations at New York City–based Bristol-Myers Squibb, a 2009 winning company. “There is not necessarily a huge cost associated with flexibility if the employee is going to be more productive and it’s going to help the business grow.”

Our 100 Best aren’t the only flex advocates. Throughout the country, the percentage of companies offering flextime, telecommuting and compressed workweeks remained unchanged in 2009 as compared with last year, according to a June survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. Other surveys reveal a similar commitment: 62 percent of employees said they enjoyed the same level of work flexibility this year as last— and 20 percent had even more, according to a national survey by Madison, NJ–based flexibility consulting firm Work+Life Fit.

The reason, says Work+Life CEO Cali Williams Yost, is simple: Flex is cheap and powerful. Flexibility helps execs save money on overhead, retain talent and create mobile workforces capable of working wherever and whenever.

Ann Andreosatos, U.S. work/life initiatives leader at Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, agrees, noting that flex can be a necessity when work happens around the globe 24 hours a day. That’s one of the key reasons why, even as the recession took hold last year, 2009 100 Best Company Procter & Gamble opted to relaunch and expand its already impressive work/life menu (including a flexibility information system, mentoring and career coaching)—and added an outreach campaign to get the word out. It worked: The use of compressed workweeks at the consumer products giant has increased more than fourfold since the relaunch in 2008. “The whole idea of flexibility is based on the premise that you have people working more effectively, when and where and how they need to,” explains Andreosatos. “You can no longer talk about work in the same old parameters as we used to in the twentieth century”—even in a down economy.

The lesson for millions of working moms nationwide? Flexibility and other family-friendly programs are still out there, but you have to continue to ask for them.

Remember, too, that flex benefits your company in productivity and cost savings, and work/life programs can also help boost morale and help companies attract top employees when there’s less cash for bonuses and raises.

These programs can also inspire employee loyalty. Take Jennifer Fron Mauer. After leaving two jobs because she couldn’t strike a balance between family and work, Jennifer says she is now staying put as director of research and development communications at Bristol-Myers Squibb in large part because of the biopharmaceutical company’s impressive flexibility benefits, which recently helped her deal with a classic parenting challenge: a schoolyard bully.

When a kindergarten kid teased and chased her 5-year-old daughter on the playground last year, Jennifer telecommuted from home one day a week and periodically spent lunch hours as a recess monitor at her daughter’s school. The bullying soon stopped. “It’s very important to be able to be an involved parent,” says the mother of two. “It’s also very important to be able to have a stimulating, thriving career. When you find a place where you can have both, you stay.”

Just as important as offering great work/life benefits is creating a workplace culture that supports them. For seven years, Jackie Tinsley’s boss, Erica O’Malley, head of Grant Thornton’s National Benefit Plan Practice, has set an example by working shortened and flexible hours even as she climbed the corporate ladder to partner. “I felt that if she can do it, I can do it, too,” says Jackie. Today, 12 of the 15 moms on Erica’s 19-member team have formal flexible work arrangements. For Erica, herself a mother of five—Jimmy, 16; Mary, 15; Kelly, 13; Danny, 10; and Tommy, 7—flexible work options are a powerful tool to help keep top performers like Jackie happy while also saving the company money. The math is easy: Every lost employee costs Grant Thornton an estimated $70,000, and Erica’s very low annual turnover rate of 3.5 percent helps protect the accounting firm’s bottom line. “The payoff is retaining top talent,” she says. “The costs we avoid are recruiting costs, training costs and the cost of lost productivity, because a new hire’s productivity is typically low.”

Anne Lang, Grant Thornton’s chief human resources officer, agrees, noting that at the end of the day, it’s all about business. “What Erica looks at is results: ‘Are my people giving the results that we need to our clients?’” says Lang. And to that end, she adds, “I think flex does need to fit with the business model. But it can fit very nicely.”

As the nation’s economic engine restarts, experts say a perfect storm of three powerful generational forces—the rise of Generation Y, the never-ending careers of baby boomers and a new era of working dads—may help increase flexibility’s role in everyday corporate life.

To start, Gen Y, otherwise known as the laptop generation (and ranging in age from late teens to late twenties), has already forced a change in many employers’ minds with its members’ comfort working anywhere from coffee shops to parks to commuter trains. “I think the next big shift you will see is in the whole notion we’ve had of work being a place that you go,” predicts Kathie Lingle, executive director of the Alliance for Work-Life Progress at WorldatWork in Scottsdale, AZ. Instead, she says, work will be what you do, whenever and wherever it makes sense to do it.