Maybe not. Even big companies without a particular reputation for cutting-edge practices are slowly starting to realize that the real estate savings and employee morale benefits of remote work make it an attractive option. Take UK telecoms giant O2 for example, which closed its headquarters in Slough this week, sending all 3,000 staff home to work for an initiative designed to test the company’s ability to manage remote workers.

“We believe a cultural step-change is underway affecting staff and businesses, as work increasingly becomes something we do, rather than a place that we go,” O2 business manager Ben Dowd told UK tech news site, V3. “Today’s office-wide flexible working initiative is an opportunity for us to tangibly demonstrate the opportunity and potential available to British businesses today.”

Of course, O2 has a horse in this race as it sells a platform to support remote workers, so the firm is hardly the least likely to push the practice. Dowd acknowledges that this week’s experiment had obvious marketing benefits for the company. “By sharing experiences from across our business, from business divisions to operations, we hope to encourage more organizations to help their workforce become mobile,” he said.

But on the other hand Slough (home to Wernham Hogg Paper Company in the British version of The Office) is hardly Silicon Valley or SoHo either, so the large-scale experiment still offers some evidence that telecommuting is seeping out of trendy enclaves and into the business mainstream.

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The Atlantic Cities explained this second point of view recently, noting data that points to a renewed and rising interest in downtown cores and trends towards more urban-style suburbs where residents live closer together and rely less on cars for transportation. Citing a post by Thomas Fisher, dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, that appeared on the Huffington Post, the Atlantic piece argues that as telecommuting becomes more common these trends towards denser communities will accelerate.

With the rise of the contingent workforce, people will also live and work in ways we haven’t seen for a very long time. We have developed our cities based on the old economy, with residential, commercial, and industrial areas kept separate and ‘pure’ through single-use zoning. That made sense in an economy that divided our work lives from our private lives, and that spawned large-scale noxious industries that no one wanted nearby. The next economy, though, may look more like the way in which people lived and worked prior to the industrial revolution, in which home, office, and shop co-exist in some combination of physical and digital space. This may require rethinking our zoning laws to allow for a much finer-grain mix of uses and re-purposing buildings designed for single functions that will have no tenants or buyers if they remain that way.

The Atlantic points out, knowledge work requires creative, thoughtful professionals who in turn need stimulating, densely populated spaces where they can run into and bump ideas off others of their kind. Remote work won’t eliminate this need. It’ll just shift where these interactions happen from the water cooler at the office to the street outside your house.

This idea that the changing nature of work will alter how we envision and build our communities has come up on WebWorkerDaily before. Coworking advocates, for example, have noted that, as people stay closer to their houses during the workday, they demand more from their community (and also offer it more) spurring development around their homes and coworking spaces.

Jerome Chang, an architect and owner of BLANKSPACES coworking in Los Angeles, noted that Zappos, ahead of the curve as usual, is already trying to put these insights into practice, building a new corporate campus that the company hopes will encourage employees to mix their work and personal lives in the same downtown area.

Do you think the rise of remote work will spur us to rethink our communities?

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While on average nearly one-in-five (17 percent) wired workers claims to telecommute on a frequent basis, the percentage of workers taking advantage of their broadband connection to get out of the office was far higher in emerging markets.

“Those working in the Middle East and Africa (27 percent), Latin America (25 percent) and Asia-Pacific (24 percent) are considerably more likely than those in North America (9 percent) and Europe (9 percent) to telecommute ‘on a frequent basis,’” the survey found. The rates for individual countries hold more surprises with these nations reporting the most and fewest telecommuters:

• India: 56 percent
• Indonesia: 34 percent
• Mexico: 30 percent
• Argentina: 29 percent
• South Africa: 28 percent
• Turkey: 27 percent
• Canada: 8 percent
• France: 7 percent
• Italy: 7 percent
• Sweden: 6 percent
• Germany: 5 percent
• Hungary: 3 percent

So who exactly qualifies as a frequent telecommuter for the purposes of the Ipsos survey? A telecommuter, the release explains is “an employee uses a stationary or portable computer to do their office work from a location outside of their office,” so a fairly standard definition that encompasses how the word is commonly used here in the States.

The survey also found differences between populations in how much appetite for telecommuting exists among those who have not yet been offered the option. In Japan, a measly 12 percent would telecommute if given the opportunity. Sixteen percent in Sweden and 19 percent in Great Britain felt the same, while a whopping 54 percent of Argentines would happily jump on the telecommuting bandwagon if allowed.

One thing healthy majorities in nearly every country agreed on though was that telecommuting is a productivity booster. Sixty-five percent globally told pollsters “telecommuters are more productive because the flexibility allows them to work when they have the most focus and/or because having maximum control over the work environment and schedule leads to job satisfaction and happiness.” Surprisingly, in telecommuting-bereft Hungary, 74 percent agreed with this proposition, as did a similar proportion of those polled in Argentina, Poland, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

What do you think accounts for the national differences revealed by the survey?

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Working from home has obvious benefits, but it has equally glaring and hard to fix drawbacks: the loneliness, the endless supply of interesting links and the tendency for work to seep into more and more of your personal life. So what’s to be done to make working from home, well work? Fast Company’s Kevin Purdy, a veteran remote worker himself, recently polled fellow web workers about their best tips.

The exercise turned up commonplace but utterly correct advice such as changing out of your pajamas and explicitly planning time for face-to-face human interaction, and is well worth a read in full to those new to the world of remote work or just looking for a well written post to buck them up and improve their work habits. But one bit of advice may be more of a jolt, even to those experienced at resisting the pull of one more cute cat link:

Realize when the problem is motivation, not space. Distractions, temptations, and kids can all legitimately get in the way of doing work at home. But sometimes you have to step back and look at other reasons why you’re avoiding the work that needs doing. Is it really because you don’t want to do it?

This is perhaps the hardest part of working from home. At an office, you are very likely to be found out and penalized if you spend all day checking Facebook or replaying Portal 2, so you at least make a stab at moving forward on even the most painful tasks. At home, it’s up to you to stay motivated, and the things toward the very bottom of the Awesome Challenging Fun list might never get done.

With the web awash in posts suggesting every imaginable variation on the to-do list and providing a seemingly endless parade of gadgets and pointers to be more productive, it’s refreshing to see someone acknowledge that the problem may actually be the content of your work rather than your system for accomplishing it. In that case, no number of colored flags or minute-by-minute scheduling will fully solve your issue. In fact, it’ll probably distract from the true solution, which is finding a way to begin to do more of what you enjoy and less of those truly soul-sapping tasks. Even if that means a career shift of some kind.

Do you ever obsess about tweaks to your productivity routine as a way to avoid acknowledging that the true, underlying problem of simply not liking your work?

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A recent Gallup study found that 71 percent of US workers are “not engaged” or are “actively disengaged” in their work. This suggests that only a third of American workers are deeply engaged in their jobs, which is at least a serious challenge for businesses, and perhaps a serious threat. And the proportion of disengaged seems to be rising.

New scientific evidence is emerging about the benefits of telework (or telecommuting), supporting anecdotal knowledge about workers’ desire to work outside of the office. (We’ll be digging more into these kinds of topics at Net:Work on Dec. 8.) Stanford University partnered with a Chinese travel agency to find out if teleworkers were more productive, as reported by Ray Fisman at Slate:

Within a few weeks, the performance of the telecommuting group started to pull away from their cubicle-bound counterparts. Over the duration of the experiment, home workers answered 15 percent more calls, partly because each hour was 4 percent more productive, and partly because home office employees spent 11 percent more time answering phone calls. (Home workers took fewer breaks and sick days, rarely arrived late to their desks, and had fewer distractions.) While answering more calls, the distractions of home life had no impact on the quality of service: The home-work group converted phone calls into sales at exactly the same rate as those in the office. And employees themselves liked the arrangement better, making it look like a win-win for the company. The home-work group reported less “work exhaustion,” a more positive attitude towards their jobs, and were nearly 50 percent less likely to say they were planning to quit at the end of the eight months. (In fact the quit rate among home-office workers during the experiment was about one-half of what it was for those making the commute.)

And the same sort of business thinking that is interested in productivity of telework also starts to extrapolate about the impacts. If 40 percent of workers — in general — are working out of the office, that means 40 percent of office space — and associated expenses, like furniture, energy, and cleaning — might be productively invested elsewhere. In a 2007 Businessweek report, it was estimated that as much as 60 percent of offices space is “a dead zone of darkened doorways and wasting cubes,” and some have estimated that $600B is wasted in direct costs, leaving aside the externalities like impact to the environment, and the costs that employees incur commuting.

Sara Horowitz recently made the case that we really don’t know the makeup of the US workforce any longer, since the US government stopped counting independent workers in any systematic way. However, her research at the Freelancers Union — she’s the founder — indicate that as much as one third of our workforce participates in the rapidly growing freelance economy.

Connecting The Dots

These seemingly independent trends are tied together by the changing mindset of the people doing the work. Young people in particular are increasingly disinclined to commute to a distant office for the sake of ‘face time’, but many people of all ages have personal reasons for wanting to work in a ‘results-only work environment’, where getting the job done becomes the core principle surrounding work.

Giving workers more control of their lives — giving them back many hours of time per week not spent in commuting and pointless meetings, letting them decide when to do what, and putting money in their pockets by cutting commuting costs — has a very serious impact on morale. As the Chinese travel agency example shows, many of the workers reported less ‘work exhaustion’ and were less likely to quit. That seems like a direct antidote to the unengagement risks that Gallup reports US companies are running.

And people moving into telework and results-only work models will need new tools — like the stream-based work media tools I discussed in a recent post here on GigaOM. But with ubiquitous connectivity, mobile devices, and the proliferation of work media, the technological infrastructure to support telework is very low-cost, and requires basically zero training.

What’s Missing? The Second Place.

But there is a factor that is a potential hiccup. Many folks that adopt a telework or freelance work model and opt to work from home quickly come to miss the social aspect of their old work place.

In the US and Western countries, there has been a growing adoption of coworking spaces, where freelancers, employees of small businesses, or teleworkers can get the best of both worlds: they can work from a work space close to their home — thereby avoiding a long distance commute — but at the same time they can have the support and stimulation that comes from social interaction with well-known people other than your family.

Ray Oldenburg, the urban sociologist, is best known for his notion of the Third Place, like the corner bar, the cafe, or the barber shop, where we can interact with people that we don’t know well, and perhaps with whom we have little in common. He argued that such places are critically import to the health of cities and out societies. He took almost as a given that people would continue their relationship with First and Second Places, the home and the workplace, respectively. But the trends of telework and freelancing means that an increasing means the more people are spending less time in official Second Places, and more at home and Starbucks. But as wonderful as working in a café is, there is definitely a great deal missing.

So it’s no real surprise that the coworking movement is growing at a pace that seems closely linked to the number of people jumping into telework or out of the traditional workplace. Deskmag states there are now more than 1,100 coworking spaces worldwide, more than double the number in 2006. Loosecubes, a service set up to help people find coworking spaces, is tracking over 1,400 locations in over 500 cities, globally.

According to Carsten Foetrsch of deskmag, 72 percent of all coworking spaces become profitable after 2 years of operation, and for privately-run spaces, the number is even higher: 87 percent . So the economics for those interested in setting up and running coworking spaces is compelling.

A Virtuous Cycle?

Looking from a economics viewpoint, all the players have economic motivations to support coworking:

• The office worker saves significant expense and time by decreasing commute time, and those with the longest commutes should have the strongest motivation to shift to telework. Therefore, there is a steady migration to telework as businesses adopt policies to support it.
• Businesses have a strong incentive to increase employee morale and productivity, and to decrease expenses related to the increasingly large percentage of their office space that is underutilized. Even if businesses have to subsidize coworking space use by teleworkers, the net savings are significant.
• As the number of freelancers and teleworkers increase, the demand for coworking space grows, since people need the strong social connections historically offered in the workplace, not just the chance connections afforded by sharing a table in Starbucks.
• Entrepreneurs have strong incentives to create coworking spaces: partly to serve as their own base of operations, but also as a business proposition of its own. Note that the desire of businesses to shed unneeded office space in our down economy also provides lower cost space in which to set up shop.

When you look at it as a system, coworking is a complex societal dance, where the various players are each seeking to  maximize their personal economic situation, and it leads to a new social reintegration. And the result of this migration of workers from the office to the coworking space is a net benefit for the world, too: the decrease in energy use for the unused office space and the decrease in commuting translates into decreased carbon footprints for all involved.

Coworking may turn out to be the pivot in today’s post-industrial transformation of work: a shining example, perhaps, of how large-scale positive change at the societal level can emerge peacefully from the independent pursuit of personal ends.

Stowe Boyd writes and speaks about social tools and their impact on media, business and society. A GigaOM Pro analyst, Boyd also writes at stoweboyd.com and is working on a new book about the rise of a socially augmented world, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine. Stowe will be speaking about co-working at Net:Work. 

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The article by Linda Carroll explains that the very employees who may desire the flexibility to work remotely the most actually appear to suffer a higher risk of burnout when their wish is granted and they start working from home. Why? Carroll explains:

That’s because when job and family are in the same place, some workers feel there is no chance for downtime —no respite or time to relax, said Timothy Golden, an associate professor of management at the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“A teleworker may feel conflict more because you’re being constantly reminded of your home role: whether it’s what you need to do as a parent or household chores,” Golden said. “And that can make exhaustion worse.”

The study surveyed the relatively modest number of 316 employees at a computer firm that allowed telecommuting, asking them to rate their level of job-family conflict and exhaustion. When the researchers crunched the numbers, they discovered that while those with low levels of work-life conflict got a ton out of working from home, those that were already finding the balancing act hard found it even more difficult when working remotely.

Besides telecommuting parents failing to set appropriate boundaries between work and home, another possible explanation for this increase in burnout among some parents who telecommute could be the mistaken belief that working from home is a good opportunity to cut back on child care. With additional family responsibilities and, in reality, the same amount of work as in the office, these parents could quickly reach the breaking point.

What do you think: Does the freedom to telecommute ever make the work-life juggle psychologically harder?

At Net:Work, we will explore the challenges of avoiding burnout and policing work-life boundaries. The event will be held in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

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In the nearly six-minute video, Bloom outlines the three main benefits of telecommuting for both companies and employees, including reduced need for real estate, improved retention and reduced or eliminated commutes. He also addresses concerns that the study, which was conducted in China, wouldn’t apply in the US, and also discusses what sort of workers get the biggest boost from working from home. Check it out below.

Looking for more information of not only the whys of telecommuting but also the hows? on December 8th in San Francisco GigaOm’s Net:Work conference will host discussions on the rise in remote work and the benefits and challenges it brings.

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The study tracked 21,000 full-time employees in Sweden aged between 18 and 65, comparing their health and asking about their method of commuting and sleep and stress levels, as well as tracking how many days they missed work. The results indicate that taking a car, train or bus to the office is likely to negatively impact your health.

“Generally car and public transport users suffered more everyday stress, poorer sleep quality, exhaustion and, on a seven point scale, felt that they struggled with their health compared to the active commuters,” like cyclists, said Researcher Erik Hansson. The longer the commute, the worse the effects.

ABC News spoke to Dr. Redford Williams, professor of medicine at Duke University about the findings. He argued that while sitting in your car is not an inherently healthy activity, the actual problem with commuting may be as much the lack of control we have over the experience as the hours of inactivity:

We know that people who have a lot of demands and very little control over how they meet those demands are at a higher risk for negative health effects. And when you’re relying on a train to get to work, it’s totally out of your control most of the time.

This is entirely in line with existing science we’ve covered previously on WWD, which shows lack of autonomy is linked to higher stress, which, in turn, correlates with worse health. Flexible and self-directed, new ways of working that are web enabled and location independent, boost autonomy and so should also boost health.

And if you’re still on the fence about approaching your boss about ditching your commute, the grim math about how much your commute is daily journey is costing you might spur your courage and get you into her office.

At Net:Work, we’ll explore the benefits — and challenges — of an increasingly mobile workforce. The event will be held in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

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Nor is the uptake of telecommuting speeding up, according to recent research. In fact, the rate of growth is slowing down, claims a recent post on the blog Workshifting:

The latest research from the Telework Research Network indicates that while telework is growing, it’s not increasing at the pace we might have expected. According to 2009 U.S. Census data, 61 percent more employees considered home their primary place of work versus 2005. But that number translates to only 2.3 percent of the total workforce.

When compared with a recent report from WorldatWork, which indicates that the overall number of teleworkers declined between 2008 and 2010, a trend emerges. The frequency of telework has increased, meaning fewer workshifters are doing more flexible work.

What’s behind this decrease in the number of teleworkers? Workshifting suggests a number of possibilities, including:

• Not everyone wants to telecommute
• Companies struggling to quantify the costs and benefits
• Inadequate tools and resources available to support the lifestyle
• Businesses still unsure how to manage people they can’t see

All of these are certainly hurdles to increased telecommuting, but a separate recent study suggests the slowdown in the increase in remote work may have a simpler explanation: the terrible economy.

That seems to be true in the UK at least, where communications company O2 has recently published a report looking at the future of work and flexible working. The poll of 2,000 workers found that two out of five feel pressured to be in the office because of the gloomy economy. O2 has dubbed the fear of prejudice against remote work “presenteeism” and says the condition is on the rise among Brits.

“With so many organizations facing economic uncertainty, our research suggests large numbers of businesses are missing out on the productivity gains, improved employee and customer engagement and efficient processes that such flexible working practices can deliver,” said David Plumb, O2′s general manager for enterprise.

At Net:Work in December, we’ll discuss the future of the mobile workforce and how managers can better manage remote workers. Get your tickets today.

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As of now, yes. Previous studies of telecommuting may have been less than scientifically rigorous, but recently researchers out of Stanford University set out to compare office-based employees with telecommuters in as careful and controlled a manner as scientists usually examine the effects of new pharmaceuticals, relying on a large sample and a control group.

To conduct this test, the researchers partnered with a Chinese travel agency interested in exploring telecommuting with more than 12,000 employees. Workers were asked whether they would volunteer to dial — rather than commute — in and were then screened to ensure their home-based workspace was adequate and they had a solid enough record to be trustworthy. Then 255 were set free to telecommute. The results, according to Smithsonian.com were heartening:

After a few weeks of the experiment, it was clear that the telecommuters were performing better than their counterparts in the office. They took more calls (it was quieter and there were fewer distractions at home) and worked more hours (they lost less time to late arrivals and sick breaks) and more days (fewer sick days). This translated into greater profits for the company because more calls equaled more sales. The telecommuters were also less likely to quit their jobs, which meant less turnover for the company.

The company considered the experiment so successful that they implemented a wider telecommuting policy.

If your boss wants more details, this PDF of the preliminary findings posted by Stanford should satisfy him. The experiment may have been an all-around success for fans of telecommuting, but it also should be noted that not all the 255 guinea pigs fell into that category after trying out working from home. Slate investigated the research and reports,

Surprisingly, only about one-half of the employees agreed to the deal, and many of those involved in the original experiment decided that they’d had enough, preferring the hours in commute in exchange for the human interaction of office life and a fixed beginning and end to each work day. The home office isn’t for everyone.

So think carefully before you yourself decide to telecommute. But if it’s just a matter of convincing your company higher-ups to make it an option, you now come well armed with evidence.

Would this solid scientific evidence sway your firm to be more open to remote work?

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The two senators from Connecticut, a hotbed of remote work double taxation for professionals employed by companies in nearby New York who actually do their jobs from their leafy Connecticut communities, introduced a bill to eliminate the double penalty this week, according to a blog on political site The Hill.  The post by Pete Kasperowicz reports:

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I) and Richard Blumenthal (D) said the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act, S. 1811, would help encourage telecommuting, which could create jobs, relieve traffic congestion and reduce the demand for gasoline.

“Although most states tax telecommuters on the percentage of time worked within that state, a few other states tax 100 percent of the income of nonresident teleworking employees whose companies are based in their state, regardless of the amount of time they are physically present in that state,” the two senators said.

“Consequently, because telecommuters’ home states can also tax the income earned at home, workers nationwide are threatened with double taxation on that income,” they added. “This double tax risk puts telecommuting out of reach for many Americans.”

Kasperowicz offers no information on how likely it is that the proposed legislation will actually become law, but as the bill was introduced at least as early as 2009 and never made it out of committee, it doesn’t appear that being a common sense measure is enough to ensure swift passage.

If you’re feeling fired up to support the bill, there is a petition online.

Does the government do enough to support telecommuters?

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Now, halfway around the world in New Zealand, a ZDNet Australia writer is asking whether the ongoing shifts in the way many of us work are going to encourage denser city cores or more spread out population patterns. Writer Darren Greenwood notes that though environmental activists and design enthusiasts often call for denser city cores that demand fewer resource-gobbling cars and encourage us to live in smaller spaces, the connected future of work might actually lead to more people moving further out from these urban cores.

In recent decades, New Zealand has seen a drift from the provinces to large cities like Auckland, mainly due to better job prospects. However, this has made Auckland extremely crowded and expensive, just like many a large Australian metro area.

People just might find that the costs of living in Auckland are no longer worth it, especially if the extra pay is not enough to compensate for loss of quality of life, never mind if you want that garden that the planners are so keen to use on housing.

Employers, too, will soon realize that if you can get people working from home in the exurbs for a bit less, or they can have branch offices in cheaper, neighboring towns and cities, then why be in the city centre?

Thus, one of the main impacts of UFB [Ultra-Fast Broadband] could well be on the shape of our towns and cities.

Commentators have had plenty to say about the possible advantages of greater uptake of remote work for rural areas, as well as how coworking spaces might benefit out-of-the-way communities, but the idea that remote work might be a boon for the exurbs – bane of green campaigners – isn’t one you hear too often.

Of course, there are lots of factors at play when it comes to how our cities and town evolve, including energy prices, climate change and how our collective interest in greener living develops, or fails to. But nonetheless, Greenwood’s insight is an interesting thought to add to the pot.

If you could work from anywhere, where would you live?

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For those moments of doubt, there is no better cure than a conversation with Barry Frangipane, the co-author of The Venice Experiment: A Year of Trial and Error Living Abroad. A middle-of-the-road computer programmer living in Florida with a full-time job, Frangipane decided to see if he could make all the advances in remote collaboration and increased acceptance of telecommuting work for him — by moving to Venice for a year with his wife and keeping his day job.

Sneaking up on the boss

Frangipane knew better than to spring a transatlantic move on his boss all at once, opting instead to inch his way toward greater freedom by slowly proving that, for him, the office was only a hindrance.

“The first thing I did was I started working a day a week at home,” he explains, “and then that gradually grew until I was spending the entire week working from home. Home being five miles away from the office.” From that point it was a surprisingly simple leap from Florida to Italy.

“Once you iron out the technical details and your employer can see that your productivity is actually increasing working from home, then at that point approaching the boss and saying, ‘look, I’m thinking of moving my home. Oh, and by the way, that home is Venice,’ well certainly it’s a little startling, but when the discussion turns to just the facts,” the boss has no reason to disagree.

All upside

Did Frangipane’s customers revolt? Did he miss the office banter or feel like his career was suffering because he was 4,000 miles away? Quite the contrary. “I would say it was all upside,” he says. Leaving aside the benefits of spending a year in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Frangipane actually felt he got more done living abroad.

“In an office environment, there are so many interruptions. One of my partners once said that 32 15-minute interruptions is the entire day. And it makes you think a little bit,” he says. “When I’m working at home people don’t just stop by and stand in my doorway to talk about the ball game. I find myself substantially more productive because I can focus for longer periods of time.”

Dare to dream

Frangipane is adamant that there’s nothing special about him that allowed him to succeed at extreme telecommuting and insists that while living abroad for a year isn’t for everyone, it is for way more people than you’d think. “There was a time when this was just for computer people — web designers and programmers and things — but not so much anymore,” he says, citing the case of a neighbor who works as a customer service rep for a big-box store and has never set foot in the company’s offices.

“It wouldn’t even be noticed if she moved to another country and just continued answering the phone,” he says.

And if you think that Frangipane is simply braver than the average joe, he replies that simply setting a date to leave, informing yourself about your destination and carefully planning your move does wonders to embolden the timid. “Before you go, check the blogs online, check websites and talk to people who have already done it and ask them questions. You’ll see that many of your fears will be allayed,” he insists.

Once he and his wife started learning more about life in Venice, “you start realizing that they’re really just not that much different. Everybody puts on their pants one leg at a time.”

Learning to think Italian

International similarities in dressing aside, there were differences between the Italian way of life and the American, according to Frangipane, and these made a deep impression on him. “I find that things that used to be considered big issues for me, office politics and things, just slide off my back now,” he says. And Italy also changed him in other ways.

“Venice is a town of only 60,000 people and functions as one big family. Everyone knows everyone. They’re happy to shut their stores for a half an hour and just take you to the local coffee shop. They value the relationships so much more than the money that that has certainly changed my focus,” says Frangipane. “I’ve learned that earning that last $1,000 or $10,000 a year is not as important as the relationships.”

How much so? He and his wife already have their eye on Paris for another jaunt abroad.

Image courtesy of Flickr user melename

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• The Future of Workplaces
• Opportunities Abound as the “Rules of Work” are Broken

Total myth, argues BNET blogger Laura Vanderkam in a post this week calling the need to trim your babysitting bill the worst reason to work from home. Vanderkam cites FlexJobs.com CEO Sara Sutton Fell as support for the claim: “If you have a professional job, something you take pride in and want to keep, absolutely do not be trying to watch your children at the same time.” Why? Vanderkam elaborates for those with less experience of childcare:

The vast majority of us who have small kids and work from home know from hard experience that even the most independent 2-year-old is going to give you a grand total of 10 minutes of concentration at a time unless someone else is running interference. While it’s incredibly tempting to skimp on childcare if your kid is a good napper — why pay a sitter to watch TV? — the reality is that even a sleeping baby can turn, unexpectedly, into an awake baby. It is inevitably the day you have an important presentation you’re giving on a conference call at 1:30PM that your child who naps religiously at 1PM decides not to.

While working for home to cover an occasional childcare emergency is probably par for the course, better not bet on being able to do professional work and keep your kid out of trouble at the same time, concludes the post. “Childcare is an investment in your career,” Sutton Fell tells Vanderkam, so don’t skimp.

Of course, with rough economic times come tough choices and the WSJ Juggle blog reported an uptick in those trying to mix professional and parental duties at home a few years back. The gist of the post, however, was the difficulties in making these sorts of arrangements work for both parents and kids, including time spent constructing “byzantine work schedules around their child’s sleep time or their spouse’s time at home” and “‘craft packs’ of art and puppetry materials” the night before to keep kids occupied. In short, saving money usually means putting in longer hours to make it work.

How do you work from home parents out there make it work– is your child always out of your care when you’re in professional mode or do you sometimes mix kid-time with work?  

Image courtesy of Flickr user Bethany L King.

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So what makes telecommuting so challenging to implement for the individual and the company? To find out, think tank The Workforce Institute at Kronos asked two board members and veteran work-from-homers, Sue Meisinger and John Hollon, to discuss their on-the-ground experience with remote work and managing telecommuters. This interesting podcast is the result. It covers:

• The outsized impact of “the technology gods” on web workers’ existence
• The remote work adjustment period and the danger of driving your spouse crazy
• Community v. flexibility tradeoffs and the benefits of growing and meeting with your local network
• The importance of face-to-face meetings and realistic travel budgets
• How to remind office-based staff of the existence of remote workers and how to keep remote staff in the loop about other divisions of the company
• The current limitations of videoconferencing
• How remote work can enrich your talent pool

Image courtesy of Flickr user Plutor.

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• The rise of tablets in the enterprise

While a healthy 37 and 35 percent of respondents fulfilled Staples’ dreams and suggested better office technology and furniture would brighten up life at the office, an even larger percentage (41 percent) thought the best improvement that could be made was not seeing the office at all. That’s the percentage that cited allowing or encouraging telecommuting as likely to improve American offices.

The only modification that won more support was eliminating office politics at 44 percent. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that adding telecommuting and removing office politics took the top slots, as research has shown previously that one of the most undersung benefits of remote work is how it reduces perceptions of and participation in office politics. Distance, in the case of colleagues, does seem to make the heart grow fonder.

Is the best improvement to the office getting rid of the need to be there?

Image courtesy of Flickr user kevinspencer.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
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• The rise of tablets in the enterprise