...telecommuting success, the telecommuting traps to avoid.

TELECOMMUTING WAS SUPPOSED TO CHANGE the world. In corporate America, it was going to allow dissatisfied cubicle inhabitants to work from their own home. Small companies would spend less on office space and empower employees to keep their own schedules (but deliver the same amount of work). In the government and engineering sectors, knowledge workers would be able to tap into networks from virtual office locations and still communicate daily with home base.

Yet, as any human resources manager can tell you, the telecommuting trend never really took off--at least, not yet. According to Meta Group, the number of fulltime telecommuters has doubled since 2000. By 2006, at least 60 percent of the large corporations will have a telecommuting program in place. That's not earth-shattering growth, but it's steady enough that many employees and managers have kept an eye on the off-campus, cubicle-free alternative.

Telecommuting is a viable solution to rising gas prices and worsening traffic. With ever-increasing broadband availability, telecommuting has again become popular. The infrastructure for telecommuting (or "teleworking," which is now the more commonly used term) is starting to take shape. Employees can use virtual private networks (VPNs) for end-to-end security, run a wireless access point in their homes, and communicate with co-workers via Web conferencing tools. Teleworkers are becoming a more integral part of a corporate strategy--no small task. Companies are constantly deploying complex networks for both data and voice, adding to their existing enterprise solution offering, running scripts on network servers to install software remotely, and relying on ever-more-complex archiving, virus-checking, and spam-killing tools. IT is starting to include telecommuters in these infrastructure changes, rather than seeing them as autonomous technology islands.

Another challenge: In the past, managers have been skeptical about telecommuting, mostly because their old-school management techniques were contradictory to self-paced productivity. This style of management measures productivity...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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