I've been working from home on and off for about 10 years now. It started as one day a week to avoid commuting, but it became full time in my next job. We didn't have an office to go to—all the development team worked from home. That model worked fine for us until the day we needed to hire graduates. Then we realized we needed an office. The grads didn't have the space at home, they needed exposure to the company culture, and they needed closer supervision.

Technology pundits would have us all working on remote ranches holding virtual meetings over the Internet while munching e-donuts supplied by e-grocers. However, they're missing the point: Just because you and your team could work from home doesn't mean you should. There are, however, a number of valid reasons for people wanting to work from home, or for encouraging them to do so. In my experience the most common reasons are: reducing commute time, meeting family commitments, saving space and costs in the office, and reducing interruptions.

The shortage of skilled IT staff means that you may well have to accept demands from staffers or new recruits. Not that working from home is necessarily bad—for some staffers it's an ideal solution for some or all of the above reasons.

Working from home is just one of the options that become open to us once we've broken the "one job, one desk, one person" chain. Changing attitudes and technology give us a wide range of solutions for getting work done. Long- and short-term contracts replace a lifetime career commitment. Two part-time people can fill a single job if the division of responsibilities works. Some people work for two companies at once. And of course you can forget about the how of doing something through outsourcing.

These ways of working all imply a change in management style. You need to adapt the way you work with your team, especially the supervisory aspects, when people change where they work.

The Long Road Home
Not all jobs can be taken home. You can't assemble automobiles in your basement, for example. But any function that doesn't require an industrial plant or direct, physical interaction with others is a candidate. Software development, analysis, and documentation are all ideally suited to it, assuming that the person can adapt to the working style. Supervision and project management roles require a different approach, and I'll discuss that later. Let's look at relocating one of your staff from your office to their home.

For many people the biggest win of working from home must be the absence of a commute. No more time lost in traffic queues. You arrive at your desk fresh and ready to attack the day's big issues, not the driver of the 18-wheeler who cut you off on the freeway. That works for both the employee and the employer, of course, as an unstressed worker has more concentration and energy and so is more productive. It also transforms the commute time itself into productive time for the company.

Calm concentration is another important aspect of home working. People working at home can avoid the assorted interruptions that occur in an office setting—provided, of course, that their home workspace is suitable. Home workers need at least a notional work area in the home that can be entered and left—everyone needs space and rhythm in their life.

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Psychologists talk about most people needing three distinct spaces in their lives: home, work, and another—perhaps the gym, coffee shop or favorite bar. Any home office must be sufficiently distinct to meet this basic emotional need. Being perched on a stool in the kitchen looks cute in furniture catalogs, but it is not going to last long in practice. Neither is planting a computer permanently at one end of your dining room table—the only sure outcome of that ploy is disputes with the other occupants of the house.

If you're considering letting a staffer work from home you need to assure yourself that they will succeed there. The first step is helping them set up their workspace. Ideally they need a separate room in which to work—in other words, a study. Somewhere they can go when they get up in the morning, and with a door which they can close when they're done. If they don't have a spare room, make sure that they choose a corner where computers, folders, printers and all the rest of the stuff can be parked. Bookcases or potted plants can increase the illusion of separation. I once worked one day a week from a 38-inch-square cupboard fitted out with work surface, shelves and cable management, but I wouldn't recommend it. I know someone who works from a well-equipped shed in his backyard, which works very well indeed.

Most people working from home face one of two diametrically opposed problems: working all the time, or not working at all. Neither is good for them or their job. Many people need the structure of going to an office to put on their working attitudes. Staying at home might lead to getting up late, watching television, having another cup of coffee, and so on.

Do you instantly worry that the home worker candidate is likely to behave like that and have difficulty putting in the necessary hours? That could mean that your employee is genuinely unlikely to focus, or you're not ready for having outworkers on your team.

Face the Facts
One of the beauties of home working is that it allows people to structure their day the way that suits them. They can work when they are most efficient or work around life's obstacles. As long as they get the job done on time and as specified, it shouldn't matter where or when the hours are put in. Some people like to get up early and can turn out beautiful shiny UML models while the rest of us are blearily trying to remember how to work the coffee machine. Maybe they like to pick up the kids from school and play with them in the afternoon, hitting the keyboard again after the tots have gone to bed.

I had someone developing training material for me who did exactly that—and she worked perfectly to plan. I also worked with a technical writer who was also a professional jazz musician. He would rise mid-afternoon, write until about six, and then come in to the office to talk to the development team for an hour or so. After that he would wander home again to write some more, and finish up by playing sax from midnight until about 4 a.m.

Just as my training developer was predictable, controlled, and on time, my musician/writer was a nightmare for coordination. He was the perfect example of why face time —the time that people spend together, inside or outside the office—is so important.

Face time is important for the employee, the team, and the project manager. I'm not talking about conducting that institutionalized waste of time, the status meeting. I'm talking about the social interaction that comes with sharing space with other people. Home workers can suffer from cabin fever. A good antidote is a regular lunch date for the team. It's a great way of keeping them together.

When someone asks if they can work from home you'll have to decide with them how often they will put in an appearance in the office. This is key to their success, and there are no general rules. An introspective detail person will love working from home and will be able to turn out exquisitely optimized code but which no longer meets the evolving requirements—not good. The opposite is like a people-focused extrovert friend of mine who spends her life on the phone and has to scramble like crazy at the last minute to make things happen—not good, either. Both of these cases might need too much supervision to be good candidates for home working.

As I've said before in this column, communication is key to ensuring that work flows as normal. As manager of a wholly or occasionally disconnected team, you're going to have to keep in touch with the people outside the office, and encourage them to keep in contact back. This will be crucial during the early days when they are learning to work on their own.

Increasing availability of low-cost, high-bandwidth Internet connections should help with this, allowing people to connect to the office network from home without significant loss of performance. Shared resources and meeting technologies can help everyone stay on the same page. Until we all have access to technologies like ADSL, however, the occasional telephone call will make all the difference.

If someone plans on working odd hours—including being away from their desk during conventional hours—consider having them get a cell phone or pager. That way people can still get in touch with them and it will reduce paranoia. Don't, however, confuse answering the phone with real work. Someone might well be able to dream up a great new ASP-based architecture for the company's e-commerce site at their local coffee shop, but some people will still think that's goofing off.

Bringing people into the office always raises the thorny issue of where do they sit? Few companies will go whole hog and allocate a full-size office or cubicle for someone who comes in only once a month, or even once a week. One solution is "hot desking" or "hoteling" where you keep a few spare desks for those who don't normally come to the office. They are used on a first-come, first-served basis and are a good solution when you are likely to have visits every day. Alternatively, people can camp out in meeting rooms or at the desks of workers who are out the office, but neither of these are particularly convenient.

Corporate Yogurt
Creating a positive, productive work culture is one of the key means of binding a team together. It should always be your priority. But it's all too easy to let that evaporate if your people are dotted around the local suburbs. Again, the weekly status meeting won't help with that, but lunches and other social events will. Combined with good brainstorming sessions and design meetings, you'll have a sound basis for a common spirit.

Of course, this all works only if your team is in reasonable proximity. You might not have an office at all, and meet occasionally in one person's house or at a restaurant, but you can still meet. But if the other workers are thousands of miles away, the cultural issue can be a problem.

Mergers and acquisitions have helped spawn such problems. All too often these forced marriages lead to strange, unstructured organizations. A Boston-based group running DB/2 on water-cooled mainframes can suddenly find itself working with weirdos running Oracle on Solaris. How alien can you get?

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How can you avoid developing a "them and us" feeling between these teams separated by culture and distance? Plenty of face time is about the only answer, coupled with serious management commitment. Of course it may be that the two teams don't need to work that much together, in which case only the most senior staff need to learn to communicate. Some companies can survive quite well with several distinct internal cultures even within the same area, while others fail dismally.

One local company was bought by a large Japanese corporation—which offered to fly anyone who wanted out to their head office to see how things were done there. That shows commitment: It's a public statement about the newly acquired team: You're so important we're prepared so spend serious money on you. It displays an important aspect of a successful M&A: You're not losing your independence; you're joining an extended family.

Sometimes that family can become very extended indeed. I've a friend who has his own consulting company. Number of employees: one. His company is placed by an agency to a consulting company that sells his services to an end user. This is not an uncommon situation, and in many of the companies I work with it seems as if half the staff are contractors. In some places even more.

Contracting things out is another of those bean-counter ideas. If we don't give Dina a contract of employment we don't have to carry her health insurance, pension plans, vacation time, and other costs. Nor do we have to retain her services longer than we need them. Sure, we'll have to pay her a bit more to compensate for all the missing benefits in kind, but it's still a good deal. Maybe, but there are plenty of tenured contractors out there. Of course contractors don't get tenure, it's just that some of them have been in the same contract for 10 years. Don't find yourself in the position of a local bank: begging contractors to become permanent to reduce costs!

The big win for the employers comes when you need a skill for only part of the development cycle. Testing and documentation are good examples. Much Web talent is hired on short contracts, too.

The big wins for employees are increased mobility and the fact that they can take time to pursue other interests if they are prepared to take the loss of income. A friend of mine composes electronic music for contemporary dance and regularly takes time off to concentrate on performances. He works as a contractor specifically because he can do that.

Unfortunately, those upsides are downsides for the employer. Loss of corporate knowledge when people move on is a particular issue, and they are more likely to job-hop if they are on contract. All that information feeding the brain of the contractor will disappear when they move to the next job. You need to make sure that it is caught in documents or a full-time employee's head. The freedom to choose their own working hours can also be a disadvantage for contractors when deadlines approach. Your permanent staff might be sweating it out to hit that key deliverable, but Jake doesn't care—it's not in his contract.

Management Challenge
Making sure that Jake doesn't abandon your project is, of course, a management challenge. It's your responsibility to ensure that everyone is fully motivated and committed, no matter how they choose to work. And that includes you.

While there are plenty of contract project managers taken on to run specific projects, managing from outside the office is a particular challenge. You're going to have to work hard if you're fed up with your gnarly commute and want to run the ship from home. You'll have to put in more time at the office than a regular team member would, so expect to work from home maybe half the time, at least at the start. That way you can avoid the crushes on Mondays and Fridays, doing your planning and thinking from home.