let's face it, the primary argument against working from home is not wanting to adjust communication styles. if you are part of a team that tends not to put co

let's face it, the primary argument against working from home is not wanting to adjust communication styles. if you are part of a team that tends not to put communication in writing or text (email, IM, etc), and does more of the shuffling-from-desk-to-desk thing, you are going to fail with folks who work from home, folks who work in a different office, and folks who work on the road. a few years ago, i managed a team of 6: 5 in new york, 1 in california. first, i started out using the conference room for team meetings, and like clockwork, everyone would break out into mini-conversations, or not talk loud enough for the speakerphone, so the california guy would essentially check out. when it came time for scheduled work to be done, the new york team has already left for the day, and california guy wouldn't have enough details to complete it successfully. so he'd bail on the change, or wake up someone on the east coast. i didn't realize what could be the root cause until i flew out to california to spend some days with him, and i got to experience how damn frustrating it was to talk with the rest of my team back in new york. so i started an experiment -- we would no longer meet in the conference room and dial him in, but instead, we would all dial in from our desks into the same conference bridge. there was definitely a learning curve, but things improved. the welcome side effect is everyone learned how to use mute button on their phones appropriately (keep it muted unless you are talking, no one wants to hear echoing coworkers, or your darth vader breathing). what happened next surprised me: the mini-conversations didn't go away, they instead either turned into full blown voice conversations on the bridge or it became a conversation on our internal irc server (either privmsg, or our team channel). everyone learned to share details even if they thought it was irrelevant, and started to respect each other's time -- california guy no longer felt like he was left holding the bag, and the new york team would go out of their way to provide enough detail so that could avoid getting a call at odd hours (due to the combination of change window scheduling and pacific time vs. eastern time) working from home is the excuse, when learning how to effectively communicate is the actual problem. not addressing that is what leads to the redundant efforts, or being too "heads down" in something but going down the wrong path. additionally, in every work from home failure story or success story, no one has ever addressed the challenges of migrating from face-to-face to remote -- it's really, really, hard. you're fighting with people who have "being doing it this way forever". you're juggling with people who feel more and more disconnected from the company. eventually, everyone feels offended and things break down, either temporarily or permanently. working from home is not something to be taken lightly, you either commit to supporting it in your work environment, or don't bother.