The effectiveness of remote working is directly connected to the office environment, company culture, and processes. The initial transition to remote working i

The effectiveness of remote working is directly connected to the office environment, company culture, and processes. The initial transition to remote working is especially hard - you require infrastructural and organisational changes to accommodate remote workers, and there's an up-front cost (not just financial) to that that dissuades getting started. I previously worked in an environment that had a culture of face-to-face meetings, informal chats and the like, and it really would have required a total change in culture to implement frequent remote working. By contrast, about 25% of my current engineering colleagues frequently work from home - we've got Google Hangouts and the appropriate equipment and infrastructure to pull it off. There are real upsides and downsides though - obviously a remote worker saves on a commute, but they do tend to miss out on the more social aspects of an office. Like, "Let's go get lunch," or "It's Matt's birthday, let's all have some cake." Those are definitely some of the perks of working with pleasant colleagues.