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Three things that I think are holding telecommuting back

I saw an interesting line chart recently that showed the number of telecommuters declining. The first thought is that this seems surprising. Technology is getting better and we can do more and more all the time on our mobile phones. Why would people be doing less telecommuting?

I'm lucky enough that I can work from home occasionally, and usually try to do so once a week. The conveniences are largely to my personal life: it instantly saves me at least an hour and a half of the day by cutting out my commute, I can start my work day earlier, my home computer is faster than the one I have at home, and I can get small household chores done. It's really nice, a definite advantage, and I don't feel that there's any productivity loss.

But I can also say that there are definitely ways that telecommuting still doesn't match the office experience. Here's three ways:

Conference calls are still lacking and are no substitute for a conversation. I've said before that conference calls are a joke, but where even person-to-person video calls don't match up is that there's still no culture of casual conversations in the digital world; no equivalent of running into someone in the hall or stopping by their desk. Instant message has long been a pop-in kind of medium, but that hasn't extended to video calls, and even IM can't match the number of times the important conversations that start casually in the hallways.

Lack of adoption of centralized management and communication tools. There are tons of project management (ie Basecamp, etc) and communications (ie Yammer) tools around, but the workplace still operates around email, which is a highly exclusive (as opposed to inclusive) medium. Working from home often separates you from those projects that you aren't directly involved with that you only hear because the people around you are involved. There are plenty of tools that could broadcast what's going on in the company so that everyone would be informed not matter where they are, but in my experience, it's extremely hard to get most people to adopt such tools.

You learn more by being around people. If you ask someone a question over email, you get the answer to that question. If you ask them when in person, you see the entire process as they walk you through it. We underestimate how much we learn, even on computers, by actually seeing it done, and no amount of screen sharing or video conferences can replace the amount you can learn by working through a problem with someone in person.

I know that some of the few readers of these posts work from home: what do you think? As nice and easy as working from home is, where do you think its weaknesses are? Or strengths?
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