<p>The bottom line: Organizations can no longer focus strictly on working, while ignoring living and learning. Neither can you, as a knowledge professional. The enterprise of the future must bring all three of those areas into balance.</p><p>Living means loving what you do and finding fulfillment in it. Working means doing what you love, in a way that is both challenging and rewarding. Learning means continually making new discoveries and putting those discoveries to work, both personally and professionally.</p><p>In essence, you and your organization, and your extended network, are now co-dependent. Your ability to grow is limited if your organization and network aren’t growing. Likewise, if you aren’t growing, you are inhibiting the growth of the organizations to which you belong. Think brain trust, as opposed to assembly line.</p>

Last year, <a href="http://www.smeal.psu.edu/news/latest-news/nov07/telecom.html">researchers from Penn State</a> analyzed 46 studies of telecommuting conducted over two decades and covering almost 13,000 employees. Their sweeping inquiry concluded that working from home has "favorable effects on perceived autonomy, work-family conflict, job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent, and stress." The only demonstrable drawback is a slight fraying of the relationships between telecommuters and their colleagues back at headquarters — largely because of jealousy on the part of the latter group. That's the first problem you solve when you kill your office.

When it comes to creating an effective team, cohesion is far more important than co-location.

Virtual meeting and collaboration tools can be a great servant, but not a great master. Rather than letting technology dictate processes, a virtual team should aim to take effective face-to-face working practices and adapt them to work virtually.

A shared vision, which is understood by all team members, acts as an anchor for decision making. Each team member’s responsibilities should be in service of the collective purpose.

A virtual environment should support relationship development, not simply communication.

Yet a work force culture based on long hours at the office with little regard for family or community does not inevitably lead to strong productivity <em>or</em> innovation. Two outdated ideas seem to underlie the Yahoo decision: first, that tech companies can still operate like the small groups of 20-something engineers that founded them; and second, the most old-fashioned of all, that companies get the most out of their employees by limiting their autonomy.

Why are companies so leery of this type of flexibility? Managers are tempted to use “face time” in the office as the de facto measurement of commitment and productivity. They are often suspicious about employees who work out of sight, believing they will shirk or drift if not under constant supervision. As a result, telecommuting is often viewed as a perk to be handed out after employees have proved their worth.

In the last week, I have heard a number of claims that research supports the idea that workers on-site are more innovative than those who work from home. I remain skeptical. The notion that impromptu conversations with colleagues in the cafeteria are the core of innovation seems a bit simplistic; in my experience, they are just as likely to produce talk of better jobs at competing firms or last night’s “American Idol” winner. Besides, much of this “research” simply shows that workers who collaborate with others in loose networks generate better ideas. It doesn’t suggest that the best way to create new products and services is by isolating your employees in the silo of a single location.

<p>“The results we saw at Ctrip blew me away. Ctrip was thinking that it could save money on space and furniture if people worked from home and that the savings would outweigh the productivity hit it would take when employees left the discipline of the office environment.</p> <p>“Instead, we found that people working from home completed 13.5% more calls than the staff in the office did—meaning that Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. They also quit at half the rate of people in the office—way beyond what we anticipated. And predictably, at-home workers reported much higher job satisfaction.”</p>

<p>One other fascinating insight from the interview: Bloom notes that those who liked the work-at-home option most were people:</p> <p>” . . . who have established social lives—older workers, married workers, parents. We found that the younger workers whose social lives are more connected to the office tend to not want to work from home as much.</p>

If employees complete their work on time, and if they do a quality job, then location shouldn’t matter.

There is a big difference between “going to work” and “getting to work.” Of the two, only “getting to work” creates value. Managers should focus on improving the quality of the work and the efficiency of completion, rather than juggling the logistics of employee location.

Because we’re remote, we’re laser-focused on productivity. We know a team’s working well because they’re producing high-quality work. And we know when things aren’t working well because there are hiccups in productivity or quality.

In fact, I firmly believe that <em class="markup--em markup--p-em">Articulate is better at collaboration and communication</em> than many traditional companies because we haven’t had the luxury of assuming it’ll just happen organically. We deliberately architect the way we work to support collaboration and foster clear, direct, open communication.

<p>The study's authors speculate that the reason the numbers are so high is because women at remote or mostly remote companies are more likely to be fairly evaluated.</p> <p>“It’s because remote work requires companies to focus on the most important aspects of work—<a href="https://www.workingmother.com/show-this-to-your-manager-people-who-work-from-home-have-been-proven-to-be-more-productive" class="linkTargets-processed">productivity</a>, progress, results—rather than less important things like face time in the office, office politics, traditional notions of what leadership ‘looks like,’ popularity or likability, or hours spent at your desk,” they write.</p>