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Telecommuting provides employees with the flexibility and quiet they need to optimize their productivity.

You don't have to repeat others' expensive mistakes.  

This article presents input that several telecommuting IT professionals shared via e-mail about the benefits the practice brings to the enterprise, processes that help remote workers interact with other team members, and the irritations that twist telecommuters' shorts in a knot.

1. Telecommuting saves money -- truly.

Companies have the potential to benefit financially in a number of ways from supporting telecommuters.

First, fewer people in the corporate office means companies save money on such expenses as rent, furniture and facilities maintenance.

Second, companies open to hiring remote workers benefit from wider—and potentially cheaper—pools of applicants. They can hire qualified workers without regard to their geographic location – an invaluable benefit during a recession.

This "more diverse pool of applicants" includes disabled citizens, 70 per cent of whom are unemployed, primarily due to the lack of accessible transportation to the workplace, especially in rural areas, according to Ed Dodds, a systems architecture consultant, who telecommutes for several different companies that have retained his services.

"Working from home offices outfitted with assistive technologies via broadband and VPN 'virtually' eliminates this barrier," he says.

2. Telecommuters really can be more productive

One of the biggest barriers to telecommuting is convincing the boss that working remotely is not the same thing as slacking off.

Unfortunately, many managers are sure that someone who isn't visible isn't working, which creates a taboo around telecommuting.  

Katie Albers, a user experience consultant and project manager, wishes IT managers would get over their conviction that "face time = productivity." That just isn't so, she says. "I've telecommuted and worked in an office and in a cubicle farm. I know that I got my best work done fastest when I telecommuted.

I could take breaks when my brain stopped being productive. If the plumber came, it took 15 minutes to deal with him, not 45 minutes to get home, an hour and a half to stand around while I waited for the work to be done, and another 45 minutes to get back to work."

Like Albers, most telecommuters believe they are far more productive at home than in the office. Why? It's quieter, with fewer interruptions.

The dozens of remote workers queried for this story repeatedly underscored this point.

Gloria Willadsen, a freelance UNIX application and embedded systems developer, says her productivity at home is double to triple what it is in the office because of the calm her home affords. "I do heavy algorithm programming, and I need silence while this is happening.

We don't have silence in our office, but in my home, I have places of perfect peace."

3. Telecommuting doesn't work for everyone

Happy telecommuters are the first to tell you that the lifestyle is not for everyone.

Telecommuters need to be self-starters. They need to find alternate ways to interact with peers, and they must believe that the advantages (such as working with a cat on one's lap) far outweigh the disadvantages (such as missing out on those "brownies in the second-floor kitchen" e-mail messages, or at least on the brownies themselves).

Some managers are resistant to home-based work arrangements because of a bad experience they had in the past. They may have let someone work from home who lacked the necessary self-motivation to telecommute and were burned by it.

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