For telecommuting to succeed, you may need to change, or at least examine, a team's workflow. For example, a team may be used to project tracking based on shouting over the cubicle partitions. With a telecommuter on staff, that won't work. You can and should use software that can help you track project progress. Then, nobody has to waste time asking for status reports that are clearly stored in a tracking spreadsheet on the shared network drive. "Most firms don't centralize their daily task data and business processes on a central webified portal or workflow application," says systems architecture consultant Dodds. "Thus, they feel the compulsion to meet in physical space, hashing over questions with which a central repository (blog, content management system, wiki, combinations) could easily deal." A company that provided a webified index to project documents would be far ahead of most firms' practices, adds Dodds.

Telecommuting provides significant benefits to the people who live the lifestyle, with unparalleled flexibility and power over their schedule (not to mention their wardrobes). It definitely helps enterprises too, since the company can hire the "right" person for the job without regard to relocation or hour-and-a-half rush-hour commutes. However, as in all things, there are trade-offs. To gain the benefits, IT managers must learn new people skills, establish new working styles and expand their understanding of worker productivity.

Senior Online Editor Esther Schindler has been telecommuting professionally for more than 15 years. She can't imagine working in an office in which she is expected to wear shoes, where she can't have a cat on her lap, and where she can't turn up the music as loud as she likes.