When I was in University, one of the instructors enjoyed joking about how we would all be working on a laptop one day, while sunning ourselves on a sandy beach, drinking frothy beverages with little umbrellas in them.I’ve actually done this before (it was the deck of a cruise ship, but same idea) and it is as awesome as it sounds.

I’ve been working from home for around 15 years. You tend to put in more hours then the normal working as nobody knows what you doing so your visibility is needed.Commutations with your boss is obviously important so he/she knows what your doing. I’ve had 5 different people I’ve reported to and they each found out quickly that a telecommuter does work.

I believe that this is a two way street.  First, the company must have trust in the people that they have chosen to work from home instead of making the commute into the office, can this person be trusted to do their job in a timely manner, can they work unsupervised, are they a self-starter.  Things like this is one of the biggest problems when having people work from home.  Then when people are chosen, you will have those that feel that they should also work from home and they are the ones that need to be constantly reminded for reports or are at the water cooler too long or are also on one too many breaks.  These type of people make it hard for all, so management just simply says everyone comes in.Now, let’s drop the other shoe, the person doing the work.  They need to demonstrate to management that they can work on their own, they are self-starters, and that they can get the job done long before deadlines are due.  These are the people that every company would love to have and would not mind at all if they worked at home, in their pj’s.  They may have to come in for a meeting maybe once every week or son, but, you are still getting the same, if not more work out of them.  So the choice is still on management.For those working in the IT field, we can work from both places, but, depending on who you work for, they may not like you working on servers from home.  I have a government issued laptop that I use from home when I have to do some patching and really don’t want to make the drive at night back to work.  So I log into my desktop at work and then log onto the servers from there.  This is still up in the air with management.  They feel that if we are working on servers, we should be present in the server room, even thou for some, the drive takes longer that the patching.So, for myself, I would like to work from home a couple days a week because you lose some of the technical trade-off by working at home, away from others.  On the other hand, at least you can listen to the music you want and sit back and wear your bazinga tee-shirt while remoting into the servers.

In the future, do you think the majority of workers will work from home?

I’m of mixed opinion on this — I used to work from home full time and while I felt productive, I missed having people around and eventually craved going back to a more traditional workplace. Now, I work from home 1-2 days per week and find that to be ideal (though TechTarget has many full-time remote workers, and it’s working out fine for them). To me the biggest issue now is not flexibility or productivity, it’s relationships; it’s easier to feel out of the loop when you’re not seeing your co-workers regularly.

It cuts down on the wasted time spent actually commuting.

Good Question.

its seems for me when i am working at home i tend to do more than i do in office. not only that it is more flexible and i too save on travelling time and cost

Do I think that a majority of workers will be working from home?  Well, it would help those who have only one vehicle and where gas prices are out of this world.  It would also help with the gas emissions into our atmosphere, at  which, according to an article I just read, and here is the link if you are interested:http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/29/15518574-antarctica-greenland-ice-definitely-melting-into-sea-and-speeding-up-experts-warn?lite  The ice is melting even faster than first thought, in fact, it has speeded up.  So if you take that into consideration, it would be a huge plus.  Then again, it all falls back on the people actually doing the work, will they be doing what they are suppose to or will they be playing WOW instead of spreadsheets.  That will always be the ultimate question.

Here’s a great experience report on remote working from a lady who was challenged with this scenario:

I was a bit skeptical to start but I think it can work, as long as the communication is kept up between you and your boss. Learning to improve your communication skills is a good thing. Also, as others have mentioned, we tend to put in more hours and can be more productive when working from home which is a good thing!