With the skyrocketing cost of fuel and the increasing impact of fuel costs on American workers, I have to ask - Why aren’t more people telecommuting? My comments are specifically for IT-related jobs, since that is where my experience is, but I believe a fairly large number of other jobs could be done via telecommuting as well.

To give you an idea of why I think telecommuting is feasible (and attractive), here is my typical day, which isn’t too terribly different from that of many other IT workers:
- Get ready for work, throw my laptop into my backpack, and head out the door.

- Drive the 15 or so miles to work. Usually I am lucky in the morning and it only takes 30 min or so to make the drive.

- Unpack and dock my laptop, and get to work.

- Throughout the day, much of my interaction with my co-workers is done via IM and email. People are too spread out (different floors, different buildings, etc) and often too busy for real-time human interaction all the time.

- Work ends, throw my laptop back into my bag, drive the 15 or so miles home (this trip takes me 45 - 60 minutes).

So, each day I drive 30 miles and spend roughly 1.5 hours commuting to and from work. Over a week, that is 150 miles and 7.5 hours - almost a full workday! Thankfully, the new train is starting to run next week, so some of this will be mitigated, but it is still a fair amount of time and money spent commuting. Add to this other problems that are common for many companies - lack of space, parking issues, and other facility issues.
So, why not have employees telecommute a handful of days per week? Think about the benefits:

Employees

- Less time in traffic
- Less spent on gas and maintenance
- Ability to focus on your tasks for a few days (I get far more done on the rare days I work from home)

Employers

- Happier employees
- Less need for parking space
- Less floor space needed for employees

Society, the economy, and the environment

- Less gas being used
- Less pollution being created
- Roads that are less congested

I understand as well as anyone the need for people to be at work in-person and to have face-to-face time with other employees. I don’t think this needs to be every day, though. In fact, I think many of us would benefit from less time available for meetings - people scheduling them would have to think hard about whether or not a full-blown meeting was necessary, or whether whatever they are trying to accomplish could be done with a few emails.
If a large percentage of IT workers worked from home just 2 or 3 days per week, the impact could be quite large - think of all the time and energy savings. There is no good technical reason for not encouraging such policies - technology exists to allow this (many companies already have it in place and use it to a small extent), the nature of our jobs is very conducive to working off-site, and several companies (ie, RedHat), already do it to a large extent with great success.

One argument against telecommuting is that it makes it hard to keep people accountable. I’d argue that it is pretty easy to see who is getting their stuff done and who isn’t, regardless of where they are working from. If you are paying someone $100k per year to write code for you and don’t feel like you can trust them enough to let them work out of your sight for a few days, you have far bigger problems. It also kills me when companies have no problem outsourcing projects halfway around the world to people they don’t know (and can’t communicate with very well), but balk at letting employees work from home a few days per week.

I don’t see why more companies aren’t pushing this, why government at various levels isn’t pushing it, and why more employees aren’t clamoring for it. Yeah, it takes a little extra work, requires some trust on the part of the employer, and may cost a bit in initial setup (VPN, security, bigger pipes to handle the traffic, etc), but to me, it seems like it pays of well in the long run.