I'm generally not interested in hiring remote workers at our company. While it can work in rare cases (where the need for collaboration is low) it is much more the exception than the rule for us. Our company culture and structure is based around trust and collaboration. We allow VPN/remote work, but as a tradeoff. For the most part, our employees are local and have a desk in the office that they spend most of their time in. I agree that in some cases working from home offers a greater opportunity for focus and freedom from distraction. But for that case we have VPN. The rest of the time everyone benefits from closer collaboration.
For what it's worth we have done several experiments. We even tried having a remote worker on a constant skype connection, with a monitor/camera in a shared office with other workers (over a period of several months). Based on our data I would say that there is a measurable decline in value when a person shifts to >50% remote work in our environment. That may not be true for other environments of course.
> For what it's worth we have done several experiments. We even tried having a remote worker on a constant skype connection, with a monitor/camera in a shared office with other workers (over a period of several months).
It was definitely a noticeable improvement over remote with just email / phone communication (and occasional trips to the office), but easily not as good as being there.
For what it's worth we have done several experiments. We even tried having a remote worker on a constant skype connection, with a monitor/camera in a shared office with other workers (over a period of several months). Based on our data I would say that there is a measurable decline in value when a person shifts to >50% remote work in our environment. That may not be true for other environments of course.