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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

This would be funny if it was funny.

A satirical piece I published in InfoWorld (“10 sure-fire ways to kill telecommuting,” 3/30/2009) mentioned that some promised savings would not materialize. In particular, reductions in office space lease costs often won’t materialize for years, because once you’ve signed a lease you pay until it expires.

The column also “recommended” pushing all home office costs onto remote employees as a great way to encourage ergonomically unsound furnishings, rely on consumer-grade networks, and cause employee resentment.

The timing was perfect: The following, provided by a KJR subscriber, is paraphrased from an internal memo posted on a well-known company’s intranet just last week:

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

“You started out with an interesting column, but now it’s just spam. Click.”

Usually I don’t even pick up calls with no caller id. At least it wasn’t a RoboDialer (now called, as I recently learned, “agent-less proactive contact”).

The call was, most likely, in response to my recent InfoWorld article, “10 sure-fire ways to kill telecommuting.” Everyone’s a critic. Not everyone is so succinct.

When InfoWorld asked me to write about telecommuting, my knowledge was superficial at best, so I asked KJR‘s subscribers to share their experience and insights. 350 replies later I’m officially an expert.

Starting with a realization many discussions don’t make clear, which is that telecommuters come in five distinct flavors (I doubt this is original, although I couldn’t find anything like this breakdown when researching the subject). They are:

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