Second, in response to Roderick’s questions about people “gaming” productivity gains – sure, there’s always going to be some of that. But we are very confident, based on years of our own empirical research, that distributed or remote workers are consistently about 15-18% more productive than their office-bound colleagues.

That research focuses on individual performance standards mutually agreed on by the remote workers and their bosses. That’s the only way we know to track productivity and performance of knowledge workers. Each job, and each situation, is so unique that there are no general measures of knowledge worker productivity – and in my humble opinion, there shouldn’t be.

And yes, to make it work well, employers do have to invest in collaboration technologies. There’s no free lunch – you save a lot on workspace costs when you move to a distributed/touchdown work environment, but you’ve got be willing to put some of those savings back in to technology. But have no fear, in our experience companies embracing distributed work typically realize ROI’s of 50% and more on their total investment.

One more thing: the biggest barrier to more distributed work is the very real resistance of front-line managers, who don’t know how to manage people they don’t see regularly. There’s clearly a trust issue there, but it can be overcome with the right training and management oversight.

Are people sandbagging their productivity gains to make sure they get personal benefits out of it? Are people shy of making improvements since they don’t get any recognition for it?