I can relate to this article posted on the Lotus website: For 20,000 at IBM, Lotus innovation makes working at home a way of life
The bottom-line is impressive enough: More than 20,000 IBM employees working at home full time, each for $8270 less per year than it would cost IBM to put them in an office, for a total annual savings of $16.5 million per year.
But these numbers reveal only part of the benefit IBM gets from having roughly 5% of its global employees work at home. Employees who have worked from home for years say they perform their jobs without sacrifice and get a lot more done in an average workday — while living happier, more balanced lives.
I work almost exclusively from home. Actually, that’s not strictly true - I’m on the road a lot, visiting business partners, running enablement sessions, speaking at seminars and such. But when I’m not on the road, I work from home. The standing joke within our team is that we are in the office only once every 4-6 weeks - and then only to mail in our expense claim receipts (oh, how I long for the days when we will be able to submit scanned receipts electronically - I might have to start lobbying the Australian Tax Office !!).
I agree 100% with the sentiment of that article - I feel I’m far more productive working from home, I have everything I need here - a phone, a printer, a scanner, a fax machine, a high speed ADSL line with VPN access to the office, a good quality chair and an external 17″ LCD monitor (IBM ThinkVision L170p) that I use to extend my laptop desktop for greater flexibility and productivity. Most importantly, I have email (via Notes and Notesbuddy) and Sametime (via Sametime and Notesbudy for Instant Messaging, and Sametime Web Conferencing for, well, web conferencing !).
Given our team is geographically dispersed anyway; Matt lives in Melbourne; Stuart lives in the Qantas Club (and occasionally in Sydney), I have other colleagues in Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, Brisbane and Wellington (NZ) that I communicate with, practically on a daily basis - to be in the office here in Sydney only gets me closer to about 10% of my team. What’s more, my boss is in Melbourne, and my brand manager is in Canberra, so it’s not as if I would see them if I went to the office anyway.
I’m responsible for business partners throughout Australia and New Zealand anyway - and only a relatively small percentage of them are in Sydney - so the most important thing is being online, being able to respond quickly to their needs, and have a good choice of reliable and managable communication facilities at my disposal.
I never feel isolated - there’s a constant stream of emails from everyone, and if you need that immediate conversation, Sametime Instant Messaging lets you reach out and touch someone (or at least poke them to see if they are paying attention !). There’s always the phone too if you need to give the fingers a rest (I find 5 or 6 simultaneous Sametime conversations is about the most I can do at once without straining my fingers from typing so fast, or straining my brain from thinking so fast … although you can do more conversations when talking with managers or sales people - they generally type slower 
)
With online awareness becoming more pervasive now, it’s even built into our intranet site so that when I view the profile of another person through our corporate directory, it tells me if they are online via Sametime, and I can start a chat session with them right there if I want to, without even needing to add them to my buddy list first.
It does help with the people factor that I am on the road a lot, and travel to most cities several times a year, so I do get to chat face-to-face with most of my colleagues. However, I honestly don’t feel alone when I’m working from home.
The best part about it all is the commute time - I can get out of bed at 8:29am and be at work and on a phone conference by 8:30am, or collaborating with my team via a Sametime web conference, or responding to some emails, or whatever.
The whole “working in your pyjamas” issue is one of the main reasons we don’t use webcams and video conferencing
Even when on the road, as soon as we dial in or connect up via a wireless hotspot or hotel room broadband, we are instantly connected with the rest of our community and our information network. I never know where Stuart is, but so long as his icon is green in Sametime, I know I can chat to him about anything. It’s also good form to check he’s not in some distant timezone before ringing on his mobile - waking someone up in the middle of the night is never a pleasant experience for both parties (although I say it’s his fault for leaving his mobile on !). I guess I should check his Notes calendar more often to see which country he is in !
Keeping up with the rapidly changing world of Lotus Software is a major task that requires a lot of teamwork and sharing of information. I find it much easier to do so from my desk at home, and only very slightly less easy to do so while on the road (ubiquitous high speed wireless connections will help there !!).
… and it’s all done with Lotus Software … but you knew that already !