That's cute, but why do I have to be in the office? If you're discarding useless traditions, start with that one. It leads to wonderful things like: flexible hours, goal-based performance rather than time-based performance, and other nifty things like not having to move across the country to change jobs.
Also, why 9-6? Is that a magic number? What about 10 to 5? Is that worse substantially? I doubt it. There's another 22% of your time with your kids back.
I'm pretty sure that we're going to look back at office buildings and the idea of commutes in general as being a huge waste of time.
Unless you're physically manipulating things, there's no reason for it, and it wastes an immense amount of society's resources maintaining millions of square feet of office space. Think of the number of people you could house in the average office building.
I think you're understating the potential downside of telecommuting.
I'll be the first to agree that requiring bums on seats, just because, isn't helping anyone. Likewise, holding all-hands meetings where most people have better things to do and only 25% of the room cares about what is being discussed at any given moment is rarely a good investment of time.
On the other hand, having live interactions with colleagues and real face time is vastly more productive in some contexts than having everyone call into a Skype conference/available on IM/screen-sharing. Communication is simply much more efficient face-to-face than over any remote channel. If you have more than two or three people who need to work closely together, then body language really matters, and the ability to do simple things like scribble a diagram on a bit of paper or have a couple of guys step out for a minute to work through some details without holding up the rest of the group is indispensable.
(I have similar views on flexible hours, BTW. If you allow complete flexibility, to the point where you can no longer rely on the "early" guys overlapping with the "late" guys for more than a token amount of time, communication because a significant burden.)
This doesn't mean everyone needs to be in the office full-time, of course, and I'm all in favour of allowing telecommuting and flexible hours when there's no reason not to. But having people who need to work closely together in the same place for a significant chunk of the working week can have a lot of benefits, and IMHO is not a useless tradition at all.
OTOH, look at some of the open-source projects that are managed successfully by people scattered across the world who rarely, if ever, meet in person.
I've seen the problems with telecommuting that you describe, but I think it's attributable to culture and expectations. If you're adding a layer of telecommuting to a business that's already got well-established conventions for operating out of an office, and all of the baseline expectations, communication channels, feedback cycles, etc. are adapted to face-to-face interaction, then telecommuting probably isn't going to work well, because the telecommuters are going to be significantly out of step with the rest of the company.
If you want it to work, you may actually need to eliminate the office, replace it with a core set of online tools, e.g. wikis, message boards, IRC channels, and force all internal communication through those media, until a new set of conventions and expectations emerge that optimizes 'virtual office' productivity.
I find face-to-face communication is often highly inefficient. Responses are expected at reflex speed, in a fraction of a second, which means those responses necessarily consist of whatever came to mind first, regardless of whether it's correct or useful. Communicating by text, even instant message, means you have time to think about what you're saying. Sure, it may take a little longer per word, but being able to reply more thoughtfully often means better conclusions can be reached in a tiny fraction of the number of words. Big-O speedup beats constant factor slowdown for nontrivial problems.
Isn't what you describe more of a cultural problem, or simply a lack of basic communication skills among the participants?
If I'm talking face-to-face with a couple of other guys, or sitting at my desk with a colleague looking over my shoulder to give me a second opinion on something I'm working on, we don't need one of us to be speaking 100% of the time. The advantage is that you can have instant feedback when it's helpful, which I find is quite often.
If there's a larger meeting going on with a whole group of participants, then hopefully those participants were given enough information to prepare properly in advance, and hopefully someone is in the chair to moderate the discussion and ensure that the pace is sensible and everyone is able to contribute. That's another thing that becomes very much harder when phone lines and network connections are involved, IME.
Your point seems to be that smarter people tend to spend more time listening and thinking and less time talking. I completely agree. I just don't think meeting face-to-face necessarily prevents that. Sometimes you want to compare/evolve ideas at high speed or explain/learn something interactively, and being in the same place helps with that IME. Sometimes you want one person to consider an issue deeply and then report their findings, and maybe a formal document that other people can read, at their own pace and wherever they happen to be, is a better choice in that case. But working in the same location doesn't prevent that either.
I'm late to the party, but I figured I'd share how I work as a member of our product team to give a quick example of the flex in our schedule. I work 6-6:45AM (usually answering email, including personal email and catching up with what happened overnight on Twitter). It borders on being difficult to call that stretch of time work since it's general communication stuff, but it's a really useful span of time for getting the day ahead of me figured out. At 6:45AM I help my kids get ready and take them to school, and then work 8AM - 5PM with lunch in there at some point. There are usually hugs and conversations with the kids about their day around 3 when they get home from school.
In general on the product team at Treehouse we try to keep any real-time interaction (IM, video conversations on GoToMeeting) in those 9AM - 6PM hours just to help everyone have some predictable time for collaboration, but overall things are super flexible.
Well, I stand corrected. I took a look at your hiring specs and they seemed pretty office oriented. Being on the other side of the country, it makes me somewhat skeptical when I see that kind of thing - years of 'ass in chair' performance metrics :)
That's cute, but why do I have to be in the office?
Because of the evidence that co-located teams perform better than distributed ones in many situations? See http://delicious.com/adrianh/colocation for some refs.
If people have references to research (rather than anecdotes) that counter this I'd love to see 'em. I mostly work remotely myself - but I completely understand organisations that don't want to work that way.
Also, why 9-6? Is that a magic number? What about 10 to 5? Is that worse substantially? I doubt it. There's another 22% of your time with your kids back.
I'm pretty sure that we're going to look back at office buildings and the idea of commutes in general as being a huge waste of time.
Unless you're physically manipulating things, there's no reason for it, and it wastes an immense amount of society's resources maintaining millions of square feet of office space. Think of the number of people you could house in the average office building.