Geekpreneur has a nice post on the ways to kill a virtual team fast. these are nice practical tips which all boil down to trust.

• irregular contact – have meetings at regular times, keep regular contact!
• lack of leadership
• lack of responsibility
• sudden disappearances (i kid you not – i had a virtual team leader go on holiday for a week. the person didn’t tell any of the folks outside his office, didn’t have an out of office email set up, and finally on the friday one of his coworkers told us he was on holiday all week. of course we were wondering why our emails weren’t getting replied to!)
• lack of member info (trade IM, facebook, linkedin, etc. mix & match both your communications methods & let them see your world in some way

the chief happiness officer blog has a post on a study out Penn State of showing telecommuting is good for both employee and employer.

the study was a review of 46 studies including 13k employees. the blog post has a fantastic summary of the main points so i won’t steal his thunder.

i need to read the full study but the most interesting part caught by the summary IMO is working 1-2 days a week outside the office doesn’t hurt the co-worker/manager relationships although 3 days away from the office has a negative effect on office relationships. wow. an extra 8 hours and damage is done.

the full report is here (pdf)