What has worked for us (Score 1)

So we transitioned in the last year from an old school 9-5, cubical farm shop to a completely work from home team. I am the manager, CIO was responsible for deciding whether to continue the work. We are software engineering team the rights customization's for a large research medical center for the EMR (electronic medical record system) as well as doing general business automation. The team has a daily 20 minute huddle meeting via skype and a weekly team lunch/staff meeting for in town team members that is typically 2 hours (food plus deep discussions that have been saved during the week). For geographically remote members we will bring them in via speaker phone if they request it. Team size is 8 software engineers.

So results:

- defect rate (incident tickets) decreased 23%
- work order completion rate increased 19%

Biggest complaint was from non-technology adopters that like being able to drop by people's cubes for discussions instead of using skype, phone, email, etc. These were also the folks identified by our teams as our largest interrupters of productivity.

I had 1 person that decided to resume coming in the office because he liked the social interaction. He's also my least productive employee (though still acceptable).

Our setup is 1 laptop and 1 desktop used for desktop virtualization (mostly vmplayer but 2 guys prefer kvm on Ubuntu, tried hyper-V but it's basically to fragile to be useful in our opinion). Each team member has full control of both machines including OS. They are responsible for always being able to communicate (no "I'm rebuilding my box" excuses, use your smartphone or have some other plan B). The desktop is plugged into a hardwired connection at the office and laptops are at home. Access is via VPN using remote desktop or spice viewer (for KVM).

Hopefully this is enough detail, but it's been a huge win for us. It took almost 5 years of fighting with old school management to get them the ability to leave the office.