Is a team of work-at-home employees realistic?
jjs: To make this work, you need frequently-measurable goals, even if the measurement is subjective.This isn't a matter of trust, it's a matter of motivation.It can be something squishy like, "Let me take a look at what Bob's checked in so far this week", or something more quantifiable, like, "Bob has closed n tickets today".[Even if you don't have a hard number of how many tickets someone should close in a day or week, you can generally eyeball it and if there's a discrepancy, look at the descriptions to see how hard the problems were].It's best to make this as transparent as possible to all members of a given team, and provide a system of rapid feedback and especially fast positive feedback for all progress.Try and keep communication focused on whatever channel everyone actually likes using.  If you're using a wiki, trac, and basecamp to keep track of overlapping items, quickly ditch whichever ones nobody actually uses.If you can keep everybody motivated, communicative, and measurably productive, then you will actually be far better off than large traditional companies that rely on the ass-in-chair visibility metric to determine whether "work" is working.