Telecommuting can be a luxury or a curse, depending on who’s talking. Many companies (ours included) view telecommuting as a benefit to employees. But it’s also a benefit to the employer—if managed properly.

True, there are people who simply don’t want to work from home—or worse, those who think they can work from home but simply can’t. I’ve worked from home full-time since 1991, and I’ve had dozens of my staff work from home in that timeframe.

The measure of success is fairly straightforward: Are they completing their work in a timely and high-quality manner? If so, I don’t care when they do it (at 2 am or 4 pm) or how they get it done (laptop at the kitchen table during dinner in exchange for attending his or her daughter’s volleyball game after school).

But the question always remains among employers: Could I get more productivity out of this person if he were in the office—under the scrupulous oversight of a top manager? Maybe, but consider these facts first:

* About 14% of employees worked from home full or part-time in 2006, up from 10% in 2005, according to Nemertes upcoming benchmark, “Building a Successful Virtual Workplace.” The percentage of telecommuters within individual companies ranged from zero to 100%.

* The majority of telecommuters view that position as a benefit, so their loyalty to the company increases. Further, they don’t want to lose that benefit, so they work harder to prove their worth.

* Senior-level managers and executives work from home—at least part time—so the trend does not indicate that working from home stymies one’s career aspirations.

* Companies with telecommuters rely heavily upon collaborative technologies to keep them productive and to better manage them. For example, wikis, internal blogs, shared workspaces, audioconferencing, Web conferencing, instant messaging, and desktop video are becoming common tools on a telecommuter’s laptop.

* It costs less to employ a telecommuter. Nemertes has found that it costs $11,000 to $20,000 per year in real-estate and associated costs in major metropolitan areas. Those costs disappear with a telecommuter in exchange for about $6,000 in annual IT costs.

* Telecommuters spend less time commuting, and they tend to give at least half of that time to the company.

If an employee is productive, available, and communicates well from the home office, I have not found he or she will become “better” by working in an office. That’s not to say you shouldn’t make it a point to have face-to-face meetings at least quarterly. There is value to seeing employees and spending time with them in person, but it’s not required to make them productive on a daily basis while in a home office.

But there are individuals who simply need an office environment and face-to-face management. They get distracted or bored at home. I’ve found this in a handful of employees during the past 16 years, and a good solution is office sharing. They work from home two days a week and another employee works at home three days a week, and they share the office space. It still saves the company money, but gives them the benefit of telecommuting.

Bottom line: By implementing the appropriate technologies, managing a telecommuter becomes quite easy!