Chatty workers actually are best telecommuters

By Michelle Conlin

updated 3:22 p.m. ET June 30, 2009

For years the workplace commentariat has been nattering about the no-collar workplace. Companies will hire brains, not bodies. Work will go to the talent — instead of the talent extreme-commuting to the work. Teams will go transnational, warming the undersea cables with their space-and-time shifting video meetings. The workplace of the future, they've said, will be no workplace at all. Technology will turn the globe into one giant Wi-Fi-enabled kibbutz. A post-face-time world where everybody can Tivo their work.

This is one of those dreams that has actually panned out. The office — in our pocket! (Or pocketbook!) But for every miraculous solution, there's another problem created. And so it is with the wonder of wireless work.

Five years into the mainstreaming of mobile work, there's a growing enlightenment, buttressed by new research, that the benefits of working remotely are actually a bit more complicated, and nuanced, than the cheerleaders said. In all the effusive rah-rah'ing over this great employee unleashing, many managers overlooked a simple fact: Some of us are simply not — by temperament, psychology, or personality type — wired for the life of the digital nomad.

Indeed, what is to some a broadband Nirvana is to others a Sartre-esque exercise in alienation. "I'll be candid with you: If I work at home for more than two days, I feel a bit isolated," says Cisco European Marketing Manager Tim Stone. "I tend to go to the office a couple of days a week just to have human interaction."

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And this from the guy who markets all that Cisco gear that's supposed to make the virtual Valhalla happen. Over the past couple of years, the London-based Stone has become increasingly intrigued by the psychology surrounding mobile work. Was there a genome for the ideal mobile worker? And a genome for one who would fail?

Three years ago, Stone, along with a group of other Cisco execs, hired a U.K.-based outfit called Pearn Kandola to help him, Cisco, and Cisco's clients better understand the deeper psychological issues at play in mobile work. "We really wanted to understand the dynamics around the technologies we were bringing to market," says Stone.

Pearn Kandola is a psychological research-and-consulting outfit staffed with lots of psychiatrists and psychologists who specialize in all things workplace-related. Pearn Kandola began studying hundreds of workers at Cisco as well as other employees at global client companies around the world.

Pearn Kandola's chief researcher, a kindly and upbeat psychologist named Stuart Duff, was shocked at the findings. He assumed it would be the quants, the introverts and the shy types who would thrive in a virtual work situation. After all, they're the ones who keep their heads burrowed in cubicles at work. Turns out it's the extroverts among us who are better suited to going Bedouin. "The penny really dropped for us," he says.

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