As first appeared in Dell’s launch of the first-ever crowdsourced whitepaper:
This may not sounds politically correct but much of what we’ve experienced in this era of portable workers is while it’s great to talk about productivity and satisfaction from the employee’s point of view, much of the ROI for the business comes from lowering overall overhead and displacing some of that onto the employee.
I think it’s important to look at the ROI from 2 points of view: the worker’s and his employer’s.
Employer’s point of view
I recently had a gig with an internet firm which began as a completely distributed workforce. There wasn’t even a home office. We managed our time, our teams, and our tasks completely remotely. From an employer’s point of view, this kept costs bargain-basement low. Since everyone worked from home, the firm was spending almost nothing on office space. I ran biz dev so I traveled (but no more than i would have working from a traditional office space). There was not even a secretary on staff. No corporate bloat. The product of this experiment was that the firm stayed lean and mean and was able to reach profitability very quickly.
How was an interent startup with a growing staff able to do this within a year? I think it’s because this model inherently pushes out a lot of the costs onto the satellite employee in return for not requiring him/her to commute to a central office. While phone, computer, and travel were paid for by the firm, very little else was. We all had a shared mission to keep costs down by keeping bare-bones expense sheets. While not all firms would encourage digital nomads to eat certain expenses like we were, I have the feeling that this is occuring a lot. Even just logistically, employees working on a super-long leash receive less support, not more. At some point, the mobile worker stops fighting for more and just works around the situation. While many companies may treat their long distance employees better, I tend to think that this is generally the case.
Firms employing digital nomads are able to lower overhead tremendously. Frequently this comes in the form of contract employees kept just under the threshold of full-time employment. So things like healthcare and retirement benefits are skimped on. Some of this type of work is offshored currently, but the point is that firms are lowering their costs by displacing them onto the workforce.
Worker’s point of view
Increased flexibility leads to increased productivity
Much work has been done to illustrate the increased feedback loop for workers working on flex-time and/or telecommuting. Having worked for years as one of these types of employees before jutting out on my own, I feel like I know the benefits and detractions of this lifestyle very well. As a father of five who values quantity (and quality) time with my children, being a digital nomad allowed me to craft my day around breakfast, carpool, and homework time. 
When I was in work mode, I was in work mode. No watercooler breaks, no silly meetings, no shmoozy lunches. I was in the zone. I had to be in order to ensure that I completed the tasks expected of me and more. To measure this, we used shared hosted apps (like Salesforce.com for my sales pipeline and Google Docs Spreadsheets to monitor other outbound activity). My boss was able to peer into my work processes whenever he wanted.
The downside of all this though is that this lifestyle is very hard to balance. Because I didn’t have clear delineation at-work/at-home times, I felt that I was working in fits and starts from the time I woke up in the morning until I went to sleep. If a client calls with an emergency during a piano recital, you’ve gotta take the call sometimes and if a boss wants to vent on you during kids’ bedtime, well, that happens as well. While mobile apps and smartphones allow a truly mobile workforce, there are definitely drawbacks to the mobile lifestyle as well that affect productivity.
Working from home, I also received less fringe benefits (see above). I end up eating a lot of my own costs. I sort of feel like this is a trade-off: in return for being able to work at my own discretion, I have to give something up. But isn’t that true of everything important in life as well?
