And when performance appraisal time rolls around, limit telecommuter reviews to hard production numbers. The intangibles you rely on for on-site staff aren't really relevant to telecommuters, are they?

Wrapping up the plot to kill telecommuting

If you use even some of these 10 steps, everyone will end up treating remote employees as second-class corporate citizens, the remote employees will know their place, and on-site employees will happily brave long commutes so that they don't become invisible.

Any one of these 10 tactics might be enough to make sure your company fails to make telecommuting work. In combination, they'll discredit the concept until long after you're retired.

Acknowledgement: To prepare for this article, I asked the subscribers of to tell me about their experiences telecommuting and managing telecommuters. Nearly 350 were kind enough to send in very thoughtful and insightful responses.