We were taken by surprise by the news that Yahoo is apparently turning thumbs down on telecommuting and remote work, and will begin to require everyone to come to the office. If this turns out to be true, there are a lot of Yahoo people who are going to have to make some adjustments.

You can read this Fierce article about the move, along with some read-between-the-lines interpretation about the possible motivations behind it. But even taken at face value – that the reasons for this change in approach is to foster more face-to-face collaboration and creativity – it all seems so retro. More...

According to a new report, some 50 million workers in the U.S. have jobs that allow for at least part-time telework, but only 2.9 million are actually doing it.

But considering the lack of clarity in definitions of telework, determining the accuracy of that number, and other telework data, is tricky, as Gary Audin writes over at NoJitter. The report he references is the result of some numbers-crunching from a mix of mostly-governmental data sources. Our guess is that it gives a more-or-less accurate overall view, but we wouldn’t stake a business decision on any specific data point. More...

Today the enterprise office space is at most sort of a “home base” for employees. The days of a permanent cubicle, with a desktop computer and POTS phone, seem archaic. It is a very dynamic situation, and as the IDC 2009-2013 forecast points out, a remarkable 72 percent of employees are mobile today, some even working out of their homes and on the road entirely. More...