Hewlett Packard (HP) has become the latest struggling technology company to tell its workforce to get back into the office, echoing a more public move by Yahoo to bring everyone back under one roof. But don't label this as simply a near-term move by badly performing companies to clean up management issues and raise productivity. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and spending to support a philosophy of putting (most) everyone under one roof if you're in the high-tech world.

Before advocates of conference call and videoconferencing solutions call for me to be burned at the stake, there is plenty of room at the top and bottom for improved productivity tools for remote workers, remote offices, and distributed workgroups.   Given the continuing stream of announcements for small to medium business HD video-esque conferencing solutions, a lot of people still believe there's gold in them there hills. Clearly, such technology has its uses.

However – and this is where the HR industry needs to team up with a major research university – at some point in time and with a certain percentage of workforce, a company can become too distributed, too much orientated to, "Hey, we've got a thousand ways people can work anywhere, let's let everyone work from anywhere." 

One of the first case studies should be Sun Microsystems (News - Alert).  The company went through explosive growth in the 1990s, took a hit when the dot.com bubble burst at the turn of the century, and ended up struggling through the rest of the decade until being swallowed up by Oracle.  

During its struggle for survival, Sun embraced the distributed workforce concept whole hog. Under its Open Work program, over 20,000 employees participated with more than half of its workforce "working" from home at least two or three days a week. While the company saved an estimated 30 percent in initial and workplace expenses and alleged it had "gained" as much as 2.5 weeks of work time per year, that didn't save the company from losing tons of money towards its fall.

Just because people can work remotely, doesn't mean that they work effectively, either as individuals or in distributed work groups. Did the embrace of remote work actually kill Sun over the long run, by diluting actual productivity and creativity?

Contrast Sun's work-anywhere ideal to tech's current high-fliers: Apple (News - Alert), Facebook, and Google. Apple continues to move forward on a four story, 2.8 million square foot "spaceship" headquarters to be built on land formerly occupied by (cough-cough) HP's campus. The nearly $5 billion facility has space for up to 14,000 facilities under one roof.

Both Facebook and Google (News - Alert) heap amenities upon their employees at their respective campuses, providing incentives for employment and worker retention. Google provides free haircuts and meals, on-site laundry and dry cleaning services, and up to 20 percent time to work on personal projects.

Facebook (News - Alert) may be going a bit too far in the other direction. The company is building its own 394-unit apartment complex within walking distance of its Menlo Park campus. Reports say only 15 units will be reserved specifically for Facebook employees, but the meta issue here is the price and availability of housing in Silicon Valley. I wouldn't be surprised to see other high-tech companies start investing in housing close to campus just to cut down on commute time for their employees. 

The key takeaway here is that the most financially successful tech companies in the last decade have fostered a culture of keeping people together and providing incentives to keep them close to work. Too much remote work may actually decrease overall company productivity and creativity.  It might be interesting to see if BlackBerry (News - Alert) overextended itself with remote work over the past three years, trying to "save" money.