Management research shows unequivocally that without face-to-face interaction, performance and the mental health of employees suffer.
My studies using sensor ID badges to measure human interaction in the workplace show that people with extensive face-to-face networks are roughly twice as productive as people who keep to themselves or only communicate over e-mail. The mental toll is equally striking: Face-to-face interaction accounts for nearly all boosts in job satisfaction, while e-mail communication has no effect.
Now imagine what happens when people work from home and can only rely on electronic forms of communication. For example, how long would it take to write an e-mail to explain all the nuances of your position on your company’s R&D budget? Probably a few hours. Then people would get back to you with their positions, also spending hours going over fine points that you didn’t think to consider when you wrote your e-mail, and this back and forth could take days or even weeks. But if you met face to face, you could accomplish this entire discussion in an hour.
There’s the added benefit of being able to go out for coffee afterward; even if we disagreed, we could build social capital difficult to reproduce through electronic media. Without face-to-face interaction, people become less committed to one another and the organization. Until communication technology vastly improves, we are better served by utilizing the mode of interaction that we’ve refined as a species over millions of years: face-to-face communication.