How to make 'work-from-home' work?

According to me companies who offer work from home options should have a clear mission.  A business which is started 'on a clear mission' will often lead to considerable satisfaction from making a difference to the lives of people or to the world around you. In many cases a mission-based business can also bring financial reward along with it but often the personal rewards will outweigh and be far more important to you if you are starting a business on this basis.

Dear friends,

Everyone likes the idea of working from home because they can make their own hours. However, if you do not have set work hours on certain days then you will find that it is not as easy to accomplish work from home like you imagined. As a result, decide on some work hours each day and then stick to them. If you need to change them for any reason that is okay, just reschedule those work hours at another time. This may seem silly at first, but you have to control your schedule in order to complete your work.

Only possiblefor sectors which do not involve use of high cost equipment or physical presence at place of work.

Pre-requisites

• Flat structure in organization-no YES boss every time, walk-ins
• Real time information flow
• Cost balancing

Work-from-home is good idea for those  works which may be performed well at office places as well as at Home too. But every work may not or may be performed  well at both places it depend on works desired reuirements. Some works may be performed well at home as in office place, while other may be performed well at office after saving the time used for travelling form home to work places to perform the task . But I suggest  that the  work/task result should be measured not thru working hours used  but how can we performed any task/work economicaly so that maximum output can be obtain from limited resources available.Therefore we should manage rationaly  every task operation(s) best ways to obtain maximum output instead to waisting more hours to perform zero output.    

people who are a aprt of this business should be convinced about the goals of the particular company,their means of earnings and their performance measurements.

I think one of the main hurdles is lack of infrastructure. As an example the dedicated highspeed net connections available in Office is not so common at home. Moreover, for certain meetings (Team/Customer/Project meetings) it may not be good enough to call on phone. Probably, you need to share/make presentations. There are lot of available Technology/Tools which can be adopted e.g. NetMeetings, Elluminate a web based tool were you can use audio/video functionality. Thus, availability and use of proper infrastructure would definetly help the concept of 'Work-from-Home', work at least for the Office-desk kind of jobs.