Telecommuting. It’s just a bunch a lazy ne’er-do-wells hanging around the house in their pajamas, soaking up a paycheck and doing nothing, right? Why should they get to do their work at home, relaxing in that favorite chair, while the rest of us slave away in our cubicles under the watchful eye of our often malevolent superiors?

There are good reasons why telecommuting is poised for explosive growth. The best one: Before too long, crude oil will cost $200 a barrel, and gasoline will skyrocket to $10 a gallon. As soon as that happens, all the reasons why telecommuting isn’t working or isn’t appropriate for information workers will melt away overnight. The best news is, technology is poised to bridge the physical gap between telecommuters and their colleagues.

More on the coming telecommuting renaissance after the Continue link.

Let’s look at a sobering statistic: according to the National Commission on Energy Policy, a credible group of researchers known to tell the truth to the U.S. Congress among others, 70% of the 21 million barrels of oil used in the U.S. per day is gulped down in the name of transportation. Now if you were king of the world, how would you trim that number?

Sure, a lot of that transportation involves moving food and our beloved consumer goods (and gadgets) from here to there, but a big part of it is used to move our carcasses from one location on the planet to the other, so we can talk to each other, look at each others’ stuff and generally see and hear each other.

Corporate America has looked into telecommuting, or in the latest parlance, “telepresence.” So far, it doesn’t like what it sees. The Information Technology (IT) guys worry about security, concerned that if they let employees into the network from the outside, everyone else, including those dreaded hackers, will follow. And managers have always lorded over their employees by watching them, and after that quantifying the results of their work. In this upcoming age of $10/gallon gas, the watching may have to take place from afar and in some cases will become an economic necessity.

In this new world, IT problems will be quickly solved, with authentication methods that are more bulletproof than anyone’s ever seen. Already-sophisticated telepresence systems by the likes of Cisco TelePresence Meeting and HP’s Halo put meeting participants in a room with life-sized 1080p HDTV and spatial audio that feels like those images across the table are real people.

One of these HP Halo systems is in action at DreamWorks in Hollywood, and it's downright uncanny. But each one of these swank luxury rooms costs a zillion dollars. That’s only temporary, though, because with the tremendous pressure of expensive oil breathing down the corporate neck, economies of scale and increased bandwidth everywhere will make this kind of visual and audio fidelity commonplace and cheap.

Managers will need to change their ways to adapt to this new world order. They will need to be more results-oriented, and set quotas for employees to meet. Some workers won’t be able to handle the pressure of suddenly becoming self-starters with concrete expectations to be met every day. It’ll be corporate Darwinism — adapt or die. But a lot of time won’t be wasted in needless meetings, idle water-cooler chatter and the worst part of the workday, the actual commute. And a lot of money will be saved on physical office space.

But something will be lost when home becomes office. You won’t be able to spontaneously treat your comrades to a drink after a big-business win. You can’t borrow a stapler from the guy down the hall. And you won’t get to see how your fellow employees carry themselves — a lot can be deciphered by the way a person swaggers down the hall. But we’ll have to make do. Worst, we’ll have to do a damn good job of it, because in the world of telecommuting, the office building next door is just as close as, say, India.