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Work From Home People Earn More, Quit Less, and Are Happier Than Their Office-bound Counterparts (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Working from home gets a bad rap. Google the phrase and examine the results -- you'll see scams or low-level jobs, followed by links calling out "legitimate" virtual jobs. But Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Nicholas Bloom says requiring employees to be in the office is an outdated work tradition, set up during the Industrial Revolution. Such inflexibility ignores today's sophisticated communications methods and long commutes, and actually hurts firms and employees. "Working from home is a future-looking technology," Bloom told an audience during a conference, which took place in April. "I think it has enormous potential." To test his claim, Bloom studied China's largest travel agency, Ctrip. Headquartered in Shanghai, the company has 20,000 employees and a market capitalization of about $20 billion. The company's leaders -- conscious of how expensive real estate is in Shanghai -- were interested in the impact of working from home. Could they continue to grow while avoiding exorbitant office space costs? They solicited worker volunteers for a study in which half worked from home for nine months, coming into the office one day a week, and half worked only from the office. Bloom tracked these two groups for about two years. The results? "We found massive, massive improvement in performance -- a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home," Bloom says.
I see this as not so much as a collaboration issue but a management issue. There should be no reason why they could not contact you with technology that is currently available today to discuss an issue. There are people who must have that face to face interaction in order for them to participate in a project. I never understood that, but they do exist. I have worked on projects that have done both, remote and local, and saw no difference in the outcome. Some people just NEED to physically be there to be happy about the outcome. Me not so much. I find most human interaction distracting when performing my primary job function. I usually ignore them anyway when in the office.
You are more than likely an extrovert. You require that physical face to face to feel that you accomplished something. There is NOTHING that can not be done locally that can not also be done remotely (physical labor excluded). Everything you described in your comments CAN and ARE accomplished remotely just as well as when you are physically located in an office building.
Frustrating is not the word that you should be using for your 3 meeting pull ins. That is disruption from your primary task (also called chaos).