As work-from-home arrangements have become more common, they have inspired debate, suspicion and sometimes-unrealistic expectations. But the trend toward having employees who do remote work at least part of the time has shown no sign of slowing.

Pressures created by long commutes, limited workspace and the desire for a better work-life balance have made more-flexible work arrangements irresistible in industries where technology makes telecommuting possible.

"The sales associate at a retail store can't telecommute. There are always going to be some jobs that don't lend themselves to remote work," said Lisa Horn, an executive with the Society for Human Resource Management. "But in the information age that we live in, many more jobs will lend themselves to remote work."

Horn, co-leader of SHRM's Workplace Flexibility Initiative, notes that her group's research with the Families and Work Institute found that the number of employers offering work-from-home opportunities has risen from 34 percent in 2005 to 63 percent in 2012. And a recent Stanford University study found that overall, 10 percent of the U.S. workforce can now be classified as remote workers.

Given the growing popularity of telecommuting, the question about remote workers isn't whether to allow them to work from home any longer. Instead, what's increasingly become apparent is that remote workers are some of the hardest workers around.

In fact, it's all-too-easy for them to work and work and work.  

It starts innocently

Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software firm, wrote on the topic in a book he co-authored, "Remote: Office Not Required." 

When people are "set free from punching in at 9 and out at 5, it's easy to don the shackles of working around the clock," he wrote.

"It starts innocently enough. You wake up by opening your laptop in bed and answering a few work emails from the previous night. Then, you make yourself a sandwich and work through lunch. After dinner, you feel the need to check in with Jeremy on the West Coast about that one thing. Before you know it, you've stretched your workday from 7 to 9.

"That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout

"That's why managers need to establish a culture of reasonably expectations. At 37signals, that means that we expect people to work no more of 40 hours a week, on average.

"There are no hero awards for putting in more than that. Sure, every now and then there's the need for a short sprint. But most of the time, the company views what it does as a marathon. It's crucial for everyone to pace themselves."

All of this is a far cry from the days when the primary concern about remote workers was that they would be too easily distracted when working from home, or that they would abuse the freedom of working outside the office and become less productive.

This "shirking from home" school of thought has been dismissed by many — including productivity experts who have studied the matter — but has proven hard to shake.

The debate was revived earlier this year when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced that her company was bringing its remote workers back into the office. At the time, Mayer said that her company needed to rediscover its collaborative vision by having employees who interacted on a daily basis, not lone guns working from home.

The move was criticized by many as a backward step, and few companies have followed suit. But the points Mayer made do resonate with many.

Josh Marquart, IT program director with Minneapolis-based UnitedHealth Group, said that having workers who can talk to each others in the hallway and spontaneously meet to work on a problem does foster an agile, productive work culture. "The rapport you grow with your staff; the nonverbal communication, just does not exist when working from home."

On the other hand, Marquart is a believer in remote workers. "Some of my best staff I've never met in person," he said. "Some people are very, very good at it — they make the extra effort to reach out and talk to people, they maintain the relationships. They tend to be the ones who are very clear about what they have delivered."

Clocking out

Beth Ruffing, manager of HR services and workforce optimization for Insperity, a Houston, Texas-based HR consulting firm, said avoiding burnout of the sort Fried writes about requires good communication between worker and manager.  

"If you've got an employee who's never clocking out, sending emails at 3 in the morning, I think you need to get out there and meet with them, and find out what the root cause (of the problem) is," she said.

Jacques Capesius, a longtime remote worker, said regular communication helps address the other big problem for people who work from home.

Capesius was an early employee of Compellent Technologies, an IT startup that was purchased by Round Rock, Texas-based Dell in 2010. He often worked at home during his years with Compellent and works primarily from home now as a software developer and IT architect for Dell.

Capesius said the managers who do best with remote workers check in with them on at least a weekly basis and use tools such as video conferencing to promote collaboration. Such steps, he said, can ease the feeling that remote workers may have of being both out of sight and out of mind.

"When you're working from home, there's a certain disconnect from the people you're working with," Capesius said. "The hardest thing about working from home is the feeling of isolation that comes with it."

The "out of sight, out of mind" dynamic can have long-term implications for a career. Experts familiar with remote workers say opportunities for promotion may be fewer when a worker isn't in the office on a regular basis.

Building parameters

Ruffing and others said companies and managers can avoid those kinds of problems in many cases by better structuring an employee's duties and expectations at the front end of the process, when work-at-home roles are being created.

"Before managers put a telecommuting program in place, they need to build a solid set of policies," Ruffing said. "They should work with employees and the HR department to determine how suitable the job is for telecommuting and how sustainable (telecommuting) is. Then they need to build some parameters, some metrics, around it."

Horn agreed. "It's incumbent on the manager and the worker to have clear objectives and goals set out," she said. "What are the expectations on what that remote worker is to deliver? As long as they're delivering them, there's no difference between the remote worker and the worker at a bricks-and-mortar institution."