Glass's contention seems confirmed by the Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey, which identifies today's typical telecommuter as a 49-year-old college graduate of either gender who earns about $58,000 annually and works for a company with more than 100 employees.

And the ranks of these employees, whether pure telecommuters or hybrids, are steadily increasing. The number of teleworking Americans has doubled, according to Census Bureau statistics, from 2.3 percent in 1980 to 4.4 percent by 2012.

Read: Treat workplace flexibility as a strategy, not a benefit

So last year, when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer put the kibosh on work-at-home employees — to the much-reported and extreme ire of the company's many telecommuters — she was bucking a trend that Bell and Watson could scarcely have imagined.

Decades of research from academia, government and the business community have substantiated genuine productivity gains from telecommuting.Many managers just don't care.

"The biggest barrier to telecommuting, by a wide margin," suggests the study by Telework Research Network, "is management fear and mistrust."

Authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson catalog a few of those fears in their 2013 book, Remote: Office Not Required:

• Weakening of corporate culture
• Exposure of trade secrets from theft or hacking of company computers
• Impracticality for a particular industry
• Loss of control over subordinates

Without question, telecommuting confronts managers and supervisors with a host of potentially problematic issues that must be addressed if the productivity benefits are to be achieved. But the objections can be overcome with facts and common sense, stress Fried and Hansson.

Southern California management consultant Robert Cordray, like most telecommuting experts, urges the effective use of available communications technology to keep in touch with remote workers: email, phone calls, texting, social media, teleconferencing, document sharing software and chat rooms: whatever works best for the particular organization and situation.

"Regular communications help break down barriers and build trust and confidence," Cordray says. To really foster morale and keep motivation high, he adds, nothing beats the occasional "face-to-face meetings and celebrations of company milestones and successes."

The communication factor and the capacity of employees to truly interact no doubt greatly troubled Mayer, as this paragraph from her memo last year to Yahoo employees reveals:

"To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices," she wrote. "Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings."

On this, Mayer has a point. Over the last few decades, after all, the open office architecture movement has touted the advantages of creating buildings with workspaces and traffic patterns that force the serendipitous interaction of employees from different departments, mindsets and expertise.

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And despite the most up-to-date, sophisticated technology, an employee from one department — or off site entirely — can't simply Skype someone from a different part of the company that they don't know at all and fall into a conversation without seeming intrusive, suspicious or just plain weird. But those unexpected, impromptu, offhand exchanges between employees in the cafeteria line, at the copier, in the parking lot or in the hallway may very well spur some real idea sharing and fruitful collaboration later on. At least there's always that chance.

Yet even on this point, there are solutions for managers and organizations committed to telecommuting. Fried and Hansson suggest that companies need to create a corporate culture that supports telecommuting. In such an atmosphere, Skyping or emailing someone you don't know wouldn't seem odd or intrusive at all, because it would be encouraged and normalized as part of an overall intra-company communications strategy.

Fried and Hansson have some additional tips for effective management of telecommuters:

• Make sure that employees in different time zones have about four hours of overlap in working hours.
• Use screenshots to communicate information.
• Share information openly on work schedules, to-do's, calendars, and files.
• Create a "virtual water cooler," a chat forum for fun and social stuff.
• Share progress on projects to fuel a sense of achievement and momentum.
• Consider a hybrid strategy, with some employees working in the office and some at home.
• Don't only try one remote worker — try at least a team.
• To find the best workers, hire internationally, but meet in person to ensure a good fit with the company.
• Watch for signs that telecommuters are burning out or feeling that their contributions are being ignored.
• Improve retention and morale by paying employees equally across geographic lines.
• Stress the importance of good writing, so that emails and other written communications get their point across without seeming abrupt, abrasive, or offensive.

Despite challenges and managerial reticence, fear and even loathing won't slow the telecommuting trend for one simple reason: Employees want it. Millennials, a workforce even bigger than the now-retiring baby boomers, want it the most. 

A recent study by Staples found that 71 percent of telecommuters said the option to work at home was a big factor in their decision to accept a job, so much so that 67 percent of these respondents said they would forgo other perks in order to telecommute.

But here's the irony: Working with Ctrip, China's largest travel agency, Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom conducted a study in which a randomly selected group of 125 employees were picked to work at home, and a control group of 125 workers remained in the office. After just nine months, half of the telecommuters asked to return to their cubicles. The reason: They were lonely.

Clearly, eating hot wings by yourself at the end of the day over your own kitchen sink just doesn't feel like happy hour.

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