We’ve been following the saga of New York City’s “congestion fee” plan, an $8 fee that would apply to the nearly 1 million cars that enter Manhattan everyday.

As we noted in a previous post, this kind of solution, while well-meaning, can only have a limited impact on the problem of overcrowded streets. That’s why we were very pleased to see this opinion piece in Newsday. Allowing people to come in at different times would help stagger traffic and avoid what the author calls “crush hour”.

But why not take that idea farther? The problem with flextime and other traditional alternatives to the daily grind is that they are based on management giving employees permission to act outside work norms. But as we wrote a month ago, traditional alternatives to work end up being a game of “Mother, May I?” that employees can lose at any time.

There is no reason why New Yorkers (who, last time we checked, had access to cell phones and laptops) couldn’t choose how, when and where they worked. Frankly, given how rich and complete the typical New York neighborhood is, there is no reason why people couldn’t work and live in their communities. And while it might seem silly to live in the Greatest City in the World only to work virtually, it actually makes a strange kind of sense. You’d end up taking part in the aspects of the city you enjoyed most, without giving over so much of yourself to the rat race.

Unless, that is, people like the rat race? Don’t tell us you honestly like the rat race . . . .

Sue Shellenbarger’s Work & Family blog has a chilling story about how telecommuters are being “called back” to the office in droves. The reasons are “a push to consolidate operations, and the notion that teamwork improves when people work face-to-face.”

The notion. The . . . notion. The . . . one more time . . . notion.

We find it funny (as in sad funny, not funny funny) that businesses will spend incredible amounts of financial and human capital to improve processes, systems and methodologies, but they are still satisfied with “notions” when it comes to their HR practices. So you’ll have companies going ga-ga over Total Quality Management, but then turn around and recall telecommuters based on a belief about face time.

Can you imagine an operations manager saying that she has a notion that changing suppliers or using a different manufacturing technique will lead to increased product quality? Would a marketing director say he has a notion that targeting a certain demographic will lead to increased sales?

We’re not saying that employees never need to meet face to face. Or that we need to shut down every office around the world and have everyone work remotely. What we’re asking is that organizations hold their HR practices to the same standards that they apply to the rest of their business. That means taking a step back, examining assumptions, experimenting with new methods, and then listening to the results rather than freaking out and doing what’s always been done before just because it’s comfortable and easy.

If you’re a company that is rethinking telecommuting, we’re asking that you rethink it again. And we hope that whatever decision you make, you make it on something more substantial than a notion.

We’ve been sitting on this story for two weeks now because we kept waiting for it to surface in other news outlets. But it hasn’t so we’re going to bust this whole thing wide open.

The gist of the story is that, according to Public Law 106-846, federal workers should be allowed to telecommute “to the maximum extent possible without diminished employee performance.” And yet it took a federal arbitration panel to get the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to allow some of its workers the chance to telework “on a pilot basis.”

Now we realize that there are all kinds of laws on the books that go unenforced. And we won’t nitpick to death the bit about “diminished employee performance” and telecommuting pilots and all that. Instead, we’d just like to note the fact that a better way of working and living isn’t going to happen from the top down. You cannot write a law that changes what people believe about work.

We’re glad that the arbitration panel ruled in the workers’ favor, and while we don’t have any of the details, we can imagine that it took somebody standing up for their legal rights and, more importantly, for what’s right. We’re glad you did.

Change is painful, isn’t it?

We’re not surprised at all at the findings in this study. We see it everyday when we speak at companies with traditional work environments. People who have less freedom resent the people who have more.

But what interests us about this piece is the paragraph toward the end that proposes the solution:

“[B]y ensuring greater face-to-face contact between co-workers when all employees are in the office and granting greater job autonomy, employers may be able to counter these problems”, according to the study published in the journal Human Relations.

So we’re supposed to ensure greater face-to-face contact, but also grant greater job autonomy? In other words, the way to react to the changing face of work is to make people do what we think is best for them (greater face-to-face), while also letting them decide what’s best for them (greater job autonomy). Huh?

We’re not criticizing this kind of mixed message. Given where we are in this global change in how we view work, it’s not surprising that there is confusion.

Our traditional attitudes about work make tempting solutions to our workplace problems because they give us comfort. They are the devil we know. Our emerging attitudes about work are the devil we don’t. Even though give people more control is better fit with the business and the personal realities of a global, 24/7 world, embracing this idea is a little scary.

But here is one thing we know: we’re never going back. The traditional eight-to-five, in-a-cube world of work isn’t dead, but it’s dying. So the question for those miserable souls watching other people enjoy their freedom isn’t how to make them feel better about being left behind, but how to bring them along with us.

Charming piece by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, who writes a workplace trend blog for TIME. She talks about the gossip you miss by working at home. (She is also working on her snack-hoarding problem . . . wink.)

One thing we’d like to add to the conversation is the following prediction: there will come a time when we won’t have a debate about whether it’s better to work at home or work at the office.

Of course there are pros and cons to both, but there are so many variables (nature of the task, personal work style, etc.) there will never be one answer. The point is that people need to have the power to choose between the two.

The nature of that choice is important. Right now, most people have to make one commitment to an alternate schedule. (For example, you have to commit to four ten-hour days.) What’d we’d like to see is people being able to choose between working in the office or out of the office on a daily, or even hourly, basis. Work at home from eight to ten, then go into the office for two hours, then go to a coffee shop for another two hours, then back to the office for a quick meeting, then home again.

If people are delivering outcomes, there will be no need to talk about where they are being delivered. As people who work in a Results-Only Work Environment will tell you, after awhile you don’t even notice.

We were catching up on our work-life balance editorials the other day when the following jumped out at us:

“In a survey of 46 studies looking at 12,883 employees, the authors found that telecommuting improved job satisfaction, performance, turnover and stress, and did not harm career prospects. Telecommuting, more than half of the time, did harm relationships with coworkers, but not with supervisors.”

What struck us as interesting was the difference between how managers and coworkers view non-traditional work. Perhaps managers are coming around to the fact that people with more control over their work (i.e. working from home, working “odd” hours, etc.) can still produce results. The fact that managers don’t see their people doing the work doesn’t prevent them from recognizing that the work is getting done.

But what about an employee’s peers? Here, it seems the stigma of non-traditional work still holds true. When you’re working in a non-traditional way, your coworkers end up being more fixated on how you get work done as opposed to what you’re getting done. They don’t see the reduced stress, the increased productivity, or other benefits. They just see you getting away with not having to come in while they suffer through a long, confining, forty-plus-hour week crammed into a cube.

We’d be interested in hearing from both managers and employees about this disconnect. For those of you considering flextime or telecommuting, what are you more worried about? Being supported by your boss? Or being supported by your coworkers?

And for the managers out there reading this, what do you think holds you back from encouraging your employees to work differently? Is it fear of decreased business results? Or fear of the social backlash in appearing to give an employee “special treatment”?