The research is in:  Working from home is bad for your career, your bank account, and your sex life.

More than 45 million Americans work at home in some capacity. And having the company’s blessing to do so has been linked to higher levels of employee morale and loyalty.

But working too often from home can be hazardous to your career. “It sends the message that even if your job isn’t expendable, you may be,” says Paul M.A. Baker, Ph.D., who studies telecommuting as the director of research for the center for advanced communications policy at Georgia Institute of Technology. “If you can do your job outside an office environment, so could someone else—at potentially half the price.”

In fact, a recent Korn/Ferry International survey found that 78 percent of executives believe telecommuters are at least as productive as office workers, but only 39 percent said they’re equally likely to promote someone who works from home. “Everything has a price,” says Baker. Here are seven other ways you’ll pay.

1  Your work will suffer. In a recent study, 44 percent of chief information officers said that telecommuters do lower-quality work. The reason: less in-person contact. “We laugh about the watercooler, but we learn an extraordinary amount there, especially through nonverbal channels,” Baker says.

2  You’ll communicate less clearly. No office chit-chat means you can dive right into your to-do list, right? Not true, Baker says. One company he studied created a virtual environment and found that communication became more complicated when employees used just e-mail and IM. “They saw a decay in the community workplace within 2 to 3 weeks,” Baker says. “Projects also became harder to manage.”

3  You won’t build trust among coworkers. “Around here, if somebody is sick, we buy and all sign a get-well card,” says Gregory K. Stephens, Ph.D., an associate professor and chairman of the department of management at Texas Christian University. “It’s a tiny thing, but it builds relationships. Multiply that by 1,000 times—that’s what you’re missing when you work from home.”

4  You’ll work less efficiently. You can learn more—more quickly—by working in the office, says Baker. At home, “you don’t have your boss or a colleague walking by and saying, ‘Hey, that’s not the best way of doing it. Here’s how you can save some time.’ ”

5  You’ll have less sex. “Research shows that men are increasingly meeting their future girlfriends or wives at work,” says Dawn Carlson, Ph.D., an associate professor of management at Baylor University and coauthor of Beyond Juggling: Rebalancing Your Busy Life. “It’s often indirectly. You go out to a bar and friends of coworkers show up, and you hit it off with one of them.”

6  You’ll miss opportunities to shine. The company president is walking down the hall to get his morning coffee when a billion-dollar idea strikes him. He needs someone to execute it. Joe’s in his office, and that’s how Joe invents the next iPod. “There’s quite a bit of serendipity that happens in the workplace,” Baker says.

7  You won’t be seen as a go-to guy. Want to seem indispensable to your boss? Make a habit of helping him defuse crises, brainstorm new ideas, and detangle nasty office situations. “When you’re not in the office, you’re not available for quick on-site projects,” says David Fleming, one of the pioneers of telecommuting. “There’s a perception that the crisis can’t be handled by a person working from home.”

TED SPIKER

Don't Try This at Home

Telecommuters have one thing in common: they're going nowhere. Here's why real players schlep to the office 5 days a week

By Gil Schwartz Photograph by Kevin Cooley

I'm sitting at my desk the other day, and my assistant buzzes. “Your 3:30 is here,” she says.

“Who?”

“Bob Botnick.”

“Send him in,” I say.

Bob’s worked for me in some capacity for a few years. I don’t know exactly what he does, but he’s always at his desk, nose in a spreadsheet. I like that. And Notfinger, whom I really trust, seems to respect him.

“Hey,” says Bob, as he enters and sits. “Well,” he continues, and then stops.

“Go ahead, Bob,” I say, thinking about how careful you have to be when you warm a pint of ice cream in the microwave so that it doesn’t melt all over the turntable. I’ve found that 30 seconds exactly will do it; any more and it turns to soup. But Bob is talking.

“ . . . working from home, for the most part” is all I catch.

“Pardon me, Bob?”

“I was saying,” Bob continues, “that I’ve been thinking about the possibility of working primarily from home, using existing telecommuting technology to become even more productive and effective.”

“Working from home?”

“Yes,” says Bob, warming to his task. “With the new digital video hookups and conference-call capabilities, I think I could actually do my job better.”

Telecommuting. That idea again. As always, when I hear the word, the following thoughts go through my mind, pretty much concurrently.

THOUGHT #1  WHY DOESN’T THIS GUY BELIEVE HE NEEDS TO BE AT THE OFFICE?
I know I do. If I’m not in by 8:30, I feel like I’m missing something crucial that could bite me in the ass before noon. I have a cup of coffee at my desk. I wade into the scene with a few phone calls. I see who’s in and who’s not. I read the newspaper and check the stock futures online. Pretty soon things to do start to accrue, simply because I’m there, you know? Haven’t you ever noticed that when you’re away from your office for a period of time, the volume of business activity declines, slowly at first and then more rapidly? The energy you bring to the workplace actually attracts work. If you’re not there, the spirit moves down the hall to some other, more ambitious soul. What would it be like to never really be there? And why does this fellow want that?

THOUGHT #2  DOESN’T HE LIKE TO BE AROUND HERE? IS IT SOMETHING ABOUT US THAT HE CAN’T STAND? Doesn’t he enjoy seeing me? I’m his boss. Doesn’t he think that part of his job is to hang around, suck up a little, inform me of things, bring me tidbits, and mosey out for a drink after work occasionally? Is his job all about his function and nothing more? Aren’t we fun to be around? I’ve always thought that we have a lot of laughs. My people like me. Don’t they? I wonder how many of them would take the option of working from home if I offered it. Maybe more of them. Maybe nobody likes me. Maybe this guy sitting in front of me is a living reminder that I’m not as popular as I think. Screw him!

THOUGHT #3  WHAT’S HE LOOK LIKE IN HIS PAJAMAS? Out, damned thought! I’ll bet he just paddles around his place in big, ugly boxer shorts and a ripped T-shirt, doing whatever it is he does with nobody watching. If he has a video conference call, he probably dresses only from the waist up. What a dork.

THOUGHT #4  WOULD I LIKE COMMUTING TO MY LIVING ROOM EACH MORNING? One of the greatest pleasures of working life, particularly when you have small children who don’t sleep at night, is to move to the quiet of your office, hunker down, do work, have lunch, think thoughts. I see people at the restaurant where I eat lunch, and I can tell they get dressed only to attend that meal. The rest of the day, it’s a bathrobe and slippers. I don’t think I’d like to wake up at 6 a.m., check e-mail, have some Special K, honk the phone, and then listen to silence until lunchtime.

Will this guy’s wife come in around 11 and ask him to go to the post office? Will he have to do it? What about in the afternoon? When would I start drinking? Probably around 5:00, 5:30 . . . except if it was raining and nothing was going on. Then I’d have a beer with lunch maybe, all by myself sitting at the kitchen table, and then another, and then I’d be drunk on my ass by midafternoon and take a huge nap until dinnertime. After 6 months, I’d weigh 300 pounds, and my wife would be threatening to leave me unless I checked into rehab. I don’t want to go to rehab! Why does Bob want to go to rehab?

THOUGHT #5  ISN’T THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TALKING TO SOMEBODY ON AN ELECTRONIC LINKUP AND BEING THERE IN PERSON?
I was at a meeting a few days before. It was a very big gathering, with high-level players from around the world. Corporate staff were in attendance; also lots of financial types. One executive was on vacation with his family and called in on our multimillion-dollar audio system. He sounded like he was talking through Swiss cheese. “Ug buh eck,” he said. “Very important to snzz whrrr bezanger.”

“I tell you what, Frank,” the chairman finally said to him. “Send us that information in an e-mail.” Then we said goodbye and the meeting continued. We all love Frank, so it didn’t hurt him, but what if this was the kind of thing he pulled all the time? After a while, wouldn’t we just forget to tell Frank we were meeting? I know exactly what happens to guys who aren’t in the big meeting. People talk about them. Doesn’t Bob realize that? What a moron!

THOUGHT #6  DOESN’T THIS GUY HAVE ANY AMBITION? Every promotion I’ve ever gotten was because somebody liked what I did and found me indispensable to them. The very definition of a dispensable employee is one whose function can be replicated elsewhere. How can you prove you’re not fungible without being present? And why doesn’t this seem to matter to Bob? There must be something missing from his character . . . something that I usually look for in people I want to work closely with and promote. In fact, why didn’t I see this piece missing in Bob all along? Hmmm.

THOUGHT #7  PERHAPS TECHNOLOGY HAS CHANGED A LOT, AND HIS SUGGESTION ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE. But wait! I’ve attended splendiferous video conference calls in recent years. They were stilted, abbreviated, tedious affairs, nothing like a real meeting. I know there are creative companies that have entire rooms that replicate a real meeting environment. I’ve seen them. They’re very impressive. The boss who runs the company is still down the hall in the corner office, though. There is that.

And beyond that? Video, schmideo. It’s still a stupid conference call. They put me to sleep.