If you get a job at Automattic, you don't have to worry about moving. Hell, you don't even have to get out of bed.

The company, best known for WordPress.com, is completely distributed, meaning its 230 employees work from home. Or they can work from home. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, notes that the company has a physical headquarters in San Francisco. "Well, you've got to have somewhere TO get mail," he explains. While a handful of employees work in the San Francisco office, the rest are flung across 170 cities. "It allows you to get the best and brightest people in the world," Mullenweg says. Automattic gives its employees a monthly stipend of $250 to get a co-working space if their home office situation isn't great. As an Automattic employee, you also get up to $3,000 to set up your home office.

Not far from Automattic's San Francisco office are some of the world's biggest tech companies — Apple, Google, Yahoo. None of them share his vision of a distributed company. Apple is built on a culture of secrecy that views working remotely as an unnecessary risk. Google provides free meals to persuade employees to stay at company headquarters all hours of the day. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer famously required telecommuting employees to start coming into the office in 2013 in order to foster a culture of innovation.

The breakfast bar at in the employee cafeteria of Google Inc.'s new campus in Kirkland, Wash., is shown on Oct. 28, 2009, during a media open house. Image: Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

Other distributed companies like GitHub, WooThemes, Mozilla and Upworthy are outliers. In 2014, despite advances in technology over the past few decades and the ubiquity of broadband, full-time telecommuters are a tiny minority. That may be changing, though, as a new wave of distributed companies challenge the status quo.

The telecommuting concept

In the early 1970s, Jack Nilles, a rocket scientist at NASA was contemplating the next big challenge for mankind.

"One regional planner said 'If you can put a man on the moon how come you can't do something about traffic?'" Nilles recalled recently. "The proverbial light went off in my head."

Nilles solution was telecommuting, a term he is credited with coining in 1973. Reasoning that many people on the road were traveling to and from jobs, Nilles decided to address the necessity of commuting. In that pre-PC era, "telecommuting" had a different meaning. Nilles' first telecommuting project was with an insurance company that was looking to increase its employee retention rate. Rather than let them work from home — which was impossible back then — the company set up satellite offices. Employees could then walk, bike or take the bus to go to work.

The introduction of PCs was a "eureka moment" Nilles recalled. Now, those same employees didn't need to commute at all, but could do their jobs from their homes, in their pajamas if they wished. In the ensuing three decades, the technology that allows for telecommuting has gotten better and better. In 2014, you can videoconference, share documents and collaborate in real time from your PC, tablet or phone.

Yet very few people work from home full-time.

In 2012, just 2.9. million people, 2.6% of the U.S. employee workforce worked from home full-time. Some 50 million employees had jobs that were telework-compatible, according to Global Workplace Analytics.

The group claims that if all those employees worked from home just 2.4 days a week for a year, then the reduction in greenhouse gases (51 million tons) would be equivalent to taking the entire New York workforce off the roads. Great damage to the environment could be avoided if more people worked from home and if more businesses let them, but that's not happening because of managers' fear and mistrust and current gaps in technology. As the latter improves, though, managers may begin to get more comfortable with letting their employees work remotely, even full-time. New companies could also be completely distributed and lack a physical headquarters, saving overhead costs.

Media richness theory

On the other hand, consider serendipity. If you put dozens or thousands of creative people under one roof, a few might connect and create something that they wouldn't have thought of if they stayed home in their pajamas. It's a sort of riff on the Infinite Monkey Theorum, which states that if you put monkeys in a room for a long enough time, they'll produce Shakespeare.

"We do our best work when we’re physically connected," says Roy Hirshland, CEO of T3 Advisors, a commercial real estate advisor. Dialing in on Skype will work in a pinch, but it's not a substitute, he says. "When you're in the same room, you can see facial expressions, you can feel energy in a room."

The idea is based on Media Richness Theory, which posits that some tasks require face-to-face interaction. Skype doesn't fit the bill. "Skype is a great, free way to communicate with sound and picture, but with glitchy connections, awkward camera angles, the limitations of webcams and cheap microphones, etc.," says Dr. Matthew Lombard, a professor at Temple University and president of the International Society for Presence Research. "It's far from the same experience as talking to someone in person. Face-Time and other tablet and phone methods have the advantage of mobility, but they suffer in terms of the vividness of the experience."

"Narrow-bandwidth tech like text-based chat rooms and messaging, and email, are great for specific, relatively straight-forward, 'dry' cognitive tasks but not so good for things that involve ambiguity and emotion," Lombard says. "So there are an awful lot of tasks people need to complete in business (and certainly in life generally) that don't lend themselves well to these technologies."

A more negative slant on this is that managers don't trust their employees. "The C-Suite largely 'gets' the business case for telecommuting, but middle managers are largely resistant. Why? Because they simply don’t know how to manage," says Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics. "They mistake presence for performance. If they can see the back of someone’s head, they assume that person is working."

In business circles, this is known as "managing by walking around." Lister says that's a 20th Century construct. "If managers are not managing by results or outcomes, they're not managing, they're babysitting," she says.

Mullenweg agrees. "It's easier to slack off in that office than if you're working remotely," he says. "If you come into an office and are well-dressed and on time, you assume people are working because they look busy. At home, all you have is your output — did you commit the code, did you write the post, did you make the proposal? There's no theater of physical proximity."

Some studies also show that remote workers are more productive. Chinese travel site Ctrip, for instance, found employees that worked from home made 13.5% more calls than workers in the office did. Such workers also reported higher job satisfaction than their office-bound cohorts. A Brigham Young University study also found that office-based workers found it hard to manage their work and home life after logging 38 hours in a week. For telecommuters, the limit was 57 hours.

Distributed companies

A recent Automattic company meetup in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Some entrepreneurs, like Mullenweg, see telecommuting employees as an untapped resource and have launched distributed companies. While no one tracks the number of such companies, FlexJobs, a site that lists telecommuting and flexible hours jobs, saw a 98% increase in job postings from 2012 to 2013. Brie Weiler Reynolds, director of online content at FlexJobs, says she still thinks that telecommuting jobs are "in the small minority."

WooThemes, which makes WordPress plug-ins and themes, is an almost-distributed company. Thirty-seven people work for WooThemes and are flung across the world. However, the company does have a nine-person office in Cape Town, South Africa. Mark Forrester, co-founder of WooThemes, says having such a structure can be difficult.

"Being distributed doesn’t come without it’s fair share of compromises," he says, noting that tax paperwork is particularly tricky when your staff are all based in different countries. Communication can also be a challenge. "A text conversation can often be misconstrued, so we try and jump on a regular Google Hangout with team members to get some face to face time. These hangouts are hugely valuable as well as entertaining. We also try to meet up once a year as a team — somewhere new and different. These trips increase in cost as our team grows, but we see both huge tangible and intangible benefit from them."

Like WooThemes, Automattic also organizes trips a few times a year so employees can have some face time. "What we save on office space we blow on travel," he says. Employees get to pick the location of such semi-yearly conferences. Once there, they get to know each other better, Mullenweg says. "We do some things like ideation and brainstorming that work better in person," he says. "We don't need to do this every day."

There are other ways to promote a corporate culture without physical closeness. Reynolds says her company, which is itself distributed, hosts online yoga sessions and uses social media to foster a corporate culture. "We use Yammer as our watercooler," she says. "We post pics of our dogs dressed up for Halloween." Reynolds says she believes there's nothing preventing a distributed company from being as big as Google. "As long as you're really thinking about corporate culture and looking for a way to build your workforce," she says. "It's really that forethought that makes a company reach that level."

Jeff Atwood, the CEO of Discourse says that savvy startups are realizing the advantage of using telecommuting as a recruiting tool. "There's a lot of talent that's is very, very untapped," he says. "Tapping that talent is a strategic advantage." Atwood believes that tech is a canary in the coal mine for a workplace change over the next generation.

"Think of 10, 20, 30 years from now," he says. "What do you think work's going to be like? Do you really believe it's going to be like today?"