Even telecommuters commute sometimes.

But what if you worked for a company that had no office, that employed you, trained you, paid you, but existed only in cyberspace? Would you be happy and fulfilled or alienated and driven? Companies that are foregoing bricks-and-mortar altogether and embracing virtual-ness are finding plenty of qualified employees who are willing to find out.

Who's punching the virtual time clock and why

The virtual corporation--an ethereal collection of people who use technology to work together across geographical or organizational boundaries--comprises more than hermits and malcontents. Regular people are doing it, in part because it allows them to better balance work and life.

Take John Beishon and his son Marc and daughter Jessica. They run Beishon Publications, a specialty magazine publisher, from their homes in Brighton and London, England. Using private Web pages called a virtual private network, they collaborate with editors and designers, looking at the same magazine cover while discussing it on a separate phone line. The flexibility lets Marc, for example, pick up his son from nursery school in mid-afternoon and return to work in the evening.

Closer to home (where's that, virtually speaking?), in Utah, Trevor Petty recently finished his internship at Johnson & Company, which calls itself "The Virtual Agency." He's now working as the company's information officer while he pursues an MBA. The draw for Petty is "having a balanced life and being able to do the things that are most important to me."

Jennifer Johnson started the virtual PR and marketing consulting company in 1997. At the time, she was a marketing executive with Novell, Inc. Then one day she found herself shooing her kids through the Salt Lake City airport so they could meet their father's incoming flight and give her enough time to make her departure at another terminal. Settling into her seat on the plane, she decided that something had to change.

Johnson's early employees were mostly women who had dropped out of the workforce to care for their families and wanted the flexibility that working virtually offered. Lately, however, it's young professionals in their twenties who want that flexibility. "To attract and retain the best and brightest talent," Johnson says, "businesses must treat workers like customers, giving them significant choice about when, where, and how work gets accomplished. The virtual environment allows self-directed individuals to thrive."

Attending the virtual company picnic

Petty's successor in the internship program at Johnson & Company is Angela Davenport, a student at Brigham Young University. Her husband is in medical school. Working virtually lets her "set my work hours so that during my husband's few hours of free time we can actually see each other."

Compared to traditional office workers who lament that they spend more time with their office mates than they do with their spouses, Davenport doesn't see her coworkers much either. So, how do you create a corporate culture when the interaction is virtual?

Johnson & Company does the usual--company newsletter, regular conference calls, instant messaging, daily emails. It also holds four retreats a year. These bring together virtual coworkers from across four time zones.

Petty says the retreats are "a great opportunity to learn from each other and get to know one another." Thanks to all the phoning they do, however, he says that "we often recognize our coworkers voices sooner than their faces."

Johnson concedes that "by far, the most difficult component in building a strong virtual business is creating--and then continuing to reinvent--a strong virtual culture." Besides the retreats, "other things we do to create virtual unity," says Johnson, "include sending holiday gifts through the post, and then having a teleconference party to allow everyone to share the excitement real-time."

The folks at Beishon Publications (only three of them--and family to boot) find it much easier to stay connected. Corporate "meetings" happen over lunch in a London pub once a week.

Come together, right now, near your customers

For William Pape, co-founder of Verifone and current chairman of AgInfoLink, a virtual company that tracks beef from ranch to refrigerator case, working virtually isn't so much about balancing work and life as it is a response to "the strong business reasons for locating close to the customer." Pape should know. He and Bill Melton pioneered the approach when they began Verifone, Inc., in 1978.

"We had less than five percent of 4,000 employees within 250 miles of headquarters," says Pape. "Back then, people just considered us weird." There was method to their madness, however. Says Pape, "It allowed us to maximize face time with our most important stakeholders."

With all his emphasis on the customer, Pape doesn't discount the importance of an infrastructure to support far-flung employees. In fact, he thinks that an interdisciplinary team is most effective when it has the underlying cohesion that a common corporate culture provides. For that reason, "It's most likely that employees scattered around the world will come together virtually for projects within the corporation," he says, instead of teams of freelancers with no affiliation to the company.

Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, take another view. They see the future as an "e-lance economy," in which, as Laubacher says, "the distinctions between large and small, inside and outside the corporation, are likely to blur and become less important."

The e-lancer, the virtual worker, is a "have specialty, will travel" mercenary who belongs to an elastic network of specialists. "When a project needs to be undertaken, request for proposals will be transmitted or electronic want ads posted, individuals or small teams will respond, a network will be formed, and new workers will be brought on as their particular skills are needed. Once the project is done, the network will disband."

For this to work, technology, the reason virtual workplaces now exist, has to continue to develop at the speed of Moore's law (which states that the pace of microchip technology change is such that the amount of data storage that a microchip can hold doubles every year or at least every 18 months). And, according to Laubacher, "supporting institutions and practices will need to emerge to make an e-lance future socially viable."

As CEO, CFO, and CIO of his one-person writing business, RANDALL BRAAKSMA is virtually working virtually all the time.