I work at Cloudera, and engineering has work from home/no meeting Wednesday. It allows people to work wherever they prefer and are most productive, and to have the whole day to focus with minimal distractions.
That said, we do still communicate as needed for the active work. But we do so in terms of emails, chat messages, and sometimes phone calls between only the necessary parties, without any long scheduled meetings or meetings that provide value in the longer term (eg. interviews or longterm planning meetings) as opposed to helping someone do the right work today.
It works great, we've been doing it for basically the whole life of the company, and I don't see it stopping.
I work from home / where ever every day. And, it is wonderful. I can even take as much unpaid time off as I want, whenever I want, as long there is no disruption of business services to our clients. This works because I get paid hourly (I don't work = I don't get paid) and we have very fine granularity in tracking what work was done when. There is also high trust amongst all the team members that everyone is being honorable.
It does work, but has its drawbacks, for one it's communication requiring extra skill (and effort) when people don't see each other frequently. Seems that way to me (I currently operate in an environment similar to yours).
That said, we do still communicate as needed for the active work. But we do so in terms of emails, chat messages, and sometimes phone calls between only the necessary parties, without any long scheduled meetings or meetings that provide value in the longer term (eg. interviews or longterm planning meetings) as opposed to helping someone do the right work today.
It works great, we've been doing it for basically the whole life of the company, and I don't see it stopping.