I've now spent a year with two different virtual workforces. I've learned a lot about my own motivation and seen numerous situations that can easily demotivate an individual. The lack of water cooler socialization makes common courtesy and constant communication critical factors in maintaining a professional work environment that encourages productivity.

Complicated Hierarchy - either documented or inferred, a manager that allows one member of the team to manage tasks of another member runs the risk of a hidden power struggle that can destroy the strongest chemistry. These power struggles become obvious in person, but over phone calls and emails the subtleties of inter personal relations do not become apparent.

Poor Communication - obviously poor communication will destroy a non-virtual work force as quickly as a remote one - however an unmotivated worker in an office environment usually finds something productive to do to make the day go by or out of fear. If you don't find out every day what everyone in the team is working on it is likely some of the team is working on nothing.

Secrets - If a team is being divided with projects that the rest of the team isn't privy to you'd better have a good reason. In an office environment the uninvolved members can group together (and regardless of how you feel about gossip) unite with common speculation, in the virtual work force resentment and paranoia easily spring up without any recourse for the isolated workers.

Undocumented Tasks - It is critical to a technology company to be able to have a very light and flexible work plan -- especially in Internet applications, as a traditional manager I would frequently ask programmers to quickly work out a feature or fix a bug verbally with no documentation -- body language clues would let me know that we were on the same page and this approach usually worked. Too frequently in the last year I've gotten one line IMs to do a quick task with no knowledge of the scope of that project, or seen my name in a passing email that listed me as working on task that needed to be far more defined before I could get started.

Without group interaction to make sure everyone on the team is working towards the same goals it is very easy to have poor work load distribution and duplication of learning code that is unnecessary.

Let me say that I AM a big fan of the virtual work force, if managed properly it can accomplish far more without office politics, loss of commuting time, and work place distractions. These and other benefits can truly motivate the new technology work force, contrary to the expectation that self-motivated virtual employees need less structure, quality management is MORE important and more costly in time and infrastructure than in traditional companies.