[berntb]

>>if you ask them it's all personal problems

I did a double take when I saw that. I have to ask:

Five of eight really say that personal problems influence work that much for so long?!

You do realize that is statistically unlikely?! (Unless they are in e.g. Pakistan, with natural and man made catastrophes.)

[calibraxis]

Yes... to hazard a guess, the team members may be coming up with superficial reasons. They may be correct, but not touching upon the more relevant underlying problems. Maybe there's even unnecessary self-blame occuring. If the OP's assessment is correct, that they're "talented guys", then parts of the problem may be solvable without resorting to firing.

BTW, are the coworkers talented in the context of the company's technical goals?

In this situation, I might ask what these coworkers think about working away from home. Like at a nice nearby coworking facility. (I'd offer to mandate this for X days in the week, in case they need to externalize the blame to me in front of spouses who've come to expect their presence.) Working from home is often psychologically difficult, due to whatever upbringing or natural predisposition.

Having a short daily stand-up could help. I think some of the idea behind it is that people want to have something to say in front of their peers.

http://howwework.thinkrelevance.com/stakeholder_narrative.ht...

Maybe more from that page could translate into this telecommuting situation. Teams frequently don't learn from their mistakes, beause they're not institutionally accustomed to thinking about them. (Like with retrospectives/postmortems.) Especially if they're mentally stuck in the leader/follower model, where they don't stray far from The Way Things Are.

There's another red flag: "I don't want to micro-manage". In my view, this often means, "People should independently work on their things, at least as far as I'm concerned." I suspect this frequently happens when you have an individually competent person with weaker team skills. To use corporate-speak, maybe the synergies of working in a team are under-utilized.

[firingtest]

I think it's likely due to telecommuting because as far as I've seen telecommuting can do this to you. Unfortunately opening up an office is not something I want to do due to financial overhead and geographical limitations.