Employees at Yahoo have had a rough decade. The company has been drifting aimlessly with little vision, an endless parade of CEOs, and a flatlined stock price. That’s not exactly a conducive environment to be inspired and motivated within, let alone do the stellar work that Yahoo needs to pull out of the rut.
So it’s no wonder that they’ve been suffering from severe brain drain for a long time. But Yahoo is a big company, and there are surely still lots of talented people who don’t want to leave (or can’t)—waiting for better times. Unfortunately, it appears they’ll be kept waiting, if Yahoo’s announcement of “no more remote work” is anything to go by:
Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices. If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps. And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration. Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices.
The leadership vacuum at Yahoo is not going to be filled by executive decrees issued on such flimsy foundations. Imagine you’re a remote worker at Yahoo and you read that. Hell, imagine you’re any kind of worker at Yahoo and you read that. Are you going to be filled with go-getter spirit and leap to the opportunity to make Yahoo more than just “your day-to-day job”? Of course not, you’re going to be angry at such a callous edict, declared without your consultation.
What this reveals more than anything is that Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not. In their blindness they’re reaching for the lowest form of control a manager can assert: Ensuring butts in seats for eight hours between 9-5+. Though while they can make people come to the office under the threat of termination, they most certainly cannot make those same people motivated to do great work.
Great work simply doesn’t happen in environments with so little trust. Revoking the “yard time privileges” like this reeks of suspicions that go far beyond just people with remote work arrangements. Read this line one more time: “please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration”. When management has to lay it on so thick that they don’t trust you with an afternoon at home waiting for the cable guy without a stern “please think of the company”, you know something is horribly broken.
The real message is that teams and their managers can’t be trusted to construct the most productive environments on their own. They are so mistrusted, in fact, that a “zero tolerance” policy is needed to ensure their compliance. No exceptions!
Who cares if Jack is the best member of the team but has to live in Iowa because his doctor wife got placement at a hospital there? Or if Jill simply can’t deal with an hour-long commute anymore and wants to spend more time with the kids? With a zero tolerance policy, there’s simply no flexibility to bend for the best of the team, and thus the company. The result is a net loss.
Now imagine all the people who actually have a choice of where they want to work. Does management really think that the best Yahoo employees currently on remote work arrangements will simply buckle and cave? Why on earth would they do that given the wonderful alternatives available to remote workers today? No, they’re simply going to leave, and only those without options will be left behind (and resentful).
Yahoo already isn’t at the top of any “most desirable places to work” list. A decade of neglect and mounting bureaucracy has ensured that. Further limiting the talent pool Yahoo has to draw from to those willing to relocate to Sunnyvale, or another physical office, is the last thing the company needs.
Companies like Google and Apple can get away with more restrictive employment policies because they’re at the top of their game and highly desirable places to work. Many people are willing to give up the improvements that remote work can bring to their life to be part of that. Yahoo just isn’t there. It’s in no position of strength to be playing hardball with existing and future employees.
The superficial trinkets, like a free phone or free meals at the cubicle compound, are simply not going to serve as adequate passage for a zero tolerance work place that’s still fumbling its way out of a haze of disillusion. In fact, it cheapens those initiatives when the things that really matter, like the power of teams to recruit and retain the best, are curbed.
The timing of all this couldn’t be worse either. Remote work is on a rapid ascent, and not just among hot tech companies like Github, Automattic, or thousands of others. It’s been taking hold in supposedly stodgy big companies like Intel, IBM, Accenture, and many others. Worse than simply being late to that party is to try to turn back the clock and bait’n’switch your existing workforce.
Yahoo deserves better than this. It’s one of the classic brands of the internet and it’s painful to see it continue its missteps, especially on something so fool-hearted as trusting its employees and attracting the best talent.
But if recent history is any guide, I guess Yahoos without options to leave can console themselves with the fact that the average CEO term in the past six years has been a mere one year. So the odds are good that a new boss will be in place within long.
Interested in learning more about remote work? Checkout our upcoming book REMOTE: Office Not Required. It details all our lessons from more than a decade working remotely along with those from the growing list of other companies reaping the same rewards.
GeeIWonder
on 25 Feb 13What this reveals more than anything is that Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not.
You’re basing your assumption on your conclusion and vice-versa.
Is there any evidence they are this unaware? I agree it might be a bad move, but only might. The line about interactions has some real merit, and one would think they might deserve the benefit of the doubt. All that said, they may just be giving up altogether.
I, for one, am actually keen to know.
Ron Phillips
on 25 Feb 13Donella Meadows observed that when she looked at a broken system, she inevitably found that everyone knew where the levers were, but that they were firmly pushing on the wrong end.
So with Yahoo, in this case. Things aren’t going well? “More centralized control” is the knee-jerk answer, which is analogous to a driver steering away from a skid.
DHH
on 25 Feb 13Gee, if this isn’t about who’s productive and who’s not, it’s even worse! If they know for a fact that some remote workers are more productive (as plenty of studies keep showing), then they’re alienating great workers over less great workers in the office. Whatever it is, it’s the last thing Yahoo needs.
Daniel Tenner
on 25 Feb 13Management paranoia is not the only reason why someone would want to decrease the amount of remote work. There are team spirit benefits to bringing people together physically, and depending on the type of work being undertaken, remote work may have more downsides than upside.
I don’t see this as an aggression against remote workers, or an attempt at controlling remote workers more closely based on some paranoid perception that “they’re slacking” – it seems more like a change meant to help strengthen the culture at Yahoo by making it easier for teams to bond.
Mike
on 25 Feb 13Yahoo is a weird place. It has gone through the full spectrum of fame and it is having a tough time surviving. It is a like a B-rate actor struggling with losing its 15 minutes of fame at being an A-lister. It is thrashing about and has done for a long time.
Management only speaks one way (otherwise it is not management, it is something else), so I try and look at the intention and need behind what I agree is a very clumsy statement.
There is little guiding vision in Yahoo, what there is , is in the rear view mirror of the past. They have a need to get this in order and to build momentum behind that vision, to recreate trust with each other.
That is easier if they physically share the same space and use that to their full benefit to help people connect and form bonds of trust and comradeship (I don’t think they can BTW). When such binds are in place it is much easier to work remotely and still be part of a ‘family’. If however people are simply coming to Yahoo offices to occupy cubes and nothing more is done to help them connect, then its worse than useless (because now they have even more pissed off).
I’m guessing at the need and I’m giving the Yahoo management the benefit of the doubt that they simply clumsy at communicating it.
Carlos A. Becker
on 25 Feb 13I fully agreed with you.
Right now I work in a company that force me to sit 8 hours of my day in a chair, and this doesn’t prove anything.
I’ve worked on this type of environment before, and, I know, if the employee want to procrastinate, it will. Doesn’t matter where. Proxies can’t block this too.
Anyway, unfortunately, in Brazil, this is the “normal” type of work. 8 hours far from family, even when it’s not necessary, just to “prove” you’re actually working.
Also, as always, great article, David.
Cheers.
Antelio
on 25 Feb 13This is a kind of hard decision. Who take this decision, choose to pay the side effects about this.
Don’t treat anyone as a idiot: - The Management Team didn’t take this decision without notice of the bad results of this decision. - I think that a good part of the “Remote Employees” was taking too much about this benefit, and this was the measure of this decision.
But, this is Yahoo! Problem and care about them, the decided and know about the price about his decision.
Brad Patterson
on 25 Feb 13This kind of PR could be a springboard for great discussion about Yahoo and why it’s taking this decision. The decision in itself certainly isn’t the problem—- it’s the way it’s presented and the lack of transparency for why it was taken.
It might be the right decision for them, but the light in which it was presented is pretty lame…
GeeIWonder
on 25 Feb 13This is Marissa Mayer, so it’s just not a Yahoo! complex thing.
This would indicate to me there is a class of problem—perhaps cultural or social (some of the insider stories seem to point to this) and/or perhaps something exciting and groundbreaking as well, that requires a change in MM’s opinion.
I just don’t believe for a second she is naive or pulling on the lever without knowing which side is which.
Tom Ordonez
on 25 Feb 13Isn’t Marissa Mayer from Google the CEO of Yahoo? I thought coming from Google she will know better than the dictatorship culture of a mega corp. Who are remote workers in Yahoo? developers? customer support? sales? Clearly those making the no remote decision have not worked at any of these positions.
Garth
on 25 Feb 13I’ve been working at a US based company who have over 90% of their R&D staff based locally at their HQ. When the UK company I worked for was purchased by them back in the early 2000s, over 90% of the R&D staff from the UK company worked remotely. We picked some great developers regardless of their location in the UK, hooked them up with a (then) ISDN line and everyone worked remotely. And they worked brilliantly too.
During the last decade my managers have asked me on a number of occasions what was the secret of making remote working so successful – they wanted to distill and bottle the formula and roll it out to the rest of the organization. The single answer I gave them was ‘trust’. For so long, managers wanted to see their staff working. If you trust great people they will do great things. Put your emphasis on trusting and nurturing your co-workers and they will reward you no matter which location they work.
It sounds like those at Yahoo need to start trusting again.
machbio
on 25 Feb 13Yahoo has clearly lost it with this rule of not allowing remote workers in the company.. It has lost several group of geniuses like “people who are old and know a lot of technology but want to work from home”, “people who are young but away from the yahoo offices” and several other groups.. It would be nice to get some data on the attrition rate of yahoo in another 3 or more months..
Seyed
on 25 Feb 13Any online company that has bunch of advertisements on its first page about other businesses is doomed.
P.S. I’m reading REWORK, amazing! \m/
BossMan
on 25 Feb 13The beatings will continue until morale improves!
kerrigan
on 25 Feb 13There isn’t a single yahoo related data point to back up any of your claims, and you posted many hypotheticals.
Maybe work from home productivity is lower than “9-5” employees at yahoo? We don’t know that, so it shouldn’t be part of the argument as much as your opposite opinion without data to back it up.
You write about how yahoo’s “trinkets” are cheap yet praise Google’s environment which is chock full of these so called unimportant perks.
This opinionated article is a rant and not really deserving a post on a website that normally contains very high value content.
Alessandro Piana Bianco
on 25 Feb 13“Companies like Google and Apple can get away with more restrictive employment policies because they’re at the top of their game and highly desirable places to work.”
Maybe.
Or maybe, they have a company culture that’s made stronger by the fact that their resources are part active part of that culture. It’s not a case that both companies are expanding (or building new) campus-like HQs, with Google recent announcing £1bn investment for their new London, UK HQ, their plans to extend their Mountain View HQ (http://goo.gl/Gsygs); or Apple ‘spaceshift’ project (http://goo.gl/wXzGo).
What these places offer is not only ‘free meals in the cubicle’, or nursery service, gym, bus shuttle, etc. etc. but also the opportunity to see (as in understand) the way other teams work, interact, hopefully improving communication across teams.
My personal experience, in 15 years as a UX professional across various sectors and having worked pretty much all over Europe, is that is very difficult to deliver (efficiently) with distributed teams, and the more atomic those teams are the more difficult it is.
In the specific of Yahoo! situation, is extremely hard to say if the ‘decline’ of the company was due to bad management as poor strategy/lack of vision, or bad management as in product/resources management, that finally led to low morale, and finally complete anarchy (of sort).
Also I can’t really see any trend towards remote working, particularly in the high end spectrum of industries were knowledge, creativity, insight is the killer feature – and even more so where those elements should be company-shared values spread across multi-functional teams working in (extreme?) agile (in the broad sense, not the project management methodology restricted sense only).
Finally, given the background, and experience, of Ms. Mayer, she probably know better… what you think?
Chris Carvache
on 25 Feb 13Making an obtuse decree like Yahoo! management has done is a bit sad. While there are certainly merits of having face time, working from home shouldn’t be stopped cold turkey. This pushiness certain workers for the crimes of others and quite frankly gives Yahoo’s leadership team a punching bag lack of creative vision.
scrum dystopia
on 25 Feb 13I’ll bet they’ve got the scrum glasses on… the purpose of scrum is to make your workers more compliant by doing stupid impossible things like a lot of meetings and estimating and planning etc, and standing up and saying “my show and tell for today is…” and have the same conversation every single day like a kafkaesque nightmare…they’re not interested in productivity, they’re only interested in torturing their employees. According to Elaine Scarry, once you begin torturing you cannot stop, therefore this is merely more compulsive behaviour from presumably yahoo mgmt. How’s that for insight?
Louis
on 25 Feb 13I am not sure that remote working is adapted to huge companies like Yahoo, where it is very hard to hire only the best and most motivated employees. This is made worse by the fact that Yahoo is not a hot company anymore, so I think the situation will only get worse, it’s as vicious cycle.
I agree with David though on the fact that the way they announced this shows how little trust they have in their employees. Basically they’re saying “we have no clue why Yahoo is falling appart, so it must be because people are not working hard enough. Let’s supervise them”.
Paul Graham explains what went on rather well in his essay What happened to Yahoo (Summary)
Alain Mevellec
on 25 Feb 13I had very bad previous experiences with remote employees. I believe these rules should have been applied way before.
A company need people talking with each other, face to face not by IM.
IMHO this is a great decision.
Your article isn’t fair and it’s easy to knock on Yahoo today, but it’s like ROR and PHP, you gloriously think to be ahead while 90% of the web run the other langage.
Long live Yahoo!
Mark
on 25 Feb 13Oh I wish there was a “Like” button on this comments page. Big love to scrum dystopia for “once you begin torturing you cannot stop” – I’m nicking that quote :-)
Gaurav
on 25 Feb 13Just want to leave this here:
There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say, ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas. - Steve Jobs
Goran Peuc
on 25 Feb 13Show me one big and profitable company where people can continually work from home.
Benefits of having people in the same space far outweight few perks which come from working from home. If that means Jill will be fired because she cannot come to work – alright then. Note that any company will be fine if you have to stay at home for a few days in a year to wait for the Cable guy.
Furthermore, your demonisation of working at the office is just absurd. 8 hours sitting behind your desk! 9-5! Horror! Working in the office for me always meant talking with interesting people, discussing ideas right there on the spot, learning new things from coworkers, exchaning books, celebrating bithdays, enjoying out time together, having a cool desk with my LEGO Technic models on it, having a chair which is awesome (and which I would never afford/care to buy on my own) and having an awesome environment.
I have worked from home for 3 years. I would never want to relive that horrible experience again.
boris gloger
on 25 Feb 13David,
I would love to know – how you can make a distributed environment super productive. I would love to learn the secret of this. Any study I know – any creative company that I know goes the different approach. Bringing people together face2face.
Please share your insights with us.
best boris
Evan Hamilton
on 25 Feb 13I think, as other commenters have mentioned, that you’re making a lot of assumptions. If I were a jaded man, I’d say you were doing it in order to sell your book. Instead I’ll assume this is just an emotional reaction.
Possibilities:
1) There has been rampant abuse of work-from-home. 2) The staff is not let down and upset because those affected were already spoken to (as indicated in the memo.) 3) Morale and team connectedness are SO low that this is an emergency measure to try to keep the company from falling apart.
I agree that it’s not ideal but desperate times call for desperate measures. I also think many companies are so different from 37signals that the model you use just won’t work for them.
People have lots of opinions and judgments about 37signals without any real knowledge. Don’t do the same thing to Yahoo!
Alan Hodgkinson
on 25 Feb 13“Beatings will continue until moral improves” You’ve pointed out a symptom, and correctly identified it sign of the ‘distrust employees’ disease.
Building trust requires having multiple interactions with people, which takes time and effort. This means that management must invest time in their employees, building relationships that inspire and motivate employees to do their best, even when the boss is not around. The key is giving accurate feedback, both good and bad, in a constructive way (about things the employee can actually control). This requires effort, and the willingness to make this effort shows concern for an employees wellbeing, which further builds trust.
By being unwilling to invest the time and effort required to build trust, Yahoo management is ‘cutting costs’ in a very shortsighted way. Given their less than stellar performance, this doesn’t surprise me. Unfortunately, alienating employees is the first step in encouraging the best and brightest to leave. This rapidly becomes a vicious circle which could turn into a death spiral. Let’s hope they can break it before it’s too late.
alex
on 25 Feb 13it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices. —> THE BIGGEST LIE EVER!
they are probably just trying to get more work done with the same amount of people, but they are trying in the wrong direction
Patrick Corcoran
on 25 Feb 13Let’s paraphrase. David likes having the option to work from home. Yahoo! doesn’t like people working from home any more. Therefore Yahoo! management is making a bad move here.
There. I just trimmed 1500 words off the diatribe.
Anonymous Coward
on 25 Feb 13I feel like remote work is great if everyone is an expert and has worked together closely in the past but it can get selfish when your best people aren’t around face to face to pair/explain things on a whiteboard (still no great digital equivalent)/help train others/etc. For pure personal productivity remote work can’t be beat… But for working closely as a team I’d still rather be sitting next/pairing with the people that are building a product with me.
I’d say a combination of both is ideal… 2 weeks together…..month remote kinda thing
kinkfisher
on 25 Feb 13Just a minor nitpick: IBM has been pretty good about remote work for quite some time, so it’s not “taking hold” only now as your post implies. I was only a temporary employee 7 years ago, but I have friends there in various divisions at various locations (even internationally), and only one of them has not been working remotely on a regular basis.
Nathaniel Mallet
on 25 Feb 13I’m not sure it’s a question of Yahoo! not trusting its employees (that’s for someone at Yahoo! to judge). It could be that they have a cultural belief that close proximity leads to more innovation and better products. There’s certainly plenty of evidence, both factual and anecdotal, that supports that belief. (Exhibit 1: a recent New Yorker article provides convincing arguments, that people working closely together, face to face, can lead to higher quality products or revolutionary innovations).
It’s not to say it’s impossible to do amazing work by working remotely (37Signals is a good example that it is possible). But it’s probably not fair to say that working remotely is the only way.
Seth Eheart
on 25 Feb 13Thanks for the great post. At first glance, I disagreed, but the more I digested your points are very valid and fair. My biggest complaint about this type of management is the trust factor. Micromanaging team members shows distrust and kills any chance of creativity and or innovation.
David Bressler
on 25 Feb 13Valid points.
I’m a remote worker.
Definitely needs to be a balance, and all that. And, I believe that they’re right, some things only happen in person. I miss those things in my daily work experience.
The question I wonder… with the return of all the people to the office, are they going to be treated like adults with reasonable accommodations, or simple put in tiny cubicles (or worse, open areas) for “collaboration” efficiencies?
Bring people together, and give them professional workspaces, and it’s a great move. You can’t go half-in… doing so reeks of “lack of trust” because it’s all “take” and not much “give.
David
Ted Drake
on 25 Feb 13Many Yahoos see this edict as the “Dav Glass Problem”. Dav is arguably Yahoo’s most important front-end developer – who happens to work remotely. Making a broad decision like this means Yahoo could lose a tremendous resource. Companies like RackSpace, PayPal, Etsy, and many others have been actively reaching out to the remote Yahoos.
Disclosure: I worked in the Yahoo! Paris office for two years on Yahoo! Finance. I was essentially a remote employee with the teams in London and Sunnyvale. Carol Bartz closed engineering in Europe to consolidate development in California and India. This could be seen as yet another short sided move that looks better on paper than in reality.
Mike
on 25 Feb 13Well said David. I’m going to be writing about this on my blog too and referencing your well written post, as this happened to me several years ago at another silicon valley corporation. In my experience, only people who have really proven their ability to work remotely are allowed to do so in the first place. Companies and managers are smarter than that, and don’t let just anyone work from home. And you are exactly right – this does not foster an environment of trust and respect. Remember, people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. That can extend past the first level manager, all the way up. Besides, this nonsense about “missing out on hallway coversations” is bogus. I’m assuming these folks periodically visit the office, conferences, user groups, coffee shops, etc. There’s a mistaken view that remoters never leave the house. We are all more connected than ever. Sometimes I IM with my coworkers more than I talk to them in person.
Fred
on 25 Feb 13Stuff gets done or it doesn’t. (from an office or your bathroom)
Barry Graubart
on 25 Feb 13Not so fast… I have worked for a mix of companies, ranging from completely virtual to single-locations. And while I, personally, love the flexibility a virtual company can provide, it’s important to understand that there’s not a single approach that works for all companies,
Yahoo has over 11,000 employees, with “hundreds” who work remotely. This suggests that the Yahoo culture has been focused around people all being in the office. What that likely means is that much of the information sharing probably occurs through face-to-face and informal discussions. I worked in one company like this. Some of the most important strategic discussions occurred not informal meetings, but in casual “hallway” conversations between the co-founders. Working from home, I would have missed a lot of key discussions.
I love the virtual model – but it requires tools and processes to be effective (and 37 signals provides some great ones). At my last company we used chat rooms, IM, texting and other tools to communicate. We out in place processes, supported by Kanban boards, to facilitate handoffs. It worked great. But without those tools and processes, it would fail.
Every company needs to understand its culture, and what tools, processes and policies are needed to make that culture work for them. Yahoo will certainly lose some talented people because of this policy, but if it helps Marissa and her team build the culture they see necessary for Yahoo’s success then it will be worth it.
proctor
on 25 Feb 13DHH, great post Not surprised that Yahoo would take this approach and the approach is very transparent. They are trying to thin their payroll with smoke and mirrors. That is all. Not about whether they really want people in the office or not, they want to make payroll cuts without getting Wall Street’s attention. They have many employees living vast distances from any Yahoo office, so this is just a transparent attempt to get rid of them without a newspaper headline about cuts. Also, while Yahoo is an early internet company, their rate if innovation has, at least to me, seemed like zero. They have not had any hit records for a while and that is the sound of a toilet flushing on Yahoo soon.
proctor
on 25 Feb 13sorry, last one, their new home page sucks in the sense that even on a large desktop monitor the large “featured” image takes up a good 50% of the screen, and blocks the rest of the news. All I used to go to yahoo for was to read some features news, now I don’t even know what is featured as it is all blocked by a vapid lame-a** giant photo. Goodbye yahoo
Drew McKinney
on 25 Feb 13A view from the other side: “Many of these people “weren’t productive,” says this source. “A lot of people hid. There were all these employees [working remotely] and nobody knew they were still at Yahoo.” These people aren’t just Yahoo customer support reps. They’re in all divisions, from marketing to engineering.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-told-remote-employees-to-work-in-an-office-or-quit-2013-2#ixzz2LvrczNM2 http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-told-remote-employees-to-work-in-an-office-or-quit-2013-2
James
on 25 Feb 13This could have been better executed at the team level where the line managers are more in-touch with the people affected by such a policy change.
Andrew Rondeau
on 25 Feb 13I worked at Intel when they scaled back significantly on telecommuting. In Intel’s case, they were addressing a clear cultural problem:
Many Intel employees were abusing telecommuting benefits! Some held two jobs, others ran liquor stores, others merely “did the minimum” to keep benefits while they worked on startups. In one case, an employee that I worked very closely with told us that he was “telecommuting,” but instead took a vacation and spent 20 minutes a day checking email!
This could merely be a way for Yahoo to clean out people who’ve found a system that’s easy to abuse.
El fuser
on 25 Feb 13Classic case of mistaking the symptom for the problem?
Symptom being “why aren’t our teams productive”?
Wrong answer being “because of where they’re typing”.
Mike
on 25 Feb 13@Andrew Ok I guess those employees are abusing telecommuting. Why not just fire those employees?
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
on 25 Feb 13My guess is that Ms. Mayer was presented a list of options for expense reduction and a more effective business in general and this was the least draconian option she could have picked. Everyone is speculating about this move, and inserting their own biases, mostly without actual hard data, which are undoubtedly internal to Yahoo.
David, I disagree with your projection that Mayer won’t last. I think she’ll turn Yahoo around.
GregT
on 25 Feb 13“Show me one big and profitable company where people can continually work from home.”
Telus, which is the dominant phone/Internet provider in Western Canada, is big even by US standards, profitable, and strongly encourages work-from-home (or so my friend who works there tells me). You literally don’t ever have to come into the office if you can organize your work life appropriately. In reality, most Telusers (so I am told) come in once a week or so.
Dave Yankowiak
on 25 Feb 13Who’s to say Mayer didn’t do the research and found out that they were getting way more out of employees at the office than those who work from home? Maybe that’s what is driving this decision. I love telework and have a “work anywhere” job myself, but sometimes there are different situations where having several team members working in close proximity might be a better option. I think Mayer knows what she’s doing.
MattR
on 25 Feb 13This article is highly uninformed and premature. Clearly remote work and office work both have benefits, and no one could say that either (or a hybrid) is the only right way to go. I think the above comments well articulate many experienced benefits of both situations.. Without pretending to have any data or non-public knowledge of Yahoo, I think one thing can be generally agreed upon:
Yahoo is not performing well. It’s products fall short of their competitors in terms of creativity, ingenuity and speed to market.
Creative processes on the scale of a Yahoo product are inherently collaborative. To dismiss the possibility that having people work together in the same space for several hours a week might improve the company’s output is short-sighted and ignorant. The company brought in Marisa Mayer to create a game change and in turn, she is instituting her own game changes. She may likely fail, and this one policy change may have a negligible impact on that. While the inclination to armchair CEO may be high, it exhibits competence on par with Mayer’s predecessors.
Abdu
on 25 Feb 13If Marissa were the CEO of Google, would she have made the same decision at Google or is this specific to Yahoo and its condition?
pwb
on 25 Feb 13I generally agree with your contrarians and I’m sure multi-geography works well for 37s and many companies. But I think you’re probably wrong on this one. Remote working at Yahoo has simply become a way to be paid for not working. Instead of trying to fix it, they are smartly just cutting it off. If they want to re-introduce such a thing I. The future, it will be their prerogative. It doesn’t mean any more than “we’d like to see you in the office”. The anecdotes about super stars working in odd locations are a little ridiculous.
Dan
on 25 Feb 13Perhaps Yahoo doesn’t know who their productive employees are. Perhaps they do. As much as this seems like a bad move, it certainly wasn’t working for them as is. No move is the worst move. Was the work at home flexibility was running amuck? Maybe, just maybe, Yahoo is overstaffed. When you really can keep track of your 20 or so employees working from home may be very effective. Only time will tell if this one move and future moves will help to revitalize what has been a stagnant organization. They need to change the culture and it’s hard to do this if people aren’t doing life together.
Google’s take on working from home: ‘How many people telecommute at Google?’ And our answer is: ‘As few as possible’ … There is something magical about sharing meals. There is something magical about spending the time together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer ‘What do you think of this?’ These are [the] magical moments that we think at Google are immensely important in the development of your company, of your own personal development and [of] building much stronger communities.”
Patrick
on 25 Feb 13Nice article, David! Makes me think if this policy applies to women in pregnancy too, and if not, wether it applies to (top-)management.
Emma Siemasko
on 25 Feb 13Awesome article and contribution to the discussion surrounding Yahoo’s decision. Some are saying that this might not be a bad decision, but stripping workers of benefits and perks is always a bad decision! Aren’t there other ways to measure productivity rather than making people come in to the office? The choice to remove remote work is draconian, especially for a tech company where many are writing code all day. If I were one of Yahoo’s remote workers, I’d look for new employment immediately.
Keith
on 25 Feb 13Interesting article. I wonder though, Pixar seems to attract and produce the highest quality product year in and year out. They spent a significant amount of time developing their working spaces around person-to-person collaboration in a face-to-face environment. On what grounds do they succeed with face-to-face while others are insane to suggest it? The informal nature of conversation and collaboration often happen best in a physical environment because it’s atypical to be attuned into how to invite the right folks at the right time. Physical space restructuring and creative working environments can go hand-in-hand. It may not be the norm, but throwing the baby out with the bath water seems a bit premature.
Kevin Wise
on 25 Feb 13Great post, David, and yes, the perfect plug for your new book (which I highly anticipate!).
There is plenty going on behind the curtain at Yahoo! (which, no doubt, it necessary) but I don’t see how the peeps at Yahoo! didn’t immediately consider a resume update before logging into the Ladders or LinkedIn job board.
It’s a shame that’s there is compelling logic behind this move (there must be, right?!) but seemingly great for those competing with Yahoo and/or in need of their (now demoralized) talent.
Kevin Wise
on 25 Feb 13Great post, David, and yes, the perfect plug for your new book (which I highly anticipate!).
There is plenty going on behind the curtain at Yahoo! (which, no doubt, is necessary) but I don’t see how the peeps at Yahoo! didn’t immediately consider a resume update before logging into the Ladders or a LinkedIn job board.
It’s a shame that compelling logic exists behind this move (there must be, right?!) but seemingly great for those competing with Yahoo and/or in need of their (now demoralized) talent.
Kiran
on 25 Feb 13“Are you going to be filled with go-getter spirit and leap to the opportunity to make Yahoo more than just “your day-to-day job”?”
David, you are right on the money. Most analysts and industry pundits are missing this, they explain this as a move to cutting fat. Guess what Yahoo just did, it cut the throat and the company is slowly going to bleed to death. How can you be excited to work for such a company? I have employees who literally put nights and weekends when needed to get things done. Do you see that happening when you are company is saying ‘I dont’ trust you’?No way.
PS
on 25 Feb 13Way to fly off the handle without pulling the curtain back. I don’t know this for a fact (and neither do you) but my guess is they have one main objective: change the culture. Requiring physical presence seems to be one of their tactics for achieving that result. And yes, people who don’t want to be a part of that culture will self-select out of it. It’s odd that you are so incensed. They are employees of that company. If they want to get paid they will follow orders. Remote working isn’t an entitlement, it’s an allowance by the employer.
Jacek
on 25 Feb 13I have been working from home most of the time since 2008. Last year I had a 7 months job where I had to to work from office. I hated it. I am more productive at home.
Sometimes I would get stuck for many hours, pointlessly staring at the screen, not being able to move forward. I never had such problem at home. Often solution to a problem would come to my mind 10 – 15 minutes after leaving the office. While in the office best ideas came to my mind during lunch break.
I think the problems lies with explaining to managers that I work best when seemingly I am not working.
Hank
on 25 Feb 13Wow, this just seems crazy. I can see companies not wanting full time remote workers, but splitting hairs about the cable guy is bizarre. As a Silicon Valley software engineer who works from home 2 days a week, I would be polishing up my resume if I were at Yahoo. Are there really that many meetings or the constant need to be available to talk? Does e-mail, IM, texting, VNC, and phone calls not suffice? Where I work we front load the week with in person meetings so people who want to work from home later in the week can. Having to come in to take attendance, when all I need to go is go heads down and get stuff done, is wacky stuff.
dougom
on 25 Feb 13Daniel Tenner writes, “There are team spirit benefits to bringing people together physically, and depending on the type of work being undertaken, remote work may have more downsides than upside.”
Do you have data to support that? I don’t want to sound like a douche, but: There is data to support the assertion that workers who work remotely are more productive. (It can be argued with, but it does exist.) If you can define “team spirit” in some kind of quantifiable way, and then show evidence that such a thing is improved by forcing people to come in to a central office, then I can accept it as an argument. Otherwise, it sounds like the same kind of fuzzy reasoning management often employs when they want to do something but don’t want to explain it.
In my experience, people use a lot of vague terms to argue in favor of butts-in-seats-synergy, teamwork, team spirit, and so on-but what it boils down to is when you have butts in seats, you can point to it for upper management and it “looks like” your team is working hard. But as a different poster pointed out, if people want to procrastinate, they’ll find ways even if they’re forced into an office environment for 8-10 hours a day. And I know one thing: Forcing people to commute every day does not make them more energetic or productive.
PixelSlave
on 26 Feb 13It’s purely my conspiracy theory—Marissa Mayer is doing that just to cut the workforce w/o laying off people. “Oh, you leave by yourself, and we don’t own you a dime.”
Joseph Putnam
on 26 Feb 13This posts seems to be no more than a rant based on little to no facts. While the premise may be accurate, there’s no way to know yet, and the post is based on a lot of assumptions about Yahoo who’s CEO came from Google and is likely putting policies into place that create the right kind of workplace environment to engender the successful culture she was a part of at Google. I’m all for working remotely and believe that a lot of employees can be more productive this way at a lot of companies, but I don’t feel there’s a one-size-fits-all for every business. I think we also can all agree that Yahoo has had a lot of room to improve for sometime now, so how do we know that this change won’t be beneficial. Sorry for a mini-rant of my own, but I’m impressed with what Marissa Mayer has done so far and personally don’t think injecting some of the Google mojo into Yahoo can be a bad thing for the company. Ok, rant over, and yes, 37 Signals is entitled to its own opinion on the topic.
Barry Kelly
on 26 Feb 13This article would be a lot more readable on my phone if it worked like a desktop site. I can’t get any Android browser to treat it like one, and as a result could only scan through it – the text is too big and the lines too short, too little content on the screen at once and too much scrolling needed to read, making my eyes dizzy.
Andrew
on 26 Feb 13Sounds like an awful lot of questions that a good CEO would answer when making an edict like this one.
Also sounds alot like that teacher at school who would put the entire class in detention because he/she was too weak to punish the few students misbehaving.
n
on 26 Feb 13This article offers a better prospective: http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-mayer-is-right-to-ban-working-from-home-2013-2
Emmet
on 26 Feb 13Marissa is charged with making some pretty dramatic change at Yahoo, and while I personally like the idea of a remote work option, I can see where she is coming from. Yahoo has been moving sideways for the better part of a decade, and a culture of complacency has taken root amongst many employees. People are coming in late, and leaving early.
By setting a precedent that hard work is expected, and valued, it reminds employees that they are in war mode, and during war certain privileges may need to be suspended in favour of the greater good.
Working from home is very much a privilege, not a right. I would imagine they will eventually move back to a policy of “use your best judgement” with regards to remote work, but until they’re out of “war mode” I think this may be a necessary evil.
Alessandro Piana Bianco
on 26 Feb 13Looks like people in the know, know better:
Ex-Yahoos Confess: Marissa Mayer Is Right To Ban Working From Home
Mark
on 26 Feb 13Not much logic in this article to be honest. Difficult to comment on it.
Jason
on 26 Feb 13Spot on. Old things are passing away. The age of meritless work being paid are coming to an end. The mindless s(u)hits whose only contribution is to show up early, act very busy while doing nothing important all day are in big trouble. Yahoo! stopped leading over 10 years ago, has spent the last decade circling the drain and has just been disconnected from life support. The pity is that someone so highly paid (Yahoo’s CEO) gets the honour of pushing the entire company over a cliff.
testlarry
on 26 Feb 13Marissa is failing. Yahoo is failing in my opinion. Look at their “new” homepage. Windows 8 much? Me too culture can only give you a limited lifespan and limited innovation.
something else, Yahoo has too many employees, no matter where they are located. A function of being on the big board (stock market) seems to be hiring hiring hiring and then wondering what the f*sck the people are even doing. Culture in a large organization is difficult to maintain. You can’t rely on everyone to be a good apple. Some bads ones in there too.
testlarry
on 26 Feb 13@ DHH
I wish you would post a follow up article on how the growth within your company, in terms of employees, has been handled. You clearly have all good apples on board, but how do you do that? Is it the screening process? Is it culture? Is it threats or perks? Is there fine-grained accountability for each person’s hourly/weekly/monthly performance? You’ve gone beyond a handful of close partners now, so you have some insight for the inbetween size operations, i.e. not the original 37 and not the Yahoos of the world.
Eric
on 26 Feb 13As a small business owner in the software development industry, I think this article overlooks an important fact that I have learned from real experience. Regularly working from home only works for the A+ developers who are highly motivated. While I would love to house a company full of these A+ players, attracting significant numbers of high-calibre employees is by far the most challenging task a business owner faces in today’s technology industry. Creating a social, trendy, and fun atmosphere at work attracts top talent, and their presence helps the B/B+ players up their game.
Matt
on 26 Feb 13I think I remember this wise man once say that the key to being productive at home, is to install a parental-control browser filter. wink
Jonas Bruun Nielsen
on 26 Feb 13Clearly, this decision must have been taken out of desperation. It’s easy to speculate, but hard to guess what went wrong. Working remote is more productive, so is this a management, communication or culture problem?
My guess is the remote developers are being cut off because they haven’t signaled the value of their work. If it was clear to management how much value remote workers deliver, this would probably never had happened.
To those interest, this is a problem we’re trying to solve with Remoting.io for remote developers.
Btw, I’m really looking forward to the book, David.
Paris
on 26 Feb 13Marissa Mayer is known for her controlling attitude and this decision is a result of her black and white thinking. Ironically, people say she is really hard to get along with so she would definitely not be the 9-5 type herself. Also, she built a nursery in her office so she could bring her baby to work, this is a sign that she probably lacks empathy for working parents.
A lot of the telecommuting abuses people mentioned above can be solved by making small changes such as giving clear tasks to people and giving them a time to finish the tasks or telling them to report their progress at certain dates. I’m sure there are people who abuse telecommuting but it is wrong to punish everybody for a few bad apples. Instead of totally banning telecommuting they could have required the employees to show up maybe 2-3 days a week that way they could have had their meetings, face-to-face communication done and after that people could have finished the work from their homes. This is not just a freedom or comfort issue but it is a personal compatibility issue too. Not all people can perform best when they’re in the office because there are so many distractions. I’m talking about us introverts. Personally I hate distractions, I don’t chat just for chat’s sake and I hate office politics. I can’t get into the flow state when there are so many distractions.
Mark Dupree
on 26 Feb 13All workers impacted had already been contacted from their manager. It wasn’t a blind-side.
If remote workers productivity is 30% lower than those in the office. Seems like it is pretty cut-n-dried.
No, but they can make them members of the team and get them involved in team activities. Home workers are rarely team leaders.
It isn’t a trust issue – it is a productivity issue.
No one who works remote at yahoo is considered a serious ‘team’ member. trust me – they wee thought of as outcasts.
No. The gain is in the loss of the dead wood that is going to quit because the 9-5 grid scares the crap out of them.
Now we are starting to get to the point of the excersize.
Show some studies on that. The most recent ones I’ve seen show it is contracting. Many more companies are not hiring those that need remote work.
All-n-all, it was a brillant move by Mayer to sharpen up the focus and team work of the company.
Adam's Myth
on 26 Feb 13Yahoo is trying to fix a problem DHH has never faced: how to clean up flaky multi-layer middle management in a large business.
37Signals’ remote workers succeed because the owners are alert. If you don’t deliver, someone notices immediately, and, as DHH posted recently, it’s easy to fire unproductive workers in the States.
Yahoo is too big for that. Mayer cannot mind the whole store directly, so she needs alert lieutenants. How do you quickly evaluate the alertness of those lieutenants?
Yahoo likely resembles what I saw at my first job, which was Apple during the Scully era: an organization infested with bored lifers in middle management, who covered for the faults of other bored lifer employees they have known for years. Once these weeds have been allowed to take root, they become a morass that is very difficult to assess and remove. Forcing everyone to be on site for a while MIGHT help root this out.
Not saying she’s doing the right thing—just that it’s a very hard problem, and DHH’s experience to date doesn’t inform a solution.
AJ Kandy
on 26 Feb 13Re: Pixar’s workspaces: Some of the space is open, but a lot of the work also happens in the “beach huts,” small offices where animators can concentrate.
Image via Veerle Pieters’ flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/veerles-blog/461586084/
There’s a wealth of evidence that shows that open space is great for brainstorming, but the noise levels and distraction factor actually hurt productivity and increase stress. By contrast, small spaces with low ceilings encourage flow states and deep thinking / productivity.
If you can’t build that in, then the next best thing is a culture of quiet. A school can’t be all cafeteria, all library or all classroom, but they need all three spaces. Too often, open-plan offices are all cafeteria, IMHO.
CD
on 26 Feb 13There’s a lot of sweeping, statistical generalizations in the comments here. It all comes back to the fact that work is an organic situation and we’re organic people. There are no absolutes.
There’s also the whole trickling down of misery. If your business is being run by someone who appreciates their employees and allows them to thrive in their position, the office “culture” can be great. If it’s 2-hour meetings to teach them how to save a file and talk about their cats, that’s a completely different story. Because bosses are organic, too.
Productivity can be measured. Measure it and react accordingly, but don’t make sweeping, alienating changes. Forcing someone to be indoctrinated into a “culture” is, historically, not a great idea.
Jason
on 27 Feb 13I think there’s a lot here that’s not being said. I highly doubt that the problem they are trying to solve actually has anything to do with telecommuting. My thoughts are that there is a huge culture issue caused by the leadership vacuum, and telecommuting has become the focus to address that – “Hey, if we’re all in office then things will come together better”. Another possibility is that they were hacked like google, facebook, etc. and see remote access as a potential vulnerable security point and decided that admitting it wasn’t in their best interest. Of course, it’s all speculation. I look forward to hearing from an ex-Yahoo employee about what the real issue is.
Anonymous9979
on 27 Feb 13Commenters, what the hell are you on?
The Business Insider article linked above, and many of the comments, first assert that many of the remote workers are chronically and intentionally unproductive.
Ok, let’s assume for the sake of argument this is the case: there’s a bunch of remote, and only remote, workers, who are so unproductive it’s worth it to move them to an office.
So, the obvious solution is to fire the unproductive workers.
Every employment contract I’ve signed (I’m Australia based, but AFAIK the US has similar law here) the company can fire you whenever they want with a couple weeks notice for any reason or no reason at all. So the hurdle [most probably] isn’t legals.
Perhaps they’re trying to see if the remote workers who are unproductive will become productive once they’re in the office; however, if the company is in such dire straits that they’re making people move to 100% in office, why take the risk? Just fire them now; Yahoo hasn’t shied away from laying people off before.
The amount of effort it’s going to take to add all the offices (why would they have a ton of offices ready and waiting for people who don’t use them?), wait for the employees to move city (what? you thought all the remote employees were within an hours drive of the closest relevant Yahoo office?), wait for them to become established in their new city/office/people (remember the last time you moved to a new job? how long it took to adjust, learn the area etc.?), is huge. And after all that, then you’re going to see who’s the most productive? This is the solution to productivity problems, spend a bunch of money (new offices, relocation costs, time lost while waiting for people to move, adjust, etc.) and then see who’s good?
Hang on a sec though. What if these unproductive remote workers decide to stay lazy and unproductive in the new office? How will Yahoo be able to tell? Are they going to hire people to look at people’s monitors (the whole 9-5 time period too, otherwise you’ll miss tons of unproductivity when you’re not looking)?
Obviously not; they must have some other, non-retarded way of measuring productivity, otherwise this is a completely pointless exercise as they still won’t know who’s unproductive.
Presumably it’s something like measuring (broadly) how much code they’re committing, or (broadly) how many tickets they’re closing, or asking them each day what they’re working on and what they did the day before, or setting reasonable deadlines and expectations, and seeing if they meet them.
Of course, you couldn’t apply any of these measures of productivity to a remote worker, could you? Oh wait.
Of course you can measure remote workers’ productivity, using the same tools you already use to measure in-office workers’ productivity. Why would you move them to an office, go to all that expense and effort when you can measure their productivity right now? That would be silly and ludicrous and a waste of resources.
Hmmm, why then is Yahoo! going through with it anyway? There’s only one logical answer I can see: Yahoo! doesn’t have any reliable way to measure individual worker productivity at all, for either on-site or remote workers!
That is serious: a huge company like Yahoo!, with large amounts of capital , and a responsibility to it’s shareholders, doesn’t actually know if it’s workers are productive.
And Yahoo! have the vague hope that the unproductive workers will quit first rather than be unproductive in the office (fat chance, if they already know they can get away with it, why wouldn’t they continue; especially at the company who’s just made them move 5 states to a city they don’t like?). Or that somehow Yahoo! will magically be able to ascertain who is productive and who isn’t, when they haven’t been able to to date.
Those are such flimsy hopes that I certainly wouldn’t dick up a bunch of my workers lives for it.
If Yahoo! isn’t moving the workers on-site to make them more production, then the only other real alternative that the commenters have suggested is that being in the office will somehow make everyone, the already on-site, and the previously remote, workers, more productive, like if you have 10 developers in the room they combine and emit productivity dust (and a rainbow).
To this I say: show me the data! Only a fool would make all the employees go through this effort with not data to back them up.
My opinion is with David’s: they are employing 1950’s management culture in the hope it will bring their 1990’s company into the 2010’s; unfortunately, all it’s going to do is give them a big fat $00.00 at the end of it. What a clusterfuck.
Rob
on 27 Feb 13Richard Branson thinks it’s about trust: ‘Working life isn’t 9–5 any more. The world is connected. Companies that do not embrace this are missing a trick’.
Zingus
on 28 Feb 13layoffs. coming.
They should have checked before who was productive on what, but they probably never deployed a reasonable system for that. Money raining from the sky, 90s’ positivism, that kind of stuff got in the way. Now it’s simply too late, so they’ll piss everybody off.
James Abbott
on 28 Feb 13Not an easy topic to judge; it’s an apples & oranges situation (Yahoo! isn’t 37Signals). For me personally, the most productive combination is 20% i the office, 80% on my own / remotely. Seeing people face to face is important; being able to work at one’s own pace, in one’s preferred environment, etc is also very important.
A healthy mix of in-office and remote is ideal but may be unattainable in practice, so depending on the situation, a company might want to amp up one or the other. Having never worked at Yahoo!, I can’t say whether this move is right or wrong – but it definitely does go against the growing trend. Will be interesting to watch the aftermath of this policy.
Sebastian
on 28 Feb 13This post is making me stop following the blog.
What do you know about Yahoo’s inside situation? What if the best performers were the ones that showed up at the office most of the time? What if they were surveyed before making this move? What if they prefer that showing up is the best general principle?
When you run a large organisation you need general principles, where you need to be very clear. You can then give some freedom to be managed within teams, but that’s not a thing you should communicate at the same time you are putting the principle forward.
I can’t believe the arrogant tone of this post. This arrogance is a thing that I’ve been perceiving for a while in David’s or Jason’s posts. Instead of giving your humble opinion, many times I find you are writing as if you were in a high standpoint, given to you by whom?
Disappointing.
Best
Kevin
on 28 Feb 13Everyone here seems to be talking about productivity. Yes, remote workers can be very productive. But productivity will not solve Yahoo’s problems. They need innovation to succeed and that is more likely to happen when you put smart people face to face. I think this is what Mayer is getting at.
andy
on 02 Mar 13one things this has done is to get people talking about Yahoo again. my last company used “working from home”, and it was mainly the managers who took advantage of it (abused it), most of us were not allowed “working from home”. It become an in house joke, where is X today , or he’s “working from home” today. This really had a negative affect on team morale, and in a way some people would just take it easy, come in late, go home early , surf the web. Company wen’t from market leader to the present day fighting for survival. Im not saying working from home is bad, but it is if its abused by managers and team leaders.
Anonymous Coward
on 04 Mar 13She made the decision for remote work to end based on the VPN logs? Come on. Having worked from home myself, just because I wasn’t logged on didn’t mean I was slacking off. Some people have more than one computer, and depending on the position / task at hand, it may not have been a requirement to be in the system. Without knowing what Yahoo’s policy is (or should I say was) on working remotley, it’s hard to gague.
And here’s a question: The folks who worked remote had managers to report to, didn’t they? Why the hell didn’t they know what the troops at home were doing? If you’re looking to cut costs, that may be a good place to start looking…
Seems like a bad move IMHO – one that is porbably more fincial driven than making a change to the corporate culture.
Rob
on 04 Mar 13The Economist weighs in here: ‘But tethering the Yahoos to their stalls in the company’s offices does not seem like the right way to go about boosting their output…study by researchers at Stanford and Beijing Universities of a large Chinese travel company compared the performance of employees allowed to work from home with those who were stuck in the office: among the home-workers, job satisfaction rose, staff turnover fell by half and productivity went up by 13%...last year J.C. Penney, an American retailer, discovered that a third of its headquarters’ bandwidth was taken up by employees watching YouTube videos’.
This discussion is closed.