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. Plenty of evidence suggests that letting employees work from home is good for productivity. It allows them to use their time more efficiently and to spend more time with their families and less fuming in traffic jams or squashed on trains. It can reduce companies’ costs… You can shackle a Yahoo to his desk, but you can’t make him feel the buzz.
—
Mayer Culpa, The Economist
Mayer Culpa, The Economist
Nathan
on 01 Mar 13I wrote a comment about how it’s ridiculous that Mayer is getting so much heat over this decision. But then I realized… David, you already know that. You’ve experienced the same heat for decisions that ultimately helped build your success (e.g. – ‘no’ being the initial answer to customer feature request).
I’d rather let it play out than speculate on the effectiveness of a single decision. It’s going to be the whole of her decisions that will determine the outcome anyway. Only time will expose whether or not this is a misstep. She may have just given you a perfectly timed case study for your upcoming book.
ploogman
on 01 Mar 13they have cash flow problems, they need to reduce payroll, that is the real motivation behind this no-remote workers thing at Yahoo, they have too many employees and are using this as an excuse to cut some loose as they know some do not live near any Yahoo office and some will not agree to work in a Yahoo office either. Period.
Nathan
on 01 Mar 13@ploogman… I like your observation. I didn’t think about it from that perspective. Maybe the goal really is to reduce staff… very cunning on Mayer’s part if this is true.
Anonymous Coward
on 01 Mar 13Since we’re all just making up scenarios, here’s an alternative one:
Yahoo!, after urging and disclosures from all levels of government and private firms, have done an external security audit.
The audit has come back with several key recommendations. They have decided they need to pause and secure their systems. This may mean making sure no work is being offloaded, as has recently been disclosed at other firms, to 3rd parties.
How’s your security audit going? You have done one, right?
AndrewJ
on 01 Mar 13There’s a bunch of anecdotal evidence cropping up on places like Quora that Yahoo people consider this a good move, because the flexibility was being abused. A distributed workforce means trading off one thing for another. In this case of a corporate turnaround, a different trade-off may be required. The high fidelity of f2f interactions carries huge value.
Michael Guren
on 01 Mar 13Yahoo! needs to figure out who the A players are. They are so messed up right now they don’t even know the caliber of their staff.
Working from home works best when A players are involved. Low caliber employees take forever when working remotely.
Once Yahoo! figures out, or scares away, the B team then they will re-institute telecommuting with A players.
Mark
on 02 Mar 13This is a tightening up course correction for a company that has been lost for years, not a move backward by any means.
Agree with AndrewJ—offsite working only works with dedicated A team players. The B-team uses it to an selfish advantage. The A team will come in to help the company get back on track, the B team will whine, bitch and moan…and then leave. After the mess is cleaned, the benefit will return.
Sounds like Parenting 101.
curtis
on 02 Mar 13We’ve been making fun of this decision at work. It’s obvious Yahoo! is a company that is in big, big trouble, but I just can’t understand how blaming it on remote workers is going to help.
Luke
on 02 Mar 13I support remote workers, but just as not every worker makes a great remote worker (it takes a special kind of self-driven person) not every company benefits equally from a remote worker policy.
In the absence of good management and leadership, I will bet that Yahoo hired many remote workers who should never have been remote workers. Now they have to cull the good ones along with the bad ones.
It’s a sign of weakness that they had to institute the policy, but that does not mean it was the wrong policy for their situation. Hopefully their goal would be to get to a place where they can trust workers again as soon as possible.
Brett Aquila
on 02 Mar 13I think people are looking at this move in a bubble as if it isn’t related to any other moves they’re going to make. I expect Mayer has a long list of changes she feels need to be made to get Yahoo! going in the direction she wants it to go and this is just one small part of that strategy. Let’s not extrapolate it to mean “every problem Yahoo! has is being blamed on their remote workers” or “Mayer is taking the tech industry back 10 years because she doesn’t understand how remote workers can be an advantage to a company.”
Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re in the process of making a series of wholesale changes to the infrastructure and culture of the company that will likely take a couple years or more to pan out.
TDG
on 03 Mar 13She came from Google, right? Google doesn’t allow skill workers to work from home, right? So, why is anyone blaming Yahoo or Mayer. She learned it from Google. Google’s doing pretty well, right? Here’s the list of Google Telecommuting Jobs. Enjoy your work, Ad Quality Rater! http://www.google.com/about/jobs/locations/multiple/
Corporate
on 03 Mar 13Here’s my take on working from home from a small tech company owner.
- If your boss doesn’t care that you work at home as long as your tasks get done, then you’re probably not getting paid great money, or your boss just doesn’t really care as long as you make him look good. Business owners DO care, and you’ll have to add lots of productivity to that to make them happy AND be a self-starter.
- It’s not for everyone. a) Some people actually can’t communicate well by IM, email or phone. Definitely a good reason to hire people who can communicate well by any method. Nonetheless, the world is full of these people. They have to work in the office. b) Some people are indeed too distracted at home. They have to work in the office. On top of that, facebook should be blocked for those people in the office. c) People who are not self-starters, who need accountability, who are not motivated working not for themselves at home, they need to work in the office. d) Some don’t make great micro decisions on their own, frankly, and need too much communication to get anything done. That’s more difficult remotely. There’s a lot of those people out there too. Someone has to hire them. For HR, this is a policy mess, to allow some to work at home and some not to.
- Communication is not nearly as good. a) It needs to be scheduled for when people are back to their IM client, which they wouldn’t be away from for very long in the office. b) Many people just don’t know where they stand after a written communcation. Feelings get hurt. You know the drill. c) Written communication is inefficient. It’s passive. It’s not immediate. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes not.
- If you want to work at home to avoid people or “focus” better, then you’re not as valuable to the company as those who can do those things at the office.
- Security has to be addressed. Our office is physically more secure than your home. Your laptop gets lost or stolen, and that becomes our problem. Your passwords get hacked due to your loose wifi network after your kid resets your router, and that’s our problem.
- If you hate your office so much, you probably don’t like your job. If you don’t like your job, you’re not going to like it more from home. You’re going to like your life more, but you need to find other work you love more.
- Working from home is not the same as working when you want to. These are two different things, sometimes combined. Working when you want to is completely separate and determined by job. If you need to remain available 9-5, then you don’t have that flexibility.
- It’s not for small businesses/offices where people have to wear a lot of hats that the internet just doesn’t allow you to wear well.
- Workers are not seeking out as much communication with other workers when they’re remote and can’t see each other. Out of sight, out of mind. Nothing like a room full of people working together. We find problems faster, because others tune into phone calls and hear post-phonecall dialogue about issues, etc. Remote workers hear nothing and see nothing and experience nothing that the rest of the group does together in the office.
- Relationships stagnate. People get bored. Workers have to work harder to maintain relationships. Workers need to feel a part of something, not disconnected from it. See how people act on the web when they are separate from the group?
- My take on pay: Telecommuters do and should make less money than their office counterparts. They get a huge break on wear and tear on the vehicle and gas consumption, clothes, time, food, etc. Should they work more to earn the same money? Yes. They don’t have to be as accountable. You can’t find such a benefit all over the place. It’s a luxury. You should pay for it.
- From the workers’ perspective, remember, if you’re out of your employer’s sight, you may be out of his mind come eval/promotion/bonus time. If you can’t be seen and measure the old-fashioned way, you may get passed up for promotion if someone in the office is more visible and the relationship is better due to that proximity. That’s human nature.
- If you can work from home, maybe your employer can simply outsource your job cheaper on a project by project basis.
- You’re more easily let go remotely too. Basically, you become more anonymous. It easier to transition you out the company if you’re not physically IN the company. Are you “real” anymore?
- You’d better be the best of the best AND be productive to expect to work from home very long in a good if you have a smart boss. Hire slow. Fire fast.
kurt
on 03 Mar 13another perspective from Penelope Trunk, she states what is ‘the obvious’, http://bit.ly/15ropAq
Anonymous Coward
on 04 Mar 13I, personally think that Marissa’s decision is the best decision for Yahoo! in its current state of affairs.
There is no doubt that folks could be more productive while working from home, I think Yahoo! is not looking to improve productivity but to shake up the culture of the organization and if possible a pivot or a disruptive innovation.. Change in culture is very very difficult to implement if people work remotely..
I have penned my thoughts on this and my reasons in my blog – http://t.co/ttUfLhiD4i
Anonymous Coward
on 04 Mar 13That last post was by Mukesh Did not know how to add my name :(
Tony
on 04 Mar 13Lack of telecommuting is indeed the constraint we should all embrace. It’s a good thing.
Instead of freaking out about it, embrace it. Let it guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus, and it’s exactly what Yahoo! needs right now. Instead of trying to complain about how “backward thinking” Marissa’s decision is, Yahoo employees should be thankful for their CEO. People who get the most criticisms and oppositions are often right, and only courageous CEO would go against the flow.
Yahoo! has a mountain load of challenges:
A huge portal site to run 11,000 employees who are abusing their employee benefits that they never earned Telecommuting that only make them less productive and lazier Lack of collaboration No work hour accountability
Working remotely is a privilege you ought to earn, not given. Yahoo employees must prove themselves that they won’t slack and cheat at home, and that should take years to prove. Employees who don’t deliver the kind of results their company demands should be harshly punished and put in more work hours in the office where strong accountability is the norm. Let’s face it, people are lazy and dishonest by nature. They want easy money, they want to slack, and they want free stuff. It’s evident by the fact that we elected the president whose strongest selling point was to give us more government entitlement. People should be controlled, hassled and disciplined.
Lack of telecommuting would force them to come up with creative solutions and force them to be productive so they could go home. Impromptu meetings would keep them under check. Employees should never forget that they are hired to do all that for their company. You want flexibility? Well, EARN IT.
Constraints like mandatory office working are often advantages in disguise. Forget about telecommuting, convenience and flexibility. Constrain them so they would be forced to work harder to finish working.
clif
on 05 Mar 13Turns out Mayer was checking VPN records to see who was working and what they were doing while on company business before she made the decree.
The vast majority of the people were doing absolutely nothing.
Until they find new metrics to measure employee performance, this works to see who is actually working and who isn’t.
Don Schenck
on 05 Mar 13Hey @Tony … the 1920’s called … they want their labor ideas back.
Sheesh. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. People “screwing off” is a problem ONLY IF YOU ARE NOT AWARE OF IT, i.e. YOU ARE A LOUSY MANAGER.
Aye, THERE’s the rub!
TDG
on 06 Mar 13Don, would you prefer over-managing people, not to mention that being more difficult remotely.
Andrew
on 06 Mar 13This is my take on Yahoo’s new policy:
http://blog.atrubka.com/2013/03/opinion-about-yahoos-no-work-from-home.html
Chris
on 08 Mar 13In my experience it is invariably the managers who are the ones working from home. More junior staff don’t get the opportunity. So who knows, maybe the management will be forced to stop speaking among themselves and actually manage the people they’re responsible for. You never know, they may learn a thing or two. – GE
This discussion is closed.