Most corporate customer service departments seem to have been reduced to call scripts of apologies with no power whatsoever to actually address the problems they encounter. That’s the conclusion I’m left with after dealing with three business bureaucracies this year: Comcast, Verizon, and American Airlines.

All train their front line people to glaze the interaction with the plastic empathy that’s supposed to make you feel like they care, even when they demonstrably do not. It’s the customer service equivalent of empty calories, but worse, it’s also infuriating.

There’s simply nothing worse than someone telling you how sorry they are when you can hear they don’t give a damn. Nothing worse than someone telling you that they’re doing all they can, when they’re aren’t lifting a finger.

The emotional chain reaction is completely predictable: At first, you’re comforted that someone appears to care even if the tone is off (humans are remarkable at sussing out insincerity). Then you realize that their only job is to get you off the line, not solve the problem. Then follows the feelings of being powerless and betrayed. And then follows the anger.

That’s a vicious cycle and it must be almost as bad on the other side. Imagine having to field calls from customers every day who you want to help, knowing that the only thing you’re allowed to do is feign that “we apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced”.

What’s so sad too is how little it would often take to resolve the situations. You bend a policy here, you expedite an order there, you bubble an issue up to a manager. A natural, caring organization designed to create passionate customers stretches and bends. A rigid business bureaucracy looks to nail every T on policies, procedures, and practices—customers be damned.

(This post was brought on by my recent experience in American Airlines earned an enemy)

Managers who complain about slacking staff without examining their work environment are deluded. Being a slacker is not an innate human quality, it’s a product of the habitat. Fundamentally, everyone wants to do a good job (the statistical outliers who do not follow this are not worth focusing policy on).

The problem is that deluded managers expect unreasonable returns from their investment. They think you can get the best from people by thinking the worst of them. It just doesn’t work like that. You can’t crack the whip with one hand and expect a firm handshake with the other.

If you want star quality effort, you need to provide a star quality environment. No, window dressing like a free meal is not it. It can serve as a cherry on top, but if the rest of the cake is full of shit, that’s not going to make it any more appealing.

A star environment is based on trust, vision, and congruent behavior. Make people proud to work where they work by involving them in projects that matter and ignite a fire of urgency about your purpose. Find out who you are as a company and be the very best you. Give people a strategic plan that’s coherent and believable and then leave the bulk of the tactical implementation to their ingenuity.

If you’re doing work in a less than star environment, you owe less than star effort. Quid pro quo. By all means, do yours to affect and change the environment. Nudge it towards the stars. But also, accept the limitations of your power. You can drag a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink.

So ration your will and determination. Invest what’s left over, after meeting the bar of your work environment, in your own projects, skills, and future. The dividends is what’s going to lead you to the next, better thing.

Everyone deserves to work at a place that inspires them to give their very best. Don’t stop reaching until you have that.

(Like this? There’s more where this came from. Pre-order REMOTE: Office Not Required, our new book on remote work.)

Yahoo has some 11,000 workers. Most estimates put the number of remote workers between 300 and 500. In other words, just 2-4% of the Yahoo work force. That’s a tiny minority!

But that’s exactly why it’s been so easy to place the blame on them for Yahoo’s ails. Minorities make for great scapegoats in all walks of life. If we can just place the blame on this small group of people, then it means there’s nothing really wrong with the rest of us.

Gruber summed up this sentiment as “Yahoo employees have been allowed to work remotely, and they have not excelled”. In other words, Yahoo is a rudderless basket case, so it must be because of those 2-4% of the work force who are “goofing off”. Heh.

Yahoo puts the same blame in their original edict: “To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side”. So yes, remote workers are keeping Yahoo from being the “absolute best place to work”.

What a parody, what a farce.

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.

About once a month we start an internal discussion on Basecamp about what people have been reading lately. It’s a great way to get suggestions for good books. So why not try to see how it’d work on this blog. Here are five of the best books I’ve read in the last few months:

• The Intelligent Investor: Benjamin Graham’s immortal tome on value investing cuts right through the bullshit of the short-term stock market swings and valuation bubbles. He draws on examples from the stock market from the late 1800s until 1970s. The latest edition then contains chapter commentary with examples from the 2000s. It’s amazing how little has changed. As Graham says, “in the short term, the stock market behaves like a voting machine, but in the long term it acts like a weighing machine”. If you read just one book on the market or investing, make it this one.
• The New Jim Crow: Heart-breaking account of how the American justice system has been perverted through the War on Drugs to lock up utterly disproportionate number of blacks and other minorities. It then details the hopeless life that awaits those who are branded felons for the rest of their life by excluding them from public assistance, jobs, and housing. The book is full of real-life case stories that should make even the most ardent drug warrior’s stomach in disgust. Quick read too and great writing.
• Riding Man: Ad man decides to quit his job to follow his dream of racing the Isle of Man TT. Great story telling, great example of how it’s never too late to follow your dreams.
• Why Nations Fail: A thorough look through history describing why some nations rise to prosperity and others linger in poverty. It’s a little slow to get going, but once you get rolling it’s hard to put it down.
• Insanely Simple: Yes, there’s enough Steve Jobs hero worship tomes to last anyone a lifetime, but this one is full of specific examples that you can use in your own business. Written by an ad man who worked with Jobs on a number of projects.

What have you been reading lately?

Just doing work without an eye on the big picture rarely satisfies anyone. We want to know what we’re doing matters and that means knowing why we’re doing it. This is true in all walks of life and certainly so in software development.

If you simply ask a programmer to implement a feature, but fail to share the purpose or the justification for said feature, all you get is a code monkey. Code monkeys merely translate requirements into code verbatim. There’s no room to trade concessions with the designers if I don’t know what you’re trying to do.

So not only is it demotivating not to know why, it’s also bad for productivity. Figuring out what the problem really is is how good programmers judo the problem: “Yes, what you’re proposing is one way to solve it, and that’ll take 50 hours. But we can solve the same underlying problem by doing this instead and that’ll only take 8 hours. How about it?”

Sharing the context shares ownership. Now we’re all working on solving the problem the best way we can. Not just laying the bricks in the order the big man tells us to.