Discussion on:

Yahoo chief bans telecommuting at company

CNN's picked this up as well. I think their article made two very good points: 1) when a company is floundering, as Yahoo is, it's time to shake things up and get all hands on deck. Physical continuity helps a lot with that. 2) It probably doesn't make sense for everyone to have to do this.

CNN link: http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/26/opinion/fisman-yahoo/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_latest+%28RSS%3A+Most+Recent%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

We are being paid to work. If the people upstairs prefers to have 100% face time with her employees onsite, then that's how it's going to be. If you cannot cope with it, then there's the door. It's as simple as that.

Yahoo is going down the tubes and has been changing "people upstairs" so often. That might just make employees leave (and why wouldn't they? They can get the "work from home" perk elsewhere) for other companies and then who will Mayer blame for the continuous downward spiral?

Not Yahoo specifically, but Silicon Valley in general. It's not uncommon for folks to live 2 or even more hours from work. They've encouraged it (up until now), and now the're pulling the rug out from under people's feet. No wonder there's a backlash.

Working from home, I'm able to put in a good 10+ hours of solid work. Add a 90 minute commute to my day and you'll get 8. No more, no less! Especially in a company where working from home was 'part of the deal', maybe not explicitly on paper, but many folks chose jobs in Silicon Valley, and Yahoo for that very reason.

Cheap gas in Silicon Valley currently is more than $4 per gallon. And gas mileage goes down when sitting or creeping in the parking lot that is Highway 101. Traffic is always backed up at the Mathilda Avenue/237 intersecton, and there are lots of traffic lights along Lawrence Expressway.

I don't work at Yahoo!, but I live 16 miles away. It would waste at least an hour of time and 32 miles a day. At current gas prices, that would be approximately $1,900 of after-tax gas costs for my car in a year.

At least I fully agree with what you said because I have that (minimum) 90 minute commute twice a day and working from home twice a week was part of the deal.

Besides, if they dish out the reason of "when you're all here, we come up with creative ideas [that we hope can save the company!]", it simply means they're redirecting Yahoo!'s fall on their employees instead of upper management (that are the real decision makers in the end)

Encouraging home workers to come into the office occasionally is one thing, but I think she is looking at this as an opportunity to cut the workforce without having to pay out redundancies. Many of the home workers probably do so to avoid the daily commute, to allow flexibility to handle their family lives and be able to put in maximum effort without interruptions. Many of the most productive people I know are able to work from home, and when the commute consists of walking from the kitchen to the desk, the ability to save those couple of hours that are lost in commuting is significant.

If you need to concentrate on a task without interruption then working at home is great (assuming you get peace at home), if you need to collaborate with people then you need to be with them at the office.

I can't work at home; there are too many distractions. The dog to play with, birds to watch, the fridge and pantry are always present, the blasted idiot box.

If you are a tech company and need to collaborate, then no, you do not need to be physically present. As a matter of fact, this holds true tech company or not. Ever heard of Go-To Meeting, SharePoint and the like?

Yahoo is going to be history soon - so who gives a ****?

She is definitely out of touch. The latest collaboration tools break down boundaries of distance, so why not employ them, let the workers stay home and require face presence once a week? Makes no sense to me, but it seems that many good, loyal employees will find work elsewhere.

but if employees are abusing telecommuting, they don't mean a thing. And before you claim her to be "out of touch" maybe you want to consider the question many have posed, "why".

I'm sure she's smart enough to know the value in workplace flexibility. So "why" is she calling the flock back in?

If you think your people are 'abusing' the system, then you create some metrics and measure against them. Pretty much any job can be quantitatively and qualitatively measured with the right metrics (Story Points completed for developers, Tickets worked and Average Resolution time for IT folks).

If the people out of the office are abusing the system, then chances are the folks in the office are as well. She's approaching the problem completely wrong!

I am part of a virtual team and live about 500 miles from the rest of the team. There are effective methods for managing a virtual team, although the 'rules' need to be established, boundaries set, and communication needs to be enhanced. If someone is telecommuting just to 'not have to see the boss', then he/she needs to step up the game - we do have a few team members who attend all meetings via webconnect - EVEN if they are 20 feet from the conference room.......now THAT is just being lazy - not telecommuting. -

While this mandate is too extreme in my opinion I do agree with her attitude toward strengthening and making the company better internally. I would think requiring employees to be in offices for a day or couple days a week and telecommuting the rest would make more sense. Just because your in a office five plus days a week doesn't make you more productive, and certainly doesn't make you a cohesive organization. Sometimes when you create a huge disruption to policy like this it causes everyone to focus on everything except the problem your trying to fix.

While the new Yahoo policy of "in the office" may have aspirations of office effectiveness, the reality is telecommuting saves companies a ton of money. Moving employess into an office has a lot of costs. Unless Yahoo has been setting on a lot of empty office space all around its world wide operations, they are looking at absorbing the costs of acquring and maintaining office space. Add in utility costs for electricity, air/heat, phone, and networking and the costs can easily be hundreds of dollars per person. Some of you will say wait, where I live the employer has to pay for some of that stuff (i.e. phone, internet) even for a telecommuter. In many states (US) there are no such requirements and the employee pays for it all themselves. It is all about the money.

Several years ago my company (Fortune 100) made the same decision and within 6 months reversed course. Today they have a policy of maintaing at least 50% of their staff being telecommuters. In fact they periodically check on office/desk usage and if an employee is not in the office enough days of the week, they are effectively kicked out and made telecommuters. They fully expect the management and employees will make telecommuting work, if not they will replace the non-productive.

It will be very interesing to see how long Yahoo can afford everyone in the office. I suspect it will become a selectively enforced policy as money always wins out.

That is my big question. I don't want to debate the pro's and con's of telecommuting because everyone will have a good reason for or against. What was not working for Yahoo in her opinion? Why was such a huge and unpopular decision made to change when she knew it would cause employee uproar?

Why? It obviously was not an effective method for creating the Yahoo that she has in her vision. Most likely to many people were taking advantge of the situation and not for the good of Yahoo.

One bad apple...

It's possible to accomplish the face time objective with periodic meetings without forcing people into the office. That isn't to say in this case there may have been a work ethic issue causing the reaction that occurred. People can be very productive working from home if they are diligent. It should be a telecommuter's manager's job to keep them engaged by employing creative techniques. Frequent contact and concern for the work items being performed needs to be on the agenda for manager and worker. Discipline should be enforced with lapses leading to probationary actions and dismissal if goals cannot be met. The baby is out with the bathwater if the manager is not up to the task of establishing a sustainable system of telecommuting work efforts.

aside of the obvious implications that when people were hired they were told whether their job could be done from remote locations or not, and now those rules have been changed by someone who a) does not know their job; b) has not been running the company very long either; c) may well be "solving" an non-existent "problem", this: such a stunt has been done before by certain IT management, ultimately for the purpose of getting staff to leave the company so he did not have to admit that his aim was to lay them off. Many of those were IT pros who were hired to do jobs that could be tele-commuted and they lived in a wide variety of places, far from a corporate office including entirely out of state. Such a "change in policy" amounts to a violation of an implied agreement, if not a formal contract and frankly represents an ethical ambiguity that is not altogether uncommon in corporate culture in the larger sense.

What underlying management problems is this designed to solve? And it IS a failure of management...

I suspect the real issue is people aren't actually doing the work they're paid for. Of course the CEO can't come out and call those people lazy, so everyone loses the privilege.

I like the flexibility of being able to work at home when I need to. I didn't have to take time off when a family member was sick or I had to wait for the plumber. I also felt compelled to work longer and harder just because I felt it was a privledge to be able to work at home and did not want to be seen as a slacker - (the pajama and bunny slipper image). Maybe that's just me and a good work ethic.
There are days however, when I am in the office where barely a soul talks to me and there are days when too many people feel the need to 'chat it up'. Neither situation has done anything to allow for better communication. If the company doesn't have good policies in place for communication and sharing/collaboration, visibility for the telecommuter and they don't instill an environment that inspires its employees to do so, then it doesn't matter if you sit 10 feet or 10 miles away from me.
I think with Yahoo change is more of a case of using a hammer when a few turns of the screwdriver would have done.

As someone that works full time from home as a Database Administrator, the following words come to mind:
* anachronistic
* draconian
* misinformed
* orwellian

The HR memo that was cited sounds like a coverup.
Had I received such a memo I would have seen "We don't trust you to do your job unless we can see you"

The whole premise of that memo is flawed, as you havee already pointed out;
You can be sitting 20 feet from someone that doesn't communicate, proximity is not a solution.

"Yahoo"? Got its name from its management team, I suppose.

I believe that diligent workers might be adversely affected somewhat by ending telecomuting. Most of my coworkers are not diligent. They should be required to be at the office at all times. Others could function better with some leeway. I believe that there should be a minimum amount of office time for EVERYBODY. If management sets different times for different workers or even different classes of workers there would be resentment that could adversely affect productivity.
Bottom line, I believe in the golden rule. He who owns the gold (Pays your salary) makes the rules.

Not so surprising that the telecommuters on the board are up in arms. Sorry folks, but reality is coming to get you. Laying jn bed watching Maury while eating a bag of chips with the laptop sitting next to you is not work!! Yea.. rough comment, but sorry its the reality for a good portion of telecommuters, maybe not that exact example, maybe it's taking care of kids, or running some errands. Whatever the case, you're not getting paid to do whatever you want to do and work when you feel like it. You're getting paid to make the company successful. If that entails some face time then you better sack up.

That said going from an everyday telecommuting policy to a ban is extreme. Cut it to one day a week, or 5 days per month, that's plenty.

I will have to agree with the various comments that as Yahoo struggles, the team needs to be together develop a synergy to innovate. That's leadership. I think as the health of the company grows telecommuting will still be an option... the exception not the norm.

The pro of working from home is that you can focus on your tasks in a comfortable environment while the significant cons are company disconnect (pending management abilities) and work/home culture clash (honey can you ...).

Although telecommuting is innovative it is still relatively new and difficult for some to manage and control.

Sounds to me like it was designed to shake loose some employees. Nothing more. Most of them being replaced by less experienced and lower paid individuals, probably.

Hey Ms. mayer! How about first fixing the hacking and spamming problems?
"....almost overshadowed the gains she has accomplished in turning the struggling company around...." Meanwhile since her reign began, there seems to be an increase of spam. In one account of mine, 75% of spam originated from Yahoo servers or a reply to a Yahoo account.
It take not even a minute to set up a spam account on Yahoo.

I agree that working from home has many benefits to the employees, but it does not always provide increased benefits to the company. Face to face interaction can be a better and quicker method to solve problems and advance and flesh out ideas. Also, please remember that the company is directed and run by management, not the employees. If the employees do not agree with the terms and policies in place at any time, they are free to go elsewhere or to start their own businesses. Then they might get the the policies they desire; then again, why work for someone for 8 hours per day when you can work for yourself and only put in 26 hours each day.

i suspect there is a deeper motive. my experience w/ telecommuting workers is that about half of them were not, shall we say, "dedicated to task". my opinion this is a move to get the deadwood out without having to fire people. the deadwood will self-select out.

I'm with Nate on this one: two of my previous employers changed their telework policies when they were struggling.

A large part was the fact that they were paying for unoccupied office space AND for teleworker's home office.

we just do not trust your home systems
because on more than one occasion yahoo has been compromised recently
and no one is fessing up to who's system(s) is /are the infected one(s) that breached security

that would be my number one reason to guess why they want everyone at the office and shut down all outside connections

the following type of email to IT doesn't go over well
___________________________________________

um hi senior IT dept official;

my system was infected recently by a keylogger and other various sorts of malware that harvest usernames & passwords,
and I was logging into the server on a daily basis for probably months before this was discovered
can you verify that the servers and any other employee / user accounts haven't been affected

sincerely,
terrified employee
___________________________________________________

As soon as we invent an effective method for monitoring individual productivity will be the moment we can truly embrace the 'work from home' ideology. Until then it's completely doomed to failure as there is not one of us who will not take advantage of our employers trust.

"by allowing employees flexibility to get their job done where they want to"

What is the way whereby the company can deal effectively with employees who cheat? So that no hullabaloo is created, no hard feelings, no delving into their personal problems, no having to accept improbable excuses, no unrest in the masses, no employee feelings that they have some "right" to do their work at the ole fishing hole?

I think that employees serve at the pleasure of the company, in something like this. I cannot conceive that teleworking as a general rule can be good for the company.

Yahoo is in trouble and has been going through CEOs like 1985-95 Apple Computer. Marissa Mayer is on a very short leash and has to make something happen. She has considerable history at Google where employees are encouraged to spend more time at the office. And I think most of us have to agree that Google is a constant source of new ideas and concepts - good or bad. Yahoo employees have been telecommuting from home for quite awhile now and obviously it's not working for the company.

Obviously, telecommuting viability depends on the job role. But for roles that almost entirely access resources remotely anyway? Think about remote offices that access centralized or cloud-based servers over the network. Nowadays, the connection mechanism from home is just as effective - more so in some cases. The employee benefit can be significant - not to mention the additional Corporation's benefit of sticking a "Green-labled" feather in their cap as a Sales/Marketing inticement.

For example, over 95% of what I do is "remote" - whether the resource I'm connecting to is down the hall or across the globe. I access it the same way from home. Since I have divested myself of direct technician oversight responsibilities I now have miniscule hands-on requirements at HQ. So why shouldn't I abandon my HQ office and free up that resource for someone who actually needs it?

I would say, its not a good move. Companies like Yahoo can save big dollars on construction, leases and property taxes, since they may no longer need to build or rent larger offices or parking lots when they expand. Moreover, they can attract employees from a larger geography and retain top talent whofor whatever reasoncant travel to the office every day.

This article explains telecommuting and what benefits telecommuting offers, and how cloud can effectively support remote employees:

http://www.dincloud.com/blog/what-is-telecommuting-and-how-cloud-supports-remote-employees