Part of my job running the business operations side of a marketing firm is to help people be productive. One of our web developers has worked remotely for years. A designer recently went from working from home 40% of the time to 100% of the time. Both are productive, and I don’t have trouble reaching them during the day. We’re on IM and Google Hangout every day.
We’re all adults. Collaborating with remote workers is baked into our corporate culture. So when I heard Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer had banned telecommuting, I assumed it was a joke. Nope, not a joke.
Apparently a number of Yahoo! employees had been abusing the work-from-home policy. Well then fire them. People goofing off all day is an accountability failure by front-line managers, not a company-wide HR problem.
I applaud Mayer for her efforts to revive a has-been Internet brand. And as CEO, it’s her prerogative to mandate a draconian HR policy at her own company. I’m not a Fortune 500 CEO but I bet you it’s going to hurt retention and recruiting. In-demand prospective employees have options. Yahoo! is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
For the record, I prefer working in the office. Operations tends to be work better that way–whether it’s working on marketing projects or accessing QuickBooks over the network. I like being able to unplug by going home. I like being able to have a frictionless impromptu meeting. Remote collaboration isn’t as good as collaborating in person–but not so much that it counterbalances the other benefits, such that I’d recommend saying no one’s allowed to work from home.
When it comes to Yahoo! and to marketing firms like ours, the productivity solution is really about hiring responsible people who have a strong work ethic, trusting them to do the right thing, and then verifying (as needed) that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
As business managers, I believe it’s our job to maximize sustainable results. Maximize as in “as much as possible,” but sustainable as in “don’t burn people out while you’re doing it.” If someone is productive, let them be productive where they’re most productive. And if someone isn’t being productive, it’s time for you to have a candid chat about their performance, not to create a draconian HR policy that punishes both the innocent and the guilty.
Question: Do you think an HR policy banning remote workers is good, bad, or somewhere in between? You can leave a comment by clicking here.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Karl, I don’t see this as a way to “punish” low performers, or a signal about personal responsibility.
We’re talking about Yahoo here. A company that we made fun of a few years ago when the CEO couldn’t answer the simple question, “What is Yahoo?”
Yahoo isn’t suffering because people in bunny slippers are running personal side projects from home. Yahoo is ailing and flailing because there is zero culture. It has the feel of 783 legacy startups that coincidentally share a logo and a universal sign-on credential.
The telecommuting fix isn’t about being a sneaky layoff – it’s about giving a culture and identity to a company that is siloed at best, and completely a-cultural at worst.
Ike, you’re right — I wasn’t looking at it from the perspective that Yahoo! was a culture-less company. With that in mind, having everyone in one place makes sense.
My experience has been that remote employees work best when they’ve worked at the company before, rather than being remote from the start.
It sounds like for Yahoo!, desperate times call for extreme measures. Thanks for sharing!
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week and I agree with you, Karl. The best talent will probably just leave Yahoo! and get another gig. Remote work is easy to come by these days, especially for in-demand skills. The flip side of that is that the worst workers – the ones that were really slacking off – will probably comply with Mayer’s decree. So the sum total of that activity is that Yahoo! loses its best people and keeps its worst. Hence, like you said Karl, there’s still an accountability problem and people will still need to be fired.
But, I see Ike’s point too. I wonder if Mayer just felt that this was best way to make a quick change that would ultimately have a powerful impact.
Incidentally, this Quora feed by a group of anonymous Yahoo! employees seems wholeheartedly in favor of the second explanation: http://www.quora.com/Yahoo/What-has-been-the-internal-reaction-at-Yahoo-to-Marissa-Mayers-no-work-from-home-policy
Stephanie, that makes sense — if some remote workers aren’t working now, they’ll find a way to not work while in the office, too.
Thanks for sharing the Quora link! It sounds like most employees see the policy change as a good thing. A quick change is definitely a way to make a powerful impact; as with anything that big, time will tell…