Working from Home
This past week, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo banned all working from home for the company. According to an article by Business Insider she sent out a memo “telling all remote employees that they needed to find a way to be working in an office by June.”
The reasons cited in the article from “Ex-Yahoos” blame employees who took gross advantage of the trust that working from home requires. Instead of working as they were supposed to, some of the employees were putting in minimal effort while working on personal side projects.
Your company is not Yahoo
Do not mistake the problems of Yahoo for something systemically wrong with working from home. A company’s culture plays a key role in whether or not working from home will succeed. That and managing remote employees well will determine the success or failure.
The issue with Yahoo is that they allowed a number of employees to work remotely every day. They never had to make an appearance in the office. And in a collaborative environment, out of sight can definitely be out of mind.
The memo Mayer issued said:
To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side…Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices…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.
It remains to be seen if Yahoo will allow a few days of work from home per week, or if that arrangement has been written off altogether. And the people who did not abuse the system will suffer unfairly.
When Mayer had her child in October of 2012, she bragged at what an easy transition it was to go back to work. Could it possibly be due to the fact that she paid for a nursery to be built directly next to her office inside Yahoo’s headquarters? According to Yahoo’s Family Child Care Center, Silicon Valley employees at Yahoo “can expect to wait 12–18 months before they are contacted regarding openings in a CCLC center”. So good luck to new mom’s at Yahoo who were hoping to work from home for a bit.
So will this cause a mass exodus from Yahoo? And if so, is it good riddance to bad rubbish? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
What makes working from home successful?
Working from home can be successful. Being in UX, I would not ever want to work from home 100% of the time. UX is extremely collaborative, so most days I want to be in the office interacting with colleagues. But there are days when working from home allows me to hyper-focus in tasks that require more focus and concentration. Working in an open office environment is great for collaboration, but can be hell on concentration when you’re working on tight deadlines.
What has succeeded for me on days that I work from home is:
- Getting to work early. I wake up at my regular time (6:15am) and am being productive by about 7:00am, after seeing the kids off to school. That gives me extra time in the morning to answer emails and get my day started.
- Eat lunch at home. This is a win-win. I spend less money on lunch because the kitchen is at my disposal. And since there’s no one to sit around and chat with, I take a shorter lunch. More time to be productive.
- Stay in touch with the office. I make sure my IM is open and at the ready, my corporate phone is on and close at hand, and I constantly check my emails.
- Don’t schedule errands. On the days I work from home, my purpose is to get something done more quickly than I can with the constant interruptions that the office environment can create. I don’t need to make my own interruptions.
- Unless you absolutely have to, don’t work with any family members in the house. Work is work. Family is family. I know I can’t get quality work done with either my spouse or my children home. My kids are 6 years and 8 years old. They both love my attention, and deserve it in full when they are home with me.
Goose versus Gander
The bottom line is that Marissa Mayer believes that Yahoo’s policies need changing. According to her, Yahoo can only be at its best with its employees working side-by-side. That may work for her and for Yahoo. But what’s right for Yahoo is not right for every other company. Many companies have found ways to make working from home succeed for them and their employees.
My hope is that what some people are calling a “desperate move by a desperate company that has trouble trusting their employees,” doesn’t start an avalanche of mistrust in other companies.
Comic is property of Scott Adams and appears on the Dilbert website.
