Yahoo bans staff from working at home
 

Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson responds calling it a "backwards step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21588760

"Yahoo has banned its staff from "remote" working. After years of many predicting working from home as the future for everybody, why is it not the norm?

When a memo from human resources dropped into the inbox of Yahoo staff banning them from working from home it prompted anger from many of its recipients.

"Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings," the memo said.

"Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home."

The move to get staff back into the office from June this year is thought to have been driven by new chief executive Marissa Mayer, who herself returned to work weeks after giving birth.

Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson, who spends much of his time working on Necker Island in the Caribbean, was quick to respond, calling it a "backwards step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever".

People in the West are constantly bombarded by news about technology that makes it easier to communicate with the office. Many have fast broadband and webcams that allow their faces to appear through the ether at any important meetings. They are surrounded by smartphones, laptops and tablets.

Everything is surely there to free them from the daily commute. Those in manufacturing or retail might always have to be present, but in an age when so many work in offices, why can't they have their office space at home?

There are signs that the number of people working from home is on the increase in the UK, according to the CBI. A total of 59% of employers who responded to a survey in 2011 were offering teleworking, up from 13% in 2006.

In the US, 24% of employed people report working from home at least some hours each week, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics.

But only 2.5% of the workforce (3.1 million people, not including the self employed or unpaid volunteers) consider home their primary place of work, says the Telework Research Network.

Yahoo is not a lone voice in espousing the virtues of physically being in the office.

Only last week Google's chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said when the company is asked how many people telecommute, their answer is "as few as possible".

"There is something magical about sharing meals," Pichette explained. "There is something magical about spending the time together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer 'What do you think of this?'"

Google workers are provided with a free wifi-enabled bus in to the HQ. Mayer, of course, is a former Google executive.

There are obvious reasons why working from home has not proliferated in the way people thought it might. There is still ingrained cultural antipathy.
Designers at Google HQ Google, like Yahoo, prefers its workers in the office

Not "being seen in the office" may affect a person's chances of promotion, result in a smaller pay rise than office-based peers and lower performance evaluations, according to research by the London Business School and the University of California.

They stress the continuing importance of so-called "passive face time" that is being in the office, regardless of what someone is doing.

The additional pressure not to be perceived as "skiving" may drive those who do work from home to exceed their hours.

Prof Jennifer Glass, co-author of a report on the US workforce published by the University of Texas at Austin, says for many people, especially those in their 30s and 40s, teleworking is part of their work after they have already done 40 hours in the office.

Glass was "flabbergasted" by the Yahoo memo. "This seems to be trying to bring Yahoo in line with corporate America, not high-tech industries," she says.

"The idea that this is going to promote more innovation seems bizarre."

Promoting the value of interactions in hallways and canteen seems strange at a time when face-to-face contact within the office is decreasing.

"I frequently email someone without getting up to see if they are there," Glass notes.

Managers can be biased in favour of those they can actually see working.

"There is this attitude that managers need to see people are close by and that those workers are more productive," says Glass. "It is a natural tendency to want to control things."

This seems outdated to many. "The best employers don't overlook staff because they are not in the office. That strikes me as yesterday's way of working," says Paul Sellers, policy adviser at UK trade union umbrella group the TUC.

Dame Stephanie Shirley, who pioneered home working in the computer industry in the early 1960s, says the concept has not taken off in quite the way many predicted at the time.

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side.

Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

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.

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.

When she started her company F International in 1962, the idea of people working from home was alien to most businesses. Offices were highly regimented. Some of the company's programmers did not even have home telephones.

Workers were used to signing in and having their output closely supervised. "It was about the time you were present, rather than what you had achieved," says Dame Stephanie.

By the mid-1980s F International was a pioneer of teleworking employing 800 home workers and turning over nearly £20m a year, and was setting up a national electronic mail network to link workers' home computers to the company's minimal headquarters.

Dame Stephanie said she was on a "crusade" to find skilled work for women who had left the workplace to start families or look after relatives.

But social changes can take longer than expected, says the 75-year-old, who quit the industry in 1993.

Decades later the issue has not gone away. Working from home still has its image problem.

London Mayor Boris Johnson once joked: 'We all know that is basically sitting wondering whether to go down to the fridge to hack off that bit of cheese before checking your emails again."

For Alan Denbigh, co-author of The Teleworking Handbook and former executive director of the Telework Association, there are proven benefits of home working. "It gives you the opportunity to get on with a particular project and for those who are bringing up small families where it is imperative to have a degree of flexibility it works."

Having done both he does not recommend working from home exclusively, recognising the benefits of interacting with people in the office and the pitfalls of working long hours at home to keep up.

But he says it is "equally ridiculous" to feel you have to be at the office every day. He recommends a bit of both.

"A large corporation saying you can't work at home, especially an IT based company, seems counter-productive. You have to treat people as grown-ups."


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21588760

Branson can run Yahoo the way he wants when he buys it.

no idea why this is news.. working at home sucks

Branson just wants to get his dick wet

The lady that did that was smart. people are not coming forward in her support saying that people were milking the hell out of it.

Good fuck everyone else why should they do what everyone else does

Mayer v Branson: The Work From Home War
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/201...from-home-war/

And why is it any of his business?

Yea, working from home was really working well for Yahoo the past several years. That's why they've come up so many amazing innovations while Google has done shit.



















:1orglaugh

LOLOL

I can honestly say I've seen way more production from working in office then home. Look at CrakMedia, Manwin, Gammae, Hustler... and I could had much more. All those companies have offices and hire in house and it is a key to their growth and success

Branson is Illuminati :winkwink:

branson is a very smart guy. i remember in a marketing class, the professor was explaining how companies grow horizontally and vertically with similar products. otherwise its not healthy, smart, etc. someone asked what about virgin? records, airline, mobile? the professor was stumped and goes yeah, virgin doesn't follow any of this. branson is quite good at what he does.

if you think about it, he's broken all the rules and succeeded. he bought a bank recently. i get wine delivered to my house by virgin wines. he's all over, and quite good at it

Aside from some programmers off site, we have have never hired home workers. I am a firm believer in office interaction and the fact that when staffers work remotely you can't really keep track of them as well from a management standpoint, unless they are solely commission or task based.

Mitch

Not everyone can work from home. You have to take it seriously - and I am guessing most people don't. Even though I work from home, I am online before 9am every morning, take lunch at the same time, take breaks at the same time...

Working at the office has some great benefits with interaction and so forth, but it can also be a great distraction too. No more birthday cake for me when a co-worker has their birthday....

In the corporate world it is a bit different. Working from home and working for yourself from home are not the same. Remote workers is a big initiative for a lot of companies because of the cost. Most technology companies are all remote worker based including Barracuda Networks, Cisco, Citrix, VMware etc... They have office space if you want to go in, but its not mandatory, and all of these are successful companies. If you are a engineer of some sort, there are tools to monitor hours worked and progress on jobs etc. If you are not getting the job done. You are going to get fired. It is simple as that. If you are a remote sales person who works in the field etc. If you dont put up your numbers. your are going to get fired.

As far as Sir Branson is concerned. He is correct when he says that remote workers are the future. This is pretty typical in the corporate mainstream world. I sell technology services and this has been a big push for the last 3-4 years. Virtual Desktops, VoiP Softphones etc...

It all comes down to the person. One size does not fit all.

About 1 in 10 of the people you hire can function with self discipline. As spartan as this may sound, you always work better when the boss is watching or you feel you are being observed. See Hawthorne effect
Duke

Ok, but then explain long range semi truck drivers.

They are not in the office and can do whatever they want on the road and
if only 1 in 10 did their job right, there wouldn't be any food in the store.
Every business in town would be running out of supplies because of late deliveries
all the time.

They are closely monitored by time, miles and deliveries and the ones that underperform are fired.

For sure. Sometimes you need to toss around the koosh ball & get everyone motivated
Duke

What Mitch said,
Also you're comparing apples to vaginas.
Ds

Then it would seem that the problem is that another employer does not have a way to
measure his employee's performance except looking into the cubicle to make sure he is there.

:1orglaugh

Moving people into an office doesn't change anything if you don't have
a system of measurement besides seeing them alive every morning. And if you
have a strong system of measurements like , schedules, dead lines, goals then
the employee is just like the truck driver.

So in Yahoo's case, what the CEO is really saying is : "I didn't have a good way to
account for your performance, therefore we really don't know who should be fired.
So let's all come to the office and maybe by looking at you I can then determine which
ones should be fired because I still don't know what the fuck you really do or how to measure it".

:2 cents:

No, she is saying, "you are not being paid like a truck driver, don't expect to be treated like one."

I think that's a damn good comparison, because I eat apples too.

:thumbsup

I don't think many of them are being paid like "Clock punchers" either, but they are getting
ready for that.

:1orglaugh

I think this is a big reason for a big decline in peoples general knowledge and it also leads people to be less knowledgeable about what their company actually do.
I'm currently at the MWC and when looking at the different booths many of them contain powerful words but no statement.

I walked up to a rather big 2 story booth after looking at the "keywords" they had written on their booth, they where related to something I was searching for. I asked them what their services was about and the guy in the booth couldn't give me any real answer. He concluded that it would probably be a good idea to schedule a meeting with his sales director the same day.

Might be just a clever way to trim the work force. Firing people by making it inconvenient for them. I think that most people who aren't entrepreneurs are just lazy when they work from home. It's just that much easier to slack off.

There are these great things called "reports" on what you've done if you work from home. So 2015. There's also this newfangled software out there called "Skype" that lets you see other people wherever they happen to be.

I've always been amazed at how much slacking goes on in corporate America. If they think moving warm bodies to where they can see them will change anything, it won't. They need to hire better people.

the angle of the effects on the environment should be a reason to make Yahoo look bad on this decision, unnecessary commuting has a big effect on the environment :2 cents:

Well. You also have to realize. 99.9% of the time people who run booth at trade shows are marketing people, not sales people or technical people. They are just there to hand out literature and setup meetings for the future. This is common place. As I mentioned in my last post. Most of the top companies in the world are work from home. Most of the people that I deal with who work for companies like VMware and Cisco are some of the brightest people in the tech industry. As I said before. I do believe working from home for yourself is one thing. It is easy to get lazy. But if you are working for a company where you have 2-3 conference calls a day. Going out on meeting with clients etc. If you dont produce. you are going to lose your job. I am sure the people working from home is not the downfall of Yahoo. I am sure it was google that caused it. Yahoo fell asleep years ago, and google came and took the spot. Simple as that. No matter who works there. They are climbing from behind. A good example of this is one I mentioned in VMware. They are a leader in there space. They have some of the best technologies and innovations, and almost everyone works from home, maybe for the exception of customer service reps and such. But all sales people and engineers are remote workers for the most part. They are more like google then yahoo.

The simple fact is. I sell technologies to small to medium sized businesses and remote workers are a huge initiative in many of these companies (companies from 100-1000 employees roughly). There is just huge cost savings in this. You can pay for space for 25 people and have 100 people employed. Do you know what the monthly savings on something like this is in NYC? 100's of thousands of dollars a year.

Sir Richard Branson [white knight] for the win. Yahoo's idiots were probably fucking off on forums etc.. .

I hope this thread gets buried soon. I'm planning on telling AK to switch me to remote...









....dammit!

working from home has its pluses and minuses, but from a team perspective, having "in office" time is best.

I worked "from home" for about 3 solid years. In the last year I would commute to LA for a company that I was working with, but most of the time I was there was spent getting coffee, talking, etc.

problem is when you work at home, you really have nothing else to do besides work. in the office there are a lot of distractions that can cause people to get little done. you can make the home/in office thing work, but you need to keep a tight ship running in the office.

Its hard to comment on a company as an outsider, but I have the feeling Yahoo! employees are lacking discipline and the company needs a new mission statement.

That is simply wrong. I worked from home for about 7 years and the distractions were numerous. And I don't even have a family.

Exactly.

If you think that making someone work from an office is inherently 'better' you are an idiot. Flat out idiot.

Sure, some people are lazy and bad employees. They will be lazy at home and lazy in the office.

Some people are great employees and be great at home and great in the office.

If you can't trust your staff, employ staff you can trust.

As Epitome said, with home workers you get them to account for their time, just like any agency would account for their time. I don't employ a design agency and simply mistrust them because they are not in my office.

Also, the number of interuptions, pointless chit chat, wasted time in overlong shitly run meetings etc is insane in most offices I've worked in.

When I worked in mainstream, I was working for a company that was trialling the idea of home workers. I was part of the trial. I could easily get what would take a day in the office done in half a day working at home because of the lack of interruptions.

You'd be surprised how well a no trespassing sign and a dead phone line work.

:1orglaugh

I think John Gruber over at DaringFireball said it best:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/02/27/yahoo-mayer

"I?ve worked remotely. I know some very successful companies where most, sometimes all, employees work remotely. If I were going to start a new company today, it?d be a small team, all remote. But what works for small teams doesn?t necessarily work for large companies. It may well be that Mayer?s policy change will not help Yahoo, but Branson?s statement is clearly wrong: Yahoo employees have been allowed to work remotely, and they have not excelled.

Yahoo needs a kick in the ass. Mayer is not merely trying to keep Yahoo limping along; she?s trying to lead Yahoo to kick some ass. Same old, same old isn?t going to get them there."

Actually, here's a fantastic piece in The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/arc...second/273584/

50% of the people I know in this industry are remote workers, and I'd say that about 30% of them are better than 80% of the people here that work in office spaces at many of the companies here.. They are able to work remote for a reason, they are damn good at what they do.. In the end it all falls on management if the deadlines are not being met and productivity is dropping beyond industry standards.. The biggest problem in any company is bottlenecks.. Once you can work past or around the bottleneck all will go well usually.. When you get a person working with you that is good at what they do it does not matter if they are in the office or out of the office as long as shits getting handled..

:thumbsup:thumbsup