What do you think of Yahoo's CEO ban

[Anonymous]

I'm not lying through my teeth when I say I am just as productive out of the office as in it. Of course, I work in a field (journalism) where you are expected to be out of the office a good amount, and anyone who was AT the office all day would be under scrutiny.

Maybe in IT or tech or other fields you are constantly working in teams, but I am not really. I NEED to be out and about for my job and it really doesn't matter if I file my stories from the office, from home or from MacDonald's parking lot while scarfing a bacon cheesburger.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Her job is to improve shareholder value. It certainly is not to coddle people who worry about "work-life balance."

Are you really this ignorant/uninformed? There is tons of evidence that companies who create policies that are amenable to work-life balance are rewarded with more productive and loyal employees. This stuff has an impact on the bottom line. Company culture matters. When employees are treated solely as a means to an end and not like humans, it's bad news. I'll say it again - Yahoo will fail. Mark my words. 10 years from now the company will be gone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Let's be honest here. When I tell people I'm more productive when I work at home, I'm lying through my teeth. And I think most people are.

I work with someone who works from home one day a week and says he's more productive. I absolutely believe him. When he's at work he is constantly being called to meetings. He has a lot of work to do just sitting at his computer. I think that day at home gives him an opportunity to get that work done so that when he's in the office he can attend to the meetings people are always calling him over for. HOWEVER, if he only worked at home, he'd never be able to have that interaction. I think WAH is great one or two days a week and, honestly, it's the way things are going, but it has to be the right field and the right type of job. You can't make a blanket argument that WAH is either good or bad, more productive or less productive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Her job is to improve shareholder value. It certainly is not to coddle people who worry about "work-life balance."

Are you really this ignorant/uninformed? There is tons of evidence that companies who create policies that are amenable to work-life balance are rewarded with more productive and loyal employees. This stuff has an impact on the bottom line. Company culture matters. When employees are treated solely as a means to an end and not like humans, it's bad news. I'll say it again - Yahoo will fail. Mark my words. 10 years from now the company will be gone.

I don't know. I'm detecting a huge backlash against WAH, and I think we'll see a lot of companies pull back on that now. Yahoo's concern isn't productivity -- it's innovation. The studies show people are more productive, but face-to-face collaboration facilitates innovation more. Innovation is what Yahoo needs to survive, not more productivity doing the same failing thing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm not lying through my teeth when I say I am just as productive out of the office as in it. Of course, I work in a field (journalism) where you are expected to be out of the office a good amount, and anyone who was AT the office all day would be under scrutiny.

Maybe in IT or tech or other fields you are constantly working in teams, but I am not really. I NEED to be out and about for my job and it really doesn't matter if I file my stories from the office, from home or from MacDonald's parking lot while scarfing a bacon cheesburger.

I'm the pp who remarked about lying through teeth.

I was a journalist too, and I agree with you. Journalism is a profession where you have constant deliverables. You justify your existence every hour, at times.

Other professions that are more project-oriented or opaque in terms of deliverables, like tech or the professional services industry, are more prone to abuse.

[Anonymous]

The spin today is that this move is a way to get rid of deadwood employees and avoid layoffs. The HR email was pretty lame. (Can you feel the buzz?) It seems extreme ... I could see moving to mandatory days at work, but work from home. It's hard to know what the intentions were. I could see Yahoo losing some good employees over this.

[Anonymous]

I have a job that is based on deliverables and I have to complete x amount of work per week in 40 hours. there are some days in the office where I am lazy and some days at home where I am lazy and on the other days I am extremely productive. Doesnt matter where I am bc the work has to be turned in by the end of the week. I can waste just as much time in the office as at home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Her job is to improve shareholder value. It certainly is not to coddle people who worry about "work-life balance."

Are you really this ignorant/uninformed? There is tons of evidence that companies who create policies that are amenable to work-life balance are rewarded with more productive and loyal employees. This stuff has an impact on the bottom line. Company culture matters. When employees are treated solely as a means to an end and not like humans, it's bad news. I'll say it again - Yahoo will fail. Mark my words. 10 years from now the company will be gone.

I don't know. I'm detecting a huge backlash against WAH, and I think we'll see a lot of companies pull back on that now. Yahoo's concern isn't productivity -- it's innovation. The studies show people are more productive, but face-to-face collaboration facilitates innovation more. Innovation is what Yahoo needs to survive, not more productivity doing the same failing thing.

I dont know, its got to be the wave of the future really. It's already happening between offices at lots of companies - video conferencing, email, virtual board rooms etc. One VC firm I work with literally has a room where half of an oval conference table is built into a wall in one office, the other half is built into a wall in the other. The rest of it is 'drawn' digitally on the wall with images of each person in the other room being projected where their seats should be. Its advanced and a bit ahead of the curve, but its where the future lies. The cost of digital video conferencing has dropped dramatically, now there's even technology to do multi person to multi person calls from a laptop computer with little specialized software. Meanwhile the cost of real estate has remained high. More and more I see these virtual teams being built at firm and firm. It's not a replacement for in person interactions, but it can create hyper-localized office space. Think a dozen small offices instead of one large one. This is going to become a necessity for many firms - think of the DC area - the traffic congestion caused by population growth and limited expansion options (potomac bottlenecks) are going to continue to fuel high real estate prices; as business grow, they'll either need to begin developing pockets of localized talent (think dulles corridor) or, if they want to remain competitive in the broader metro area, the only viable responses are smaller offices or, much more cost effectively, limited telecommuting - teams will rotate days they are in the office. Some companies in the DC area are already doing this.

The solution the Yahoo CEO needs to think about is not in-person 5 days a week. Thats not going to solve the fundamental issues like poor staff performance or a disenfranchised or unengaged employee base. Innovation is clearly improved by in person interactions, but these can be designed (and often are). What the CEO needs to focus on is a pay for performance culture, where results trump face-time, where moving the bottom-line is rewarded over generating decks. What her message says is that she values people being in the office for the sake of the physical presence, not for the sake of the result. Theres some real selection bias risk in this approach - on the one hand, you might attrite the weakest workers, those who are just lazy and dont want to work, but I'd argue that more likely is you would attrite the top talent who has found a way to be successful while also being remote, and in the high-tech industry, job flexibility is practically an expectation. This isn't investment banking. The companies that will happily offer flex schedules to Yahoo employees are numerous. Moreover, I would expect that young individuals who are perhaps more economically and geographically mobile - and frankly key towards innovation - are the most likely to want to leave. Perhaps this the point - a quick and easy way to downsize on a voluntary basis - but whenever you do that you tend to loose the folks who have the most options, and those with many options are usually those who outperform their peers.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this move, but it strikes me as stupid

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let's be honest here. When I tell people I'm more productive when I work at home, I'm lying through my teeth. And I think most people are.

I work with someone who works from home one day a week and says he's more productive. I absolutely believe him. When he's at work he is constantly being called to meetings. He has a lot of work to do just sitting at his computer. I think that day at home gives him an opportunity to get that work done so that when he's in the office he can attend to the meetings people are always calling him over for. HOWEVER, if he only worked at home, he'd never be able to have that interaction. I think WAH is great one or two days a week and, honestly, it's the way things are going, but it has to be the right field and the right type of job. You can't make a blanket argument that WAH is either good or bad, more productive or less productive.

I totally agree. WAH 100% of the time is total crap. No one is working as much as they would be in the office, and your co-workers in the office know it. I WAH one day a week and it's great, but I wouldn't want to do it 100% of the time and I'd never run a company where that was allowed.

[Anonymous]

This is why I would never WAH 100% of the time. When it's time to put people on the chopping block, or even to reduce promotions, the WAH force are the first to be laid off, the last to be promoted. Face time is and will always be an important part of the business world.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let's be honest here. When I tell people I'm more productive when I work at home, I'm lying through my teeth. And I think most people are.

I work with someone who works from home one day a week and says he's more productive. I absolutely believe him. When he's at work he is constantly being called to meetings. He has a lot of work to do just sitting at his computer. I think that day at home gives him an opportunity to get that work done so that when he's in the office he can attend to the meetings people are always calling him over for. HOWEVER, if he only worked at home, he'd never be able to have that interaction. I think WAH is great one or two days a week and, honestly, it's the way things are going, but it has to be the right field and the right type of job. You can't make a blanket argument that WAH is either good or bad, more productive or less productive.

+1 My anecdotal experience supports this. I can be the best of both worlds. Plus, add to the family balance and people don't take as many individual days off to wait for the fix it guy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:When I do go into the office, I am always amazed at how much time is wasted. Coffee breaks, drawn out 'brainstorms' that are really just people saying the same thing to convince themselves they were all involved. Catching up on small talk (the gym, the kids, what they watched the night before). Bathroom breaks take longer bc the smallest room is usually a distance from their desk. Unscheduled calls/stop-ins are disruptive to workflow. I don't know that I'm more productive working from home, but it is certainly not as lopsided as some might think. Like PP, I start earlier and have very little ramp up time. When I sit down, I'm immediatley producing.

+1. My entire company (Fortune 500) teleworks routinely. I go to the office 1x/week. No one "looks down on" this because 100% of us are doing the same thing. Many of my colleagues telework 100% of the time.

I think the real motive of MM/Yahoo is to get people to leave, which will relieve Yahoo of the obligation to pay severance.

This decision is, apparently, not based on any evidence about the relative productivity and effectiveness of teleworkers versus in-office workers. She made some broad statements about the benefits of working in the office which, while perhaps correct anecdotally for some, are not supported by data of any kind. It is a well-established fact that companies that offer flexible workplaces thereby earn the loyalty of their workers, who will go the extra mile for them. These policies also help employers attract and retain talent.

I am indifferent to the decision because I am quite sure it will have no impact on how we do things in my workplace.

[Anonymous]

I think it is just a sign of the terrible economic times we're in. It's a employer's market right now -- they can pick anyone they choose and treat them however badly they want. If the economy ever does pick up -- you can bet your bottom dollar that yahoo will do whatever its competitors are doing so as to avoid "brain drain". I hate to see a woman doing such a thing...just makes all women who have reached the top look like bitches who will sell out and do things the "man's way".

[Anonymous]

not a productivity issue. she is trying to change the culture, read she wants it more like google. i do think it is funny how the media treats her like a super mom. if her kid is sick her team of nannies take over.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Her job is to improve shareholder value. It certainly is not to coddle people who worry about "work-life balance."

Are you really this ignorant/uninformed? There is tons of evidence that companies who create policies that are amenable to work-life balance are rewarded with more productive and loyal employees. This stuff has an impact on the bottom line. Company culture matters. When employees are treated solely as a means to an end and not like humans, it's bad news. I'll say it again - Yahoo will fail. Mark my words. 10 years from now the company will be gone.

Oh, hon. You're just a scared telecommuter who knows that if a new CEO came to her company and weeded out the C-players who goof off at home, you'd be gone in a heartbeat.