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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Her job is to improve shareholder value.  It certainly is not to coddle people who worry about "work-life balance."[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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
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