What is your opinion of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's ban on telecommuting for employees of Yahoo?

I agree with the consensus that this is a sign that Yahoo is in deeper sh*t than we originally thought. Personally, I am always surprised when I hear that Yahoo still exists, as I am stumped to find one reason why it does.

Legitimate. Yahoo was being ripped off by their employees. The company had three or four CEOs in the space of 3 years, and the inmates were running the asylum.

I would not look at Yahoo as an example of the future. This appears to be a special situation, where drastic measures were necessary.

By the way, I have telecommuted for 14 of the last 18 years, and it is wonderful.

I’m a Yahoo! Small Business Partner so I care a great deal about the fate of my big sister. I hope Ms. Mayer can bring positive change to the company.

I’m not privy to the facts that caused her to make that decision. Perhaps she saw that those working from home were falling behind those working on site in productivity. But numerous studies have shown that working from home can actually boost productivity. I don’t buy the claim that collaboration was the driving need. With computer conferencing, that’s easily done via technology.

We’ll see if it ends up a net positive or negative. Some key talent is leaving because of the change. In the short term, that has to hurt.

Google, as well as other major tech companies, don’t allow telecommuting. They realize the immense value of face-to-face communication and how creativity often happens during impromptu conversations. Physically going to work can help promote ownership, unity and a feeling of camaraderie among employees, which in turn helps the company.

My thoughts—GOOD.

@ETpro: “We’ll see if it ends up a net positive or negative. Some key talent is leaving because of the change. In the short term, that has to hurt.”

That’s critical. In the tech community, Yahoo had lost its, well…reputation and appeal. The addition of a tech superstar, like Marissa, was huge news and the hope was that she would stop the bleeding of good talent and make Yahoo a place people would want to work. This seems like the complete opposite. What could she possibly do now?

I am all for telecommuting and all for businesses running things as best suits the business. If Yahoo has decided this is worth a try, then they have the right to try it. Some businesses I feel are too rigid and won’t give telecommuting a try. There is also an inbetween where employees can be required in the office only a couple days a week and also have spend some time telecommuting. Telecommuting saves the company some of brick and mortar fees of maintaining an office and all the associated expences.

As far as Google, I am not sure what their offices are like. If I remember correctly Microsoft is fantastic. I don’t know if they allow telecommuting. Amazing cafeteria, gym, I am pretty sure baby siting services, and I think are flexible with clock in and out times. Those services make working at an office easier.

I like that telecommuting is better for the environment.

Time will tell if that helps them get their focus back.
I think curtailing telecommuting is addressing symptoms instead of core dysfunction, though.
People can get some great work done remotely, sometimes better than in the cube farm.

But specifically in Mayer’s case, she has a reputation of being difficult to work with and more difficult to work for. It’s an edgy move for Yahoo to bring her in at that level, could be all or nothing.

@linguaphile – I don’t think that’s exactly true. Many tech companies, like Oracle, allow telecommuting and even have people that work almost exclusively from home. Even Google allows employees to work from home – it may depend on which department you’re in, though.

I worked for a company that had a flexible work arrangement and you were allowed to work from where ever you wanted as long as you were available and met all of your goals. If there were meetings where your physical presence was required (like design review), you had to attend, but most meetings could be attended by phone. I spent about 30 hours in the office a week and the rest I spent working from home. What I loved about it was that everyone was so much more efficient because they knew they didn’t have to stick around until magic 5:00 and could leave early if their workload permitted it. It made working nights and weekends bearable because you knew you could take a little break once your big project was over without being judge. The other good thing is that slackers are pretty quickly exposed – people are judged on their results, so you have to prove you are working rather than just show up and have people assume you’re working.

The negative is that if you have a company full of slackers, you can’t very well fire them all. You probably have to do what Yahoo! did and bring everyone back into the office for training and then start over again.

The tipping point for Mayer was seeing the stats on people actually logging in and doing work. The VPN crew showed that people weren’t really putting in much time.

Working from home is great if people are still communicating and sharing ideas, and being available. Mayer was seeing an empty parking lot everyday, and no one on-line. No need for another round of layoffs, just make people show up to work.

The word in the SF Bay Area is that quite a few Yahoo employees are actually glad that the deadwood is being taken to task.

I understand why she instituted it, but I think some combination of office work and work from home would be most productive.

Was it Marissa who had built a nursery room right inside her office-?

It’s not just Yahoo, Best Buy (which, like Yahoo, is also struggling) also recently reversed their Telecommuting policy and has asked employees to be in the office.
I like the NY Times Op-Ed piece on this topic, too.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I have the good fortune to work remotely (when I’m not traveling – as I have a high-travel job) from my home office. I’ve worked for the same company for over a decade and for at least the first 8+ years I commuted downtown daily over an hour each way. When my position changed to a high-travel job part of the requirement was for me to give up my cubicle (because it would sit under-utilized..empty for more work days each month than occupied) space because it cost my company too much to keep that cubicle. Personally, I was thrilled that I got back an extra 2 hours PER DAY of my life..and some of those 2 hours, frankly, gets spent working MORE for my company..as the lines blur and I have a tendency to work non-stop (even weekends and evenings that should be my personal time)... My increased productivity, however, was merely a side effect, not the motivation for my company to decide to have me telecommute. Truthfully, I think those decisions are more likely a cost based real-estate equation.

So why is it changing at Yahoo & Best Buys? My honest guess is that it isn’t entirely about accountability, being together as a team to pull together and/or discuss issues or even whether or not Yahoo and Best Buy remote-workers were truly working their full 40 hours each week…I think it’s a cost equation.
If Best Buy and Yahoo were doing so well that their office space was too full, then remote offices might look more attractive. However, these companies have been laying off..and they have more empty space at HQ. Plenty of space at the cube farm = under-utilized office space…and hey, let’s get some bodies to occupy these empty spaces!

I saw a similar thing when Borders was slowly sinking towards insolvency. There were large portions of their corporate HQ that had the lights turned off and dismantled cube parts laying around. You could physically SEE that the company was losing employees to attrition and contraction and lay offs..because the occupied office space grew smaller and smaller.

At some point..it’s not so much about employee productivity as it is keeping up appearances. It just looks sad when there are vast wings of your company offices that look like sad empty cube farms that they are..

I think that Yahoo’s currently policy change probably probably has some good data behind it. However, I see a lot of people making generalizations about how telecommuting is good or bad based on it and I think that is ridiculous. It is one data point. Yahoo’s current circumstances aren’t the same as other companies.

My experience is that it is best when teams are homogeneous. That is, they are either all in the office or they are all remote. It is hard to work with the one guy who is remote when everyone else is in the office. It is hard to be the remote guy when everyone else is in the office (e.g. they make a decision while they’re out to lunch together and the remote guy isn’t there to hear about it).

I’ve been telecommuting for three years and it works well for me and my job.

My former boss lived in a different city. We worked together pretty well, but every quarter during earnings season (the most important couple of weeks for us), I’d travel to where she was so we would work side by side. We were much more productive that way.

Yahoo! is in the middle of a turnround. It makes perfect sense for the CEO to want eveybody in the same place.

I think she made the wrong decision.

Yahoo is going downhill. Have you seen the value of their stock on the market? Dire.
Absolutely dire. Not so recent changes in simple things like their provision of e-mail service has made it look less than attractive, I’m this close to stopping using it altogether. And that’s just e-mail. The entirety of Yahoo’s services look to be either poorly managed, poorly written, poorly executed and/or poorly moderated. It’s not looking good regardless of whether or not there is a ban on telecommuting, speaking of which, I think I’d go with @ETpro‘s opinion.
I think it wasn’t a smart move, branching out in other ways can be pretty useful under the right circumstances, so I can only imagine that things really must be stinking in the office right now in order for a ban to be in effect. Maybe the CEO thinks a more localized gathering of great minds should be used in order to pick things up, but to be honest, I think Yahoo is really struggling to stay out of the brown smelly stuff.

Stupid.