Discussion on:

Huh? Yahoo puts kibosh on employee telecommuting

okay, I will. Your example is actually one in ten million. : )

and common sense is about, most times, doing the right thing, and Ms. Mayer is doing the right thing.

when the rest of the world disagrees with what you call the "right thing".
Probably try to pass laws about some minority or another you think is vulnerable to your questionable morality.
I can tell by the sensitive way you insult anybody who disagrees with you.
Right, moron?

but, my comments are about common sense, and nothing to do with morality, and what people like you equate with morality, is pure idiocy.

If you feel insulted, then, I know I said the right things, and the moral things, and the appropriate things, since you and all like you, aren't capable of understanding that, it's your side that is lacking morals and common sense.

That doesn't mean the concept is bad. Just means the executive dropped the ball.
Can they get it back with this new policy?
Maybe - given the hole they've dug themselves into.

Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

I've always been told that this is called wasting time away from your desk!
Although I've read some of the comments and I see one that definately fits the bill.
The boss that wants to steal your ideas and ideas from the rest of his "team" so he can shine in front of his boss!

This will set them back not forward...they'll lose talent to those on board with how convenient telecommuting is. You can convene electronically.....in fact if they're worried about just improve employee electronically convening. this is DUMB but let them lose and let others show the way.

especially in a bad economy, where losing a job could mean being unemployed for years, and the older employees might find themselves completely out of the work force completely, and becoming part of the uncounted unemployed.

Is the CEO of Yahoo in her 70's?? The thought process behind this decision reflects an elderly, and inflexible, mind. In addition, is she giving up her executive suite? After all, she can't be "physically together" if she is walled off. And how "physically together" does she want the employees to be??? Hmmmm....

This looks like a knee-jerk response to a management and leadership issue with an attempt to control people. So much for innovation. Sometimes when leaders don't know what to do, they try to go back to an older way of doing things. I predict more struggle and then a swing back to telecommuting over time. I also predict that the first people to start telecommuting again at the company (in the closet) will be the top leaders. What sucks is that this decision will impact the entire company and set them back even further in their struggle.

They might think this will be a company edict, but there are going to be those people who won't start commuting and Yahoo will make exceptions. If they had a senior developer with years of experience on a critical system who said he/she would leave if forced to commute does anybody really think they'd keep an arbitrary rule in place? Like the saying goes - "rules are made to be broken". This isn't a law, it's just a dumb idea that they could have managed much better by simply managing effectively.

and for many good reasons.

Not all employees have the discipline to work on their own. Many need the supervision to make sure that they're doing their jobs as expected, and that they're productive.

Also, there won't be as many distractions as can be found by working from home. Nowadays, there are a lot more distractions than before the modern computer age and the internet age combined. The internet offers too many distractions, like Facebook and Twitter and chat/discussion sites, and YouTube, and porn, and even news and information sites, and many other "attractions". That kind of distraction cannot be monitored remotely by supervisory or management personnel. While some might feel that they can control their urges stray into the distractions, chances are that, they too will not be able to resist.

Also, when working from home, their are families with little or young ones needing attention, and that too will be distracting, and will render the employee less productive.

Plus, there is always the TV, which in itself, will be very disruptive to many who will be tempted by the daytime shows (I know first hand about that, when a lady I used to work with admitted that she was hooked on the soaps and daytime talk shows, and she ended up being canned when her work suffered).

Plus, Yahoo (Marissa Mayer), is absolutely correct when she explains that, the workplace, with the highly interactive environment, is the place where ideas originate the most for a company. We've heard it said before that, many heads are better than one; a leisure conversation can lead to the next great idea for a company, or to a solution to an existing problem. One other fact is that, what an employee does at home, is not completely known to the employer, and there could be many cases where an employee will reveal secret company information to other or to the competition. Another matter is where an employee might come up with his own idea, and will develop it, on company time, and once "finished", takes off on his own and either sells the idea or develops and implements it for his own purposes. Even if the employee had take a 1/2 hour or an hour per day from the company time, that is still company property.

Anyhow, there are likely a few more negatives, and a few more positives, but, overall, Mayer is approaching the matter correctly. Besides, a company that is not doing so great, has to take charge of all of its assets in a no nonsense approach, and that includes all of its people.

One also has to agree that, the socializing within a corporate or business environment, leads to many other benefits to the business and to the personnel of that company.

Plus, (and this is an aside, but an important one), imagine the benefits to the economy at large, where those millions of telecommuters will become a stimulus to an economy which is stagnant and even going towards recession. Millions more people needing to get gasoline for commuting or to spend on bus or train rides, and millions needing to get breakfast and lunch, and millions needing to purchase clothing and shoes. Yeah, there are some negatives surrounding the commuting to work, but, for a company, the positives do outweigh the negatives.

Does your boss know that your posting here? Unless your a blogger I doubt that its even relevent to your job. Maybe you are one of those "employees who lack the discipline to work on their own."
I guess its just as easy to be distracted at work as at home heh?

And, after several decades in the corporate world, as an regular employee and supervisory and management, I know quite well of what I'm talking about when I talk about discipline. I was also in the Marines, where discipline was and is a key ingredient for getting things done.

On the other hand, someone like you is apparently intent on just attacking others, rather than learning from those others.

Now, get back to your playground activities and try to take in a few lessons in life.

As a product manager at a software company, my job function requires a lot of cross-functional interaction. Depending on which projects I'm working on at the moment (some more collaborative than others), I generally find myself to be more productive in the office than if telecommuting from home (which I do on occasion).

Marissa Mayer is also responsible for the terrible changes to the home page at Yahoo.

For 17 years, as an employee (not yahoo) who worked with our international offices, I was communicating by phone and e-mail starting at 3:30 AM every morning and eventually in the office only to leave at 1:30 or 2 in the afternoon. Sometimes the international offices would forget the time change and call me at 9 pm or midnight to "chat" about an issue. Broken sleep became the norm.
Thank goodness I was able to work from home when I was in the States for several hours a day to continue to support our global efforts. Miz Mayer's attempt at onsite continuity simply shows she's out of touch with what's been going on a very long time. I never "cheated" the firm out of time nor did I complain about my hours. I wanted the opportunity to work internationally and this is what I did to live my dream.

Miz Mayers doesn't trust her staff and evidently wants to rule Yahoo with a clenched, iron fist.

Based on the comments, this is obviously a hot topic. I'd be interested in seeing follow up articles to this one in the form of interviews of Yahoo employees (on the record), in say 6 months or a year. This might put to rest a lot of the speculation I see in the comments above. Has this move actually been good for Yahoo? In 6-12 months the data points will be out there.

and if they do, it might be advisable for them to wear masks and to disguise their voices. Not saying that Yahoo might fire them, but, anything is possible. Besides, what Yahoo management decides, employees should abide by, and if they have problems with the company's rules, then they are free to leave and find what they're looking for elsewhere, including the availability of telecommuting. I doubt that any employee wants to chance losing their jobs in a rotten economy, and Yahoo and most other major corporations know that.

I've worked in the tech industry in Redmond and the Silicon Valley for almost 30 years and never had a problem with working at home occasionally. I have never encountered a workplace that had rules specifying whether or not you could work from home, but always left it to your manager's discretion. Being a designer, I have always felt that I needed to be in the office for face time, to show designs and get feedback. Oftentimes there were people working at home and it was awkward to interact via Skype or WebEx or whatever, so instead, I waited until the person was back in the office. I tried accounting for this by working it into my schedule.

But there were always those who took advantage of the leeway they were given and rarely came into the office, but still wanted to have a say in everything. If you're not there, you lose continuity, an din my opinion, you also lose having a say in everything.

It always seems that whenever there is anything good in the workplace, like no rules, some people have to take advantage of it, and sure enough, the rules get put into place to control this. I mean, it is a business and we are working to make a better product than the competition, and the company expects us to do the job. Telecommuting is a perk, not a guarantee. I'd hate to lose the option to work from home when I needed to, just because upper management felt the need to implement restrictions as Yahoo is doing.

In my lengthy experience in corporate engineering offices, the most common "water cooler" (actually, coffee machine) banter is complaining about the horrible traffic.

Even when in an office setting, most of the real work gets done via email and IM and various collaboration apps (code reviews and task managers etc.).

This nonsense about the "next big idea" being hatched in the hallway is pure imagination.

I also call bullhockey on the notion that we are "social animals" that need to bump into each other to feel good. This varies widely among engineers. In my experience it varies from "almost normal" to "I hate being around people". In the aggregate, engineers prefer less human interaction than "normal people". Indirect communication (via electronic means) is often their preferred connection to "the hive".

Business people (such as the Yahoo CEO) on the other hand tend in the other direction. They need people around so they can "hold court" and "see and be seen" and impress people with their shallow understanding of the obvious.

Ms. Mayer and Yahoo may be wrong on this one, maybe not. The trend itself continues to accelerate because of the huge economic efficiencies, associate (worker) satisfaction increases-by a magnitude. Maybe a better way might be to take advantage of current technology like Go-To-Meeting, Polycom, Cisco Telepresence, and others coming that make "virtual water coolers and coffee pots" more available, and more economical, every day.
Notwithstanding the spontaneity factor Yahoo wants to encourage, might virtual collaboration make sense and be a reasonalbe substitute? We'll soon add holograhic telepresence to the mix, and given the necessary bandwidth, and solving management (in)security issues, the over 11,000,000 full and part-time teleworkers will increase exponentially. For a fuller information offering see http://writinghood.com/writing/cloud-computing-cloud-commuting-and-your-new-home-office/

For GOD's sake all you people you are outraged by this - GTFOY. This is a bold and incredibly intelligent move to cut the "fluff"! Yes, far too many of you WFH folks are fluff like it or not. Many people simply cannot or will not manage themselves appropriately in a WFH scenario.And yes many of the PO'd will quit. Have fun finding a job. You would be better sutied and served if you humble yoursleves and learned to interact, communicate and participate. And QUIT WHINING!

In these times where technology is king, Smartphone technology is high on the agenda to have people mobile and working it does not make sense for a company such as Yahoo who is really owned by Microsoft to scrap a telecommuting policy all for the idea of passing ideas in a hallway or gossiping around a water cooler. My bet is that with the cost of fuel rising and everybody raising their prices on just about every consumer good you can think of, people that have telecommuted for the company will not sit in traffic in the highways and byways of this country waiting to get to the office to pass ideas around the water cooler only to turn around 8 hrs later and dorn that same ole traffic commute. Those smart people will leave Yahoo. I thought people were getting smarter than this. I have an idea, place a camera around the big ole water cooler you have or in the hallway and as people pass the objects yell out their ideas so that the camera can pick it up and record it at a central location. Then have the telecommuters do the same thing at home. But everybody does it at the same time similar to a conference style type of call or meeting. Then nothing is lost. Don't try to tell educated people that you are scraping telecommuting because ideas are being lost in discussing around a water cooler and chaining them to a cubicle, when a simple phone call, sms, e-mail will work just as well. And if they don't answer within a reasonable time then make the non-responding person loose their telecommuting option. Responsibility in the work place would be a much more effective way of dealing with the issue instead of making a blanket policy of no more telecommuting. Shame on you non-responders. Their could have been other mitigating circumstances as to why an answer was not returned such as a person being sick, or in the hospital but it is that persons responsibility to state they will be out of touch. Not penalize your whole team. Just when I was starting to like Yahoo, what a set back for sure.

Why would Yahoo instituting a no telecommuting policy, get you to dislike them? If you liked their products and services, and you weren't an employee, why the heck would it matter to you? Would Yahoo services suffer or be better because of the no telecommute policy? I go with a product and service which serves my needs and wants, and I don't care what their internal or employee policies are. Having said that, Yahoo doesn't serve my needs and wants, but, I'm just questioning your "reasoning", which stinks.

If it means their systems actually work for a change, or we get responses to our problems.

I have mixed feeling about the 'work from home and work from office' In my view, work from home is working happily in 'your' zone but that's when many a times things start slipping down a bit.

We don't always want camera surveillance zooming in and out at our screen and other shoulder surfing business while we are 'trying' to work, but at the same time, quality monitoring of individuals help eliminate many loopholes. Work from home is only for the seniors and in exceptional case but otherwise i am very much with Yahoo's Marrisa Mayer.

No matter they sit next to each other or 1000 miles away.
Forcing them to sit together will make things worse

they are often the first to go.

Now remind me why I would want to work for Yahoo?