Yahoo! CEO takes Yahoo! back to the 80s… Yahoo!!!
Don’t get me wrong, I liked the 80s—big hair, power ballads, CDs, Miami Vice, break dancing, lingerie as outer wear (okay, maybe not that last one). But one thing that I don’t miss is the idea that the only place you can do work in a corporate environment is in an office. Saying that you “work from home” was equivalent to saying you were unemployed and preferred to sit around at home watching soaps, eating bon-bons, and generally slacking. 
This attitude persisted into the 90s, perpetuated by people like my dad (love ya Dad!) who believed that it was impossible to “work” from home. (Quote marks his.) But in the companies I worked for in the 90s, only one didn’t allow work at home, and that was because of the job, not just categorically. And at my last job in the 90s and 2000s, I not only worked from home 100% of the time, but I also managed a team of between 7 and 10 people, all of whom worked from home at least every once in a while. Rather than sacrificing “speed and quality” as Yahoo! CEO Marisa Mayer implies happens (read the memo at All Things D) when employees work from home, my team was extremely effective, had regular meetings where we had strong communication and collaboration. In fact, my team worked with people in Europe, India, China, Japan, Brazil, and North America on both coasts, and it was possible because we could wake up at 2am, stumble to the phone, and be on a call in our pajamas. If I were expected to come into the office to be on that call, I wouldn’t be on the call, and neither would any of my team (except someone who worked out of the office where that was business hours).
What Gets Lost When Remote Employees are Dismissed
The thing that Ms. Mayer is forgetting is that remote employees do a lot more for companies than just sit at home watching the tube while eating chocolate.
- Remote employees cost less There is no need for the company to provide space in an office, lighting and electricity, break rooms, cafeterias, or any of the other things that the building provides.
- Remote employees are more available Most remote employees carry their work cell phone with them all the time. They often work many extra hours. And before you comment that you work in an office and work 60+ hours, I ask you and how many hours do you commute? The remote employees usually have a “commute” of about 5 minutes. Less if they don’t get out of their jammies.
- Remote employees are happy Even employees that work only one day a week feel happier than those who are under their bosses thumbs five days a week. Just the fact that their boss trusts them enough to work 20% overtime can be a huge boost to morale.
- Remote employees are productive Working remote allows the employee to be more flexible, getting work done when they would have otherwise been driving to work or shooting the shit (or as Ms. Mayer calls it “communication and collaboration”) in the break room.
Working Remotely Isn’t for Everyone, But Some Positions are Well Suited To It
I freely admit that not everyone does well working from home. Extroverts, especially, need the loud, busy camaraderie that you can often find in a bustling office. And some people do need a manager hovering over them to help them and set their priorities. But just because not everyone can successfully work from home means that no one should work from home. According to All Things D, the majority of 100% remote employees work in Customer Service. This means that they probably spend a lot of time on the phone. If they are all forced to come into an office, that means that they will probably be disturbing their non-CS co-workers (because they are on the phone a lot) and they may even require an office that isn’t normally open 24-7 to be lit and heated longer than before if they normally work a swing or graveyard shift. (See my comments above about money…)
An Internet Company Embraces the Past
I do find it sad to see a company like Yahoo! moving away from remote employees like this, especially for the implied reason that employees were using time at home to play, goof off, and generally slack. If the employees really were so lazy and underperforming, shouldn’t Ms. Mayer be looking at her managers for not managing their people better rather than punitively removing a style of working that is growing in importance and effectiveness in a demeaning and condescending memo? Yahoo! should be moving forward in creating work environments that work for the new millenium, not moving back into the 1980s and early 90s.