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Mayer Terminates Yahoo's Remote Employee Policy

Posted by timothy on from the gonna-ask-you-to-come-in-on-saaaaaturday dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reported and tweeted that Marissa Mayer (CEO since July 2012) has just sent an all-hands email ending Yahoo's policy of allowing remote employees. Hundreds of workers have been given the choice: start showing up for work at HQ (which would require relocation in many cases), or resign. (They can forget about Yahoo advice pieces like this). Mayer has also been putting her stamp on Yahoo's new home page, which was rolled out Wednesday."

14 of 524 comments (clear)

  1. At you desk! by tylikcat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because face time is so much more important that actual work.

    1. Re:At you desk! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because face time is so much more important that actual work.

      I work in a small team where one member of the team works remotely one day a week. There's definitely less feeling of teamwork when he's out of the office despite him being available via IM, email, video conference (though we almost never do that) and phone. There's a big difference between "Hey John, this is weird, can you come take a look at this", and while we're talking it over, Bob in the next cube pops his head over and says "Oh yeah, I saw that yesterday, here's how I fixed it".

      Using screensharing and IM/phone just isn't the same.

      But some jobs lend themselves well to remote working, like customer service agents. I worked at a company that had almost their entire workforce working from home, we were low on office space so using remote workers saved us a lot of money since we didn't have to rent new office space to accommodate them and we didn't have to have enough desks to handle the holiday rush that would sit empty for the rest of the year. Accountability was easy since the phone system kept the same call statistics for remote workers as for local workers (including time spent answering customer service emails) and the manager monitored random calls to make sure the home worker was professional without any background noises like kids/pets.

    2. Re:At you desk! by Bodero · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're right... Remote working doesn't work when it's a small part of the team. The rest communicates via their usual face to face measures, and the remote worker is isolated.

      When the whole team works remotely, though, the methods of communication change to accommodate.

    3. Re:At you desk! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actual Real Life Event:

      My large blue employer terminated work from home several years ago. I now sit in a several hundred office cube farm with a shoulder level barrier between cubes that are 6 feet at most apart. For a long time no one sat across from me and only one, generally quiet, person to the side. Then a cube reshuffle happened.

      I come in early for some quiet time and to plan out the day. Cubes were reassigned so I now have 2 loud people across from me, one of them comes in early too. To further disable any concentration, this person regularly leads a conference call when he comes in. Now, how likely is it that a person could focus with that going on 4 feet away? Not exactly.

      A successful, smart business would realize theres a middle ground here, that some work from home is good and desirable. Yahoo is doing two things -
      1. A layoff without calling it a layoff.
      2. Undermining employees and will bring in a boat load of contract, mostly H1B / L1, employees to weaken any bargaining power employees have for raises, flexibility, compensation. I know this because I have lived it at my large blue employer.

      lastly: Actively resist in any manner the current "reform" of H1B etc. Tech companies are using its loop holes to bring in more supply of compliant foreign workers. They arent bring in the best and brightest as the program is designed to do, they are just increasing supply to weaken US workers bargaining power. Guess what, its working great for them!

  2. bullet in the head by Yonder+Way · · Score: 5, Insightful

    After years of twitching on the gurney, Mayer is finally putting a bullet in Yahoo's head.

    1. Re:bullet in the head by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      and let's be honest, telecommuting cuts down communication by a lot.

      Does it? I find that increases the amount of traceable and accurate communication. I can't count how much misunderstandings, "misunderstandings" and CYA I have seen due to people relying on facetime. Not to mention priority shifting, because it's much harder to down-prioritize someone who comes to your office. Or when your "just one question" costs half an hour of your time because it takes twenty minutes to get back into where you were after being interrupted.

      Yes, I think there are good things about going to the office. But there are good sides to telecommuting too.
      I've seen people turn less productive with telecommunting, but I've seen them turn more productive and accurate too. And I don't think it'd down to dicipline, but mindset. Either you're cut out for working alone, or you're not.
      I hope those that are at least will get offices with doors at Yahoo.

  3. Management panic in action... by Bearhouse · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, regardless of the success or failure of their business model, (hint: it's a failure), senior management has decided that swimming against the tide will mysteriously lead to better customer service and/or lower costs?

    I assume that this move has more to do with reducing variable cost, (payroll), by encouraging people to resign, than actually implementing a well thought-out strategic or tactical innovation. This because if everyone concerned actually turns up to the office, instead of quitting, then costs must inevitably rise. Of course, productivity gains will outpace costs, right? Wrong.

    If management cannot manage remote workers today, with clear objectives supported by good processes and infrastructure, what makes you think they will be able to do it with everyone in-house?

  4. Sounding the death bell for Yahoo.... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You dont attract the top people to your company by acting like a micromanaging jerk... This lady is proof that it's not your skills but who you know to become CEO.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  5. Re:Obligatory Dilbert post by gweihir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The hallmark of truly bad management is making wrong decision in the face of well known facts that make it obvious the decisions are wrong. This is what many incompetents in high positions mistake for "leadership". It comes with vast overestimation of their own skills (which are often pitiful), meaningless productivity metrics (time being the most popular, as it is easy for these "high performers" to clock more of it, which does make them "long stayers", but does routinely _decrease_ their performance, such as it is), an ignorance of the well established basics of good management. The problem is of course that managers are hired by managers and the atrociously bad practices are just perpetuated.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  6. Re:She should watch this Ted Talk by Dexter+Herbivore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Did you get your work done though? If you did, then it shouldn't matter if you telecommute.

  7. Re:I can think of 3 reasons by Cyrano+de+Maniac · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First and probably primarily is security holes from supporting remote employees.

    This is definitely not the case, for one safe-to-assume reason and one from Mayer's memo itself.

    The safe-to-assume reason is that Yahoo will certainly continue providing remote access to employees for working from home during off-hours, while travelling on company business, and for employees who are on-call. If you have to provide remote access for even one employee some of the time you have the same set of security considerations as if you provide remote access for all employees all of the time.

    And Mayer's memo makes reference to employees exercising good judgement about waiting at home for the cable guy situations. This implies that it is recognized there will always be one-off situations where an employee needs to work from home for a particular day, even if they are not allowed to do so as their standard day-to-day situation. So once again, if you provide remote access for even one, you have all the same security considerations as if you allowed every employee to work from home all the time.

    I personally think this is just as some other posters have said -- it's a stealth layoff to avoid paying severance by getting people to quit on their own, and the decision will gradually be reversed (or the policy just not enforced) once the desired reductions have been accomplished.

    ObSnark: When did Carly change her name to Marissa?

    --
    Cyrano de Maniac
  8. The Problem with Yahoo! by gpmanrpi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is probably a management oversight problem. We will see what becomes of it. It is not Yahoo!'s biggest problem. The problem with Yahoo! is that it doesn't have a point. I think many of us remember when it was a fairly useful directory of websites, and then transformed into a "web portal." I think that still translates to shitty web based AOL clone thing. Now, it seems like there are just a lot of other sites that do each individual thing better. Whether it is Google for search, Gmail for e-mail, tons of news aggregators for news, Pandora/Spotify/Grooveshark for Music, Netflix/Hulu/Youtube for movies and video, etc. Is the new home page better than the old one? I think so. It is much clearer with less cruft. Still at the end of the day if I am a web user why would I want to use Yahoo! for internet dating, when I can use match.com, pof, etc. Yahoo! brand itself doesn't convey anything anymore. It carries no gravitas, it is not associated with quality, speed, clarity, innovation, etc. To be honest, I associate it with spam and compromised e-mail addresses.
    If they still want to be a "web portal" they need to really figure out a compelling reason for a web portal. Why should I come to Yahoo.com? What does a web portal do for me that google can't do just as easily? When they answer that question honestly, then they can figure out a way to move forward. Otherwise, they are a prisoner to their past that is not likely to return.
    Ms. Mayer seems to see some of the problems. I guess the problem is whether the boat has hit the iceberg or if there is still time to turn?

  9. Re: At your desk! by tarius8105 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When I am in the office, people from different organizations continually come up to me to ask me questions and a lot of times they can figure it out themselves but they're too lazy. These distractions tend to disrupt my thought process and so when I go back to the task I was working on it takes a bit of time for me to get back into that thought process. Its worse when I actually have to go look at something for one of these people. I am also limited at how long I can spend at work due to being single and having two dogs who need to be let out roughly after 9 hours. That means if you take into account my commute I only work 8 hours.

    When I work from home, I am only distracted as needed by people. Most times they send an email which I can respond to at my leisure. I also do not have a time limit and I can go let my dogs outside to relieve themselves and then go back to work. I end up actually working closer to 12 hours when I work from home.

    I will say that yes if I were married and had kids I would probably have distraction at home but I would have to in that situation have a separation in my home where I had an office instead of working from my recliner in the living room.

  10. Re: At your desk! by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hear this fallacy a lot.

    When I work from home, I'm still pairing up with another developer over skype/tmux, and I am super productive doing it.

    It's 2012, there's no reason remote working should incur a penalty in collaboration.

    --
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