Slashdot Mirror
The Data That Drove Yahoo's Telecommuting Ban
Stiletto writes "Business Insider and All Things D are reporting that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to ban telecommuting was data-driven, as you'd expect out of the former Google exec. After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were, Mayer consulted Yahoo's VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough. Despite all the outrage and flak she's getting from those outside the company for the move, some ex-employees are praising the decision, citing abuse, slacking off, and general 'unavailability' of folks working from home."
I'm in the office right now, slacking off, and have been all day. As far as any "Data Driven" metrics are concerned though, I've been a star employee.
making this as a philosophical issue is none of anyones business except yahoo's
"I suffer in the office so you have to as well"
If you dig deep enough you could find statistics that support any point of view, the reality is patently clear on this one.
Enjoy your office full of angry people.
is work being done? if timelines are met, and dates don't slip, then the number of times i log into a vpn isn't a valid metric.
period.
I can see telecommuting being ok when you've got an established company and clear objectives/projects, etc. When you're reorganizing, just starting, or trying to turn the fortunes of your company around I think you really have to work "together".
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Inability to lead is what causes people to slack off. Employees will slack off same as when they were telecommuting. It would be much brighter to fix the root cause of the problem: lack of motivation. For that, it would take a different CEO. For now, Yahoo will big digging itself into the ground.
I am glad that the background for the decision is coming to light after all the vitriol.
Having managed a (partially) telecommuting workforce before, nothing is more frustrating than not being able to reach people or get answers in a timely manner.
It really depends on the combination of management, tasks, and individuals to make telecommuting work.
In my personal case, admittedly, we had insufficient procedure for measuring progress to ensure equal productivity through telecommuting, and people were quick to take advantage of that (yes, I am admitting management failure here) This was not in an IT-related field but a more traditional business field.
if you're going to slack off, log on to VPN and slack off.
i work with people who work from home and offices in different states. everyone is always available and you know they are working because there are always emails flowing and tickets being done
If they did it by the numbers, and they had all this data, couldn't they see which telecommuters were effective, and shitcan all the other ones or force them into the office?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"A lot of people hid. There were all these employees [working remotely] and nobody knew they were still at Yahoo."
It's amazing that a company can have people on the payroll, and the managers forget about them..
I'm hesitant to ask, because I'd like to think no corporation would be stupid enough to create a survey that was guaranteed to conform to a preset notion, but did they at least make an attempt to compare the VPN results with a control group of cube dwellers?
(And if they did, did they also do something to avoid a bias being introduced along the lines of "People who slack off might be more inclined to work remotely"?)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If the CEO has to comb through the VPN logs to find out that people aren't working then, obviously, a lot of managers heads need to roll. It's the front-line and middle managers that failed to keep track of what their charges are doing that need to be shown the door.
Yes, there is data, that people log in to VPN for less duration, but does that mean, they work less? Some people live in office, and go home only to sleep, but what they do at office, inside the office network?
Personally, when I work from home, I am under pressure to finish some work. But when working from office, spending time is accounted as work.
VPN logs? I'd thought you'd consult the repository logs and some quality metrics (e.g. features per month vs production bugs per month).
Same thing happened in one company where I'd worked. Tele-commuting was allowed until a small subset ruined it for everyone by abusing the privilege.
Sure you need to be on the VPN to see your e-mail (that notorious destroyer of productivity), but there's a lot of stuff you can be doing offline (or at least off the VPN) that is still productive work. For example, if I'm writing code, it's not always the case that I have to be on the company network to do it.
Also, my VPN software seems to be the only common element in the rare blue-screen crashes I get on my work laptop - so it's usually a lot less frustrating to leave it off.
In fact, if I am goofing off, I'm much more likely to log into the VPN and open my e-mail so that others can see that I'm "online" and working. I like to sit my laptop next to my gaming desktop while I do this!
If someone isn't available who needs to be where is their manager in all of this? Conversely, the same can happen in the office. I have trouble finding people to "collaborate with" because they're in meetings all the time. In fact the best time to collaborate with them is over IM while they're in those meetings. What is their reasoning for not logging into the VPN? Are they still getting work done? Maybe they need to work in isolation to get their work done because of interruptions over email or IM.
Maybe there's more to this "data", but Yahoo is going to lose a lot of good talent over this. Seems like they're throwing the baby out with the bath water on this one.
If they are using a DVCS like git which provides for offline revision management, then not being constantly logged into the VPN is not necessarily a good measure of productivity. Conversely, leaving one's system logged into the VPN is hardly definitive proof that one is working either.
While VPN logs can surely be a good general indicator, I agree with the poster who points out that the quantity and quality of the work being done by each employee is likely to be a more reliable metric.
Mayer has to do something to shake things up at Yahoo and turn the company around. This seems to me to be more of a tactical move given Yahoo's decline over the years, rather than a prescription for the IT sector in general.
Not checking in and not being available to be intterupted do not mean unproductive for technical people.
Managers jobs require constant interaction, engineers jobs don't.
People can lack interest or motivation and slack off from work wherever they happen to be, at home or in the office.
All this data seems to show is that managers are poor at managing people who are not physically in the office. That I can well believe, but a more insightful solution than banning remote work is to improve managers and the management systems that they employ.
There is a huge amount of time wasted in the social atmosphere of the office, so remote working doesn't have a monopoly on time wasting. But of course poor managers will never blame themselves.
VPN logs don't necessary correlate with getting work done. On any given day I might be: reviewing a white paper, reading a new technical book, stuck in teleconferences/meetings all day, testing code ideas locally before bringing them into the code base, on the phone with customers, on the phone with other employees helping them with issues, writing a technical paper/brown bag talk, creating a presentation....
What would she do if there was a requirement to work from home, e.g. company having a way too small HQ building, being remote or employing people from around the globe? I guess then there would ought to be some very harsh measures, like losing jobs for being unavailable for more then three times a week, or not checking in on time, etc. Falling back to meatspace is not what I'd call a solution.
The problem here isn't the telecommuting; the problem is that managers in general have failed to shift from a blue collar, "if you aren't at your station, you're not working" mentality to a modern mentality that is concerned with quality and quantity of output as well as general availability to others. They don't know what they should expect from their employees, so they take the easy road and equate being in the office to working. This is a cop out for everyone above the grunt workers.
... comes great responsibility.
Telecommuting only works when you are a stakeholder in the company's dividends. While it would be great to trust every salaried employee to use company time efficiently, there are far too many distractions in the modern workforce to not enforce some method of accountability. Future in-house IT departments will be increasingly responsible playing Big Brother to control the company's time waste. Don't like it? Start your own company, hire an employee, and tell me if your mind has changed. No one cares about the things you care about more than you... no matter how much you pay them.
Unless employees needed to use the VPN to use communication resources like email, IM, etc; just because they didn't connect to VPN doesn't mean they weren't doing work. If VPN is the only metric that they have to judge worker productivity, it's the managers that should have been fired.
When I work from home, I often don't connect to the VPN at all - I can use email and IM without VPN so unless I need to send/receive data on a corporate fileserver or remote into my work desktop computer, there's no reason to get on VPN.
And my home computing environment is much nicer than my environment in the cube - I have 3 monitors at home (can't do that at the office, because if I have 2 monitors (even if I bring my own), then everyone will want them), a faster computer with much more RAM, and I can play the speakers as long as I want, no need to use headphones.
If working was home was part of the agreement with certain employees when they started working there I hope those employees sue.
I work with a few ex Yahoo employees and they've almost all commented on this. The numbers being used are bad. A distributed revision control system (like Git) needs no network to do anything but merge. Virtualized hardware let's you test and deploy most things locally. Only poorly run companies (at least in the private sector) require you to be on VPN for email. So, what good is this metric? Why do I need a VPN, most of the time?
Also, apparently Yahoo has a tunneling config that most engineers have been using for years and has nothing to do with the corp VPN but accomplishes the same. Good job Yahoo. Glad you're opening up the talent pool for the rest of us.
Not sure she would have fantasies of having a sex maniac for partner.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
If I was one of the people working remotely and getting things done, I'd be rather miffed. However I can see that a company trying to reorganize and reinvent itself would need more random, in person, collaboration to spur some of the creative processes. On the other hand, I think Best Buy's attempt to do the same isn't going to do a damn thing. They need lower prices; enough said. Making people come into office spaces they have to furnish, own, and keep up is not going to do that.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Don't take away a benefit from the employees who are meeting or exceeding their duties.
I worked from home for many years, and worked much harder. Life balance sucked. Having a spouse that wanted to come home and relax, while I wanted to go ANYWHERE in the evenings didn't work so well. Employees from the office thought I was slacking if I didn't respond immediately, even if I was attending a webex or was busy with items of more importance. I often did my work disconnected from the VPN, as I did not need to be connected. "Data-driven" VPN logs would not show that. Overall, not having face to face human interaction is great for work production and not so great for life balance and promotions. I worked from the time I went to bed, often to late at night responding to emails and calls, as to not appear to be slacking. I had the foot the bill for the power running computers at my house and provide storage space, as well as my own office furniture. Yes, there were some positives, like learning to be much more efficient, and to learn how to do all sorts of tasks remotely without ever stepping foot into a data center. I saved on gas and wear on my vehicle, and even found that my patience and driving habits improved as I was out of the rat race daily commute.
Now I can go in and chat with people at the coffee machine, talk to people in the halls about non work related activities, attend meetings that produce little results, and the days go by much faster. Human interaction is awesome, and I work MUCH less. I think Yahoo made a mistake, but I would like to continue to work from the office, even if it is way less efficient for our society as a whole.
We require remotes to have an XMPP client active when working away from HQ. Really easy to see when they are available / not available. The policy says Auto-away must be enabled and if you're going to be away for more the 15 mins, you need to leave a message stating when you'll be back. It's easy to contact people to ask quick questions so there isn't such a problem with "Joe wasn't in so we couldn't have the meeting".
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
This seems to ignore the possibility that people aren't always working while at their employer's premises. I've seen that happen as I think most people have. Just because someone is in their office doesn't mean that they're not playing solitaire. It always comes down to getting your work done or not. If people can get the same work done but have more relaxation time, what's the problem? If you force them to sit at their desk, they'll surf the internet. If you're really aggressive they'll just start making up plausible-deniability busy work.
I've worked in teams where it was very important to get groups of people together somewhere and draw stuff on whiteboards with everyone else poking holes in the ideas or making suggestions for improvements. This is especially true when a project is just getting started and you're working out lots of details. Later on when something is mature you have a lot less scope for innovation (you're constrained by what is already there) so it's not as critical.
Yes, you can do this to some extent with technology, but it's not as good as getting a bunch of people together physically.
That said, I've been a full-time teleworker for 7 years. It works for me because I have a well-defined area of responsibility, I worked in person with almost everyone I deal with prior to moving away, and I can communicate effectively by voice/text (not everyone can do this effectively when not physically present).
Either people are completing their assignments or they aren't. This is a black and white issue. There is no need to consult VPN logs. If Bob can complete all of his assignments offline and log in for 10 minutes to dump the results, what's the issue? It seems like the real issue is that micromanagers cannot stand telecommuting. After all, how will they manage the positioning of the stacks of paperwork on your desk if you're not there?
If this is about employees that need to be available for consulting, that's not a position that should be telecommuting anyway.
Still, the logic that concludes that those who put the least effort into getting work are also those who will put the least effort into their work is not totally unsound. Still there may be middle ground here, such as home office monitoring? I don't know, but it does seem that a company is so laid back as to allow it's employees to work from home in their pajamas is inviting its competitors who demand more professionalism to step in and eat it for lunch. Middle managers are usually just enforcers of overall company policy afterall.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
No, I don't think so. Since Yahoo has "webmail", just like every other modern company, you can converse with coworkers and team members without ever needing VPN. You can write your code offline, and merge commits later, or even have a local SVN and push it upstream later.
The sad fact is that while the CEO is supposed to be creating strategy for the company to achieve, she's not done that. She's going after people who have a flexible schedule. Does this fix the fact that Yahoo has no future roadmap for well.... anything? No. It just makes good engineers who have kids start looking elsewhere, lazy employees move the geography of where they slack. It doesn't fix management of those employees, it doesn't change the way productivity is measured, and it doesn't set them any goals to achieve.
In the time Mayer has been CEO, Yahoo has announced a total of zero noteworthy items. The fact that this is the biggest news out of Yahoo is more telling to their poor business model than anything else, and shows that Mayer was better suited to being an engineer than a CEO responsible for driving the business of a technology firm.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I'm a full-time teleworker...I just leave the VPN software running all the time.
Email, IRC, instant message....sure, these are distractions but they are also ways for people to contact me quickly. If you have a reputation for being responsive, people are less likely to assume you're slacking off.
Also, in my case the build farm, much of the codebase (the part that isn't in git), the test labs, etc. are all only accessible via the VPN.
"Despite all the outrage and flak she's getting from those outside the company for the move, some ex-employees are praising the decision, citing abuse, slacking off, and general 'unavailability' of folks working from home.'
Yeah, and that is an issue with MANAGEMENT, not the underlings. If my boss doesnt know what I am doing, that I am on task, it is THEIR failure, not mine.
In my case the build farm, much of the codebase (the part that isn't in git), the test labs, etc. are all only accessible via the VPN.
I can write code without the VPN, but I can't submit it or test it properly.
Part of the benefit to working from home is the lack of interruptions and the ability to just get your head down and do your work. If you're complaining that they "aren't checking in enough" or "unavailable", you're basically complaining that they are using working from home as effectively as they can.
Now if you have a real productivity metric that shows they are less productive, then fair enough. But half of the reason working from home is a benefit is to get away from pointless unwork interruptions like that. Demanding that they check in with their managers is basically saying "we don't believe you are working, stop everything you are doing every so often to reassure us that you are working", and I'm not surprised that this renders these people less productive.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
At my work, the people who do support got a new management structure. Their management is big on metrics. Sadly, their metric is "how many tickets did you close."
Unsurprisingly, service levels have gone to total shit. The people who actually solve hard problems take more time than the ones who bounce tickets to other people and only handle easy ones, and thus don't look good to the morons in charge. What used to take minutes now takes hours, but apparently it's "more efficient."
I see a lot of the same type of faulty reasoning here. Slacking off happens at work all the time, and people "being unavailable" is just code for "I can't walk over and talk about my dog for 45 minutes". I doubt their previous VPN logs really say a lot that's useful, but if there were actual abusers they should have been dealt with. Blanket bans don't tend to work.
It's particularly weird in Yahoo's case since it's already not exactly a place that top tier talent wants to go, and this isn't going to help them recruit.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Jeebus ! The first thing any decent homeworker would do is automate the log in process so that you clock in at, say around 8:00 a.m., Follow this with some random keyboard strokes for an hour or so.
That way when you do actually get up and do a bit you've already been "clocked in" for a decent chunk of time.
Honestly kids today. No imagination :)
Surely she ought to consult the people whose job descriptions include evaluating worker performance in order to assess worker performance... right? Or is the corporate world finally doing away with the inconvenient idea that managers do anything useful at all?
When that stupid teacher punished the whole class because a couple of boys misbehaved?
Mayer is cut from the same cloth.
"Data-driven" decisions don't help if you weren't doing it right in the first place.
"Call us Marissa - we can help"
I've worked at places that are heavily remote and heavily not. I've seen it done successfully and not.
One place, when I was on team A 100% on-site, I interacted with my manager very minimally. We had little direction, lots of bureaucracy, and a slow pace of accomplishing anything. I moved to another team B, 100% remote, interacted with my manager a lot, we had lots of planning, direction, and follow-up, and got stuff DONE.
I've seen it time and again: the overwhelming majority of people need leadership. What kind of leadership is specific to the individual; good mgmt can tailor their style to individual needs. Rare - much rarer than most people think - is someone who needs no leadership.
What happens is that remote teams can exacerbate management failings. People slack off; some people work in chunks (as I do - I will goof off for a couple of hours and then pound out a day's work), some people work slow and steady. If you're results-oriented, you can measure this. If you manage people correctly, it can be done remote, on-site, or blended.
Managing remote teams requires a different set of skills. Most places make the mistake of assuming a remote worker is just like an on-site worker, to be treated the same. They're not. It's not better or worse, just different.
Yahoo! wanted to drop it's workforce without a layoff. This was the cheapest and easiest way to do it. Plain and simple.
Funny. I thought what caused people to slack off was a shitty work ethic. If you need 'motivation' beyond your paycheck to do your job and do it well, perhaps you're more suited to the position of walmart greeter than you are to an IT role : remote or local. Disclaimer: I've been working from home for the past 3 years.
Couldn't round up enough people for the office football pool?
Where I used to work, the office was some people's only social activity. They'd be the ones whining when co-workers wouldn't be around to bullshit about TV episodes, sporting events, go out for drinks at lunchtime, etc.
Have gnu, will travel.
Tighten up the rules! The problem is people don't check up and hence people get lazy. Create rules such as check in with the VPN twice a day or make sure you at least two major status updates a day with work to follow. Make sure you available from 8am to 6pm all day via the phone. If you go out somewhere make sure everyone knows via email response. Make sure you voice mail box reflects the day's events. Telecommuting isn't hard to pull of, it just has to be done right.
I don't get it. If some WAH employees are not producing, why not simply fire them? (And, for that matter, reprimand their managers, who let them get away with it.) Why ban WAH for the employees that ARE getting their jobs done?
Okay, WAH requires a better work ethic than working from a desk. But if an employee can't hack it (for whatever reason) the solution is to get rid of the employee, not piss off half the company in an attempt to bring the slackers in line.
I just want to know. I want to see what percentage of people never logged in vs stayed on a few minutes... I know the controversy but click the /. article to see the data.... Now show me the data. Anyone have that?
I lament this decision, but understand it. I telecommuted from Maine to D.C. I did it very well. I was reliable. I even got more work done there where I had control over my environment and time than I do where where I don't. That said, I was alone in this. The other 3 or 4 people doing the same thing were notoriously unreliable. So I understand the decision to end the practice even if it really made my life worse. My argument would be, then... address WHY people can't stick to the job at home... rather than end the practice. In a world with dwindling resources, severe jumps in carbon emissions (not small portion of which is transportation and heating/cooling related), all of a person's lifespan utterly wasted (and in some respected, endangered by) sitting in traffic, etc. Rise above, Mayer... don't put down.
Likewise, we're hearing from people close to Yahoo executives and employees that she made the right decision banning work from home.
"The employees at Yahoo are thrilled," says one source close to the company.
"There isn't massive uprising. The truth is, they've all been pissed off that people haven't been working."
If it works for the employees, then our opinions here don't mean much in the debate.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
So since I wasn't part of the normal management structure they sent me all the complicated cases to make their closure rate look good...
How about instead of banning telecommuting, you make managers do their job and fire underperforming employees?
EOM
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
It's interesting to me that tech start-ups have adopted many elements of the ROWE concept whereas I've never heard of this in larger tech companies. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-51237128/what-is-a-results-only-work-environment/ I suspect that large companies aren't particularly interested in results, preferring instead to focus on the cult of "management". And the worst of managers, having limited capacities and imaginations, see as their primary strategies control and compliance. The definition of success is not results, but is instead how "tight a ship" they run.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
The real metric they should have looked at - since it's the main complaint of the managers - was availability. Availability needs are different for different aspects of work. The other half of that is responsiveness: getting the answers and clearances for your work from the stake holders involved.
Neither of those things have anything to do with location.
In my previous job, a lot of deployments were done in the wee hours of the night, and the fact that most of us were telecommuters meant that communication wasn't any different form a normal work environment.
Yahoo's real problem is that nobody without a legacy attachment to it needs it at all.
-- Real Stupidity is the Artificial Intelligence of the 21st century
Newsflash: Yahoo chastises workers for pretending to work.
Meanwhile: Yahoo continues to pretend to be in business.
(I seem to recall that they contributed a JS toolkit, which is cool. That's about all I can recall for the last five or eight years, though. Does anyone know what else they do?)
Why didn't they haul the worst offenders into an office and require them to explain why they weren't logging on for the days they don't show up on VPN. They could sack them on the spot and make an example of them.
I never use my company's VPN. I use ssh for everything.
News flash: most people hate their job.
Most people hate their job because they have to do it, not because they don't like doing it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
..."problems with "abuse, slacking off, and general 'unavailability' "?
Hell, I worked for a defense contractor where everyone clocked in on a time-logging computer system - the parking lots were always full, but "abuse, slacking off, and general 'unavailability' " were the rule, not the exception. Telecommuting does not magically make or destroy a work environment. Things ain't gonna change.
It seems that Yahoo is throwing the baby out with the bathwater with this decision. Surely some of their employees are productive with remote connections and would continue to be that way. And some good staff will choose to leave now because their job has become less desirable. But why suspend work-from-home rights for everyone? Is it that the vast majority of these work-from-home staff were seen as not contributing ? Or is management just not willing to do the difficult job of keeping track of its employees and finds it easier to just give an ultimatum ?
The name of the game is accountability. It's disingenuous to place blame only on management. It's everyone. It's the *culture* of complacency at Yahoo. And like I've said before, Mayer's actions is not an industry catch-all. Her style is only applicable to Yahoo and their problems with work ethics, whether you're aupser-awesome coder that earned his way to work from home or the lowly intern shuffling papers at the office.
it's hard to have an impatient boss keeping you on task when you're at home. you're left on your own responsibility.
if you come to the office, they can have somoene, annoying as they might be, riding herd over all the employees, instead of each employee being left to his own.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
A manager who comes by your cube and notices a pattern of you doing not-work-things when they walk up to you has a clear cut basis to look into what you are actually doing. Many jobs don't lend themselves to metrics that can easily demonstrate productivity. In fact your comment is a good reason why many managers used to believe lines of code was a great way to judge a developer. They didn't know any better, but it is perfectly sensible to most non-developers that a developer who can churn out 500 lines of code by lunch time is "doing more" than one who spends all day churning out 50. Nevermind the fact that most slashdot readers know that the latter very well might actually be substantially superior in quality to the former.
Because "employees" are a monolithic group who all have the same opinions, right?
I work remotely. I would switch jobs rather than go to an office regularly. I can't function well in an office; I mean, yeah, well enough to hold down most jobs in my general area, but not even close to as well as I can work when I don't have to deal with people all the time. "Face time" is not merely not a requirement for me, it's an active detriment. But IRC's great, so I'm happy with that.
Thing is, I'm sure there's some people, especially people not in our group, who note that I'm on at sporadic hours and conclude that I "haven't been working". And since a lot of the people I work with are also remote, if all the remote workers went away at once, you might find a majority view was that it was an improvement...
I don't dispute that there may have been lots of people at Yahoo who weren't actually working, but the existence of a majority who think a particular set of requirements is just fine is unpersuasive to me. There's often a majority who don't care about impact on some smaller group of people who aren't them.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Unless it's a split VPN (which only routes intranet-bound traffic through the VPN), any engineer worth his or her salt (and who cares about his or her own privacy) will set up a tunnel that doesn't send extra-curricular traffic through the company routers.
VPN usage is a stupid metric anyway for two reasons:
1. A lot of useful work can be done without being logged in.
2. It's probably not that hard to generate fake network activity.
As long as she's implementing useless metrics, why not evaluate employees on the number of lines of code written?
Well if she is so confident with the data why did she not say "well, here's the data, and that's why we are doing it". Instead she let her HR side kick share the bad news and give the goofy talk. Poor decision, poor management, poor company.
Home working was based on a REAL understanding of productivity- a 'semantic' examination of the factors, NOT a crude syntactical one.
Take a software project 'crunch' period, with an extended period of unreasonable working hours at the project's end. This only happens because a project sees massive slacking during the majority of its existence. The office is an environment where people have a massive incentive to only APPEAR as if they are working.
Bring in a moron as a new manager, and that moron will attempt to be a 'new broom' in the 'cheapest' way. The moron will always deny the existence of slacking in the work place, if the drones are making some effort to appear 'busy'. That moron will ignore sophisticated metrics that measure true productivity, but will rely on 'cheap' metrics like 'proportion of the day spent dressed in a suit tapping on the keyboard'.
Bad companies pride themselves in mindlessly following business fashions. One year it might be slavishly copying a parody of the Japanese corporate model, with compulsorily calisthenics in the morning . Another year, it is 'Victorian values'- ie., everyone back in a suit and behind a keyboard in a cubicle for 8 hours a day.
"I've been working from home for the past 3 years."
So, how do you work from home as a Walmart greeter?
Because it's the VPN giving you a comparable value about the amount of work done, _really_. m(
While I worked remotely for years, I could not help but have one of my monitors showing movies, surfing and otherwise slacking. The other monitor was connected to work, which I monitored, but only did enough to appear available. If I went somewhere, I had my laptop and modem so that I would always appear connected. When I was physically at the office, it was definitely different. I had much less opportunity to do non-work related activities.
I believe that Yahoo is simply finding a creative way to reduce the work force and making sure they keep the most motivated employees. Once they weed some people out, they can establish some fundamental measures and start allowing Telecommuting again.
The data is flawed and she is using select "data" to prove her point. Saying that people don't VPN in is total BS. Most technical people at the company ssh into the office. The even more technical and workaholics have their boxes at Yahoo! ssh to their home computer, so they are online and can work anytime they want.
- Yahoo! workaholic (never VPNing and always working)
Why is everyone complaining... Personally, I don't care about the metrics, I think she's trying to get everyone under one roof so they can get together and turn the company around and make it great again. Yes, you can slack off just as easily at work as you can at home as many have said but there's something to be said with being to just go find someone and get something done, and apparently the work-from-home model is not working for them in that way.
My boss telecommutes sometimes. All you need to know is this -
He billed 40 hours "General" time from home one week.
The week of Hurricane Sandy.
When his house didn't have power for 10 days.
If he was in the office, he'd be working on his personal e-commerce websites or looking for apps for his phone.
Yes, Mayer did it so she can fire people and cut costs. Yes, VPN is a crappy metric to use although I'm sure that isn't the only metric she used. Yes, telecommuting works for a lot of people and can be a huge cost saver for companies.
But please, let's spare me the "telecommuting is the Holy Grail" for all employees and for all businesses. Fact is every company has terrible employees and they will game the system no matter where they are.
Hagrin.com
Their biggest problem is that they're competing with Google. I'm not sure there is any fix other than trying for a merger.
People abused vacation days and suddenly companies dropped paid vacation and went PTO.
People abused working from home, companies start dropping telecommuting.
Both are the wrong reaction -- you fire the people who are abusing the system, you don't punish the people who aren't.
Yahoo needs to embrace those people working from home and rather than get rid of them they should setup goals that those employees leverage Yahoo services to work remotely and then reconcile their experiences in order to improve the services. I'm surprised that Yahoo hasn't figured this out.
This is just another case of management dysfunction. Management has the data to show who wasn't meeting their work obligations, but rather than hold specific employees accountable, they create a blanket policy that penalizes everyone. Those employees still get to keep their jobs and slack off at work (long lunches, multiple coffee breaks, You Tubing, etc...) and people who would love those jobs don't get the chance to help make Yahoo a better organization. Not to mention further reduction in employee morale. Data analysis is all well and good, but you still have to make good decisions.
'Jason Fried thinks deeply about collaboration, productivity and the nature of work. He's the co-founder of 37signals, makers of Basecamp and other web-based collaboration tools' http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work.html
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
Of course, people in a job can see the writing on the wall and will tell bull-headed managers what they want to hear to save their jobs and make their lives easier.
I agree with your main point, but there's something to consider:
You're not a special unique snowflake for doing better when you can sit down and do straight work without interruption. Thats cool, until someone actually needs you. We have some people here who are pretty much geniuses and leaders in their fields. If let alone, they'll be ridiculously productive...but that also means no knowledge sharing, not supporting more junior employees, not being there for meetings that actually matter (not all meetings are useless...). So THEIR productivity would go up drastically, but the productivity of the company as a whole wouldn't.
If you were hired to be a ninja in the shadows, then no problem (we have those here). Very few people are hired like that though.
If you're blaming management because you're unproductive, is like saying your parents are failing you because you got a C- on your test. If you're getting A+ and they still hound you, then they're at fault. But for those of you self-victimizing yourselves for being unproductive....no one is going to miss you, if you as the "talent" decides to leave.
Many people enjoy their jobs. I think hating your job is probably a stupid person thing in the U.S. The rest of us seek satisfying work.
is work being done? if timelines are met, and dates don't slip, then the number of times i log into a vpn isn't a valid metric.
period.
In Computer Science it is taught that using simplistic metrics to measure productivity is foolish. That the metric can often be easily gamed, that the highly productive may not behave as the metric assumes.
In Business School it is taught (repeatedly) that you do not get what you ask for, you do not even get what everyone agrees is good or correct, what you get is what you reward. Use VPN logins as a metric and you will get more VPN logins, not necessarily productivity.
Perhaps more importantly, Dilbert teaches us about Wally's minivan.
I'm not saying the decision is necessarily bad, for many projects/tasks there is something to be said for being on site and having very useful unplanned accidental conversations and having nearly guaranteed access to coworkers. However this VPN metric just seems to be a public excuse, that the decision was made for other reasons. And of course whether this decision is fair to existing remote workers is something else entirely.
As a Linux administrator I get so much more work done from home than I could ever get done in an office.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
Intentionally ignored, yes, because the issue examined was specific to remote workers. You're assuming this move was intended to be a fix-all for all Yahoo employee productivity issues. Instead, for Yahoo right now, this is a pretty decent idea, especially considering the anecdotes from employees saying some remote workers were taking advantage of the system, and whatever VPN data Mayer has looked at.
LegendMUD
Judging the quality of work coming from Yahoo by the new 'improved' groups calender, this new rule sure can't hurt.
But only if it results in some adult supervision. It's a bit too early to know if the management team is up to this last part or not.
It would be ashamed if they continue to seed the world to big G.
This is it: "She just wants to fire people, the data is a pretense."
I enjoy poking holes in her VPN theory as much as the next data wonk, but it's like trying to rope the wind with these people...
Marissa Meyers is going to run that company into the ground. Yahoo=Hewlet-Packard
I'm wondering if anyone at a company like Yahoo thinks it is within the realm of possibility for the employees to 'organize' and refuse to comply as a group?
Thank you Dave Raggett
When someone starts working from home, check every week if they VPNed in every day for a certain duration. If they didn't, they're fired. Simple. Why they just let it be a free for all and then checked back on it years later is beyond me.
Well, it sounds like they weren't. Certainly as a company Yahoo is doing well, but overall it sounds like people weren't available when they needed to be, which - at least IMHO - is part of the job.
The problem is that sometimes it's hard to track this down to a particular person. I've worked in places where we were "mobile." Most employees were good about it, but there was one guy "slept in" consistently, and otherwise was doing non-work stuff a good deal of time. Some work still got done, so there was visibility, but a lot of the rest ended up on the shoulders of his more diligent co-workers.
I don't think his client-sites realized how much of a problem he was, so there weren't a lot of complaints/reports back to management. Work *eventually* did get done there.
When stuff started to fall apart, then the blame started. This particular individual immediately started blaming issues on "other people changing stuff at his sites in a non-standard way." It took a *LONG* time to deal with him. In fact, as it's union, his termination was being fought against years hence (and I left there many years ago, it may still be ongoing).
You don't have to be completely absent for productivity to suffer, but quite often those that are good at shirking work are also good are deflecting blame and taking others' credit, etc. In a situation where employees aren't present, this can be even more of an issue. The work might get done, but it's unevenly spread out and not done efficiently.
Not sure how it works at Yahoo but the manager's where I work (including myself) have other stuff to do along with managing their employees. Some of the people who report to me work on projects that are managed by somebody else. If they're in the office at least I have a better idea of what's going on with them. It makes managing for me easier, more efficient, - and less expensive for the company. Frankly, the LESS time I spend on making sure my employees are doing what they're supposed to, the more time I can spend on what will contribute to bottom line. Also as a manager, it's easier to pick up on when something isn't going right when you can SEE your staff and how they interact with others.
I intentionally hire people who will happily do their job with minimal supervision. That being said, I can guarantee you that certain people who work for me that are otherwise good employees would become huge slackers if they didn't have to come into the office. They need that interaction with their peers to keep focused.
There's one guy who wouldn't slack per say, but he'd avoid interaction with people that he sees as useless distractions. But what are useless distractions to him are usually things that need to be addressed in the larger picture.
Slacking aside, anybody whose done agile development knows that there are efficiency gains when people are located within close proximity of each other.
Finally, I'm not completely opposed to working at home. I think there are times when it's best to stay out of the office if you need to focus on a single task and you have a deadline. There are other times that people need to work from home for personal reasons and I'm fine with that. But for the people that work for me, at least for the type of work they do, it's better if they spend most of their work hours at the office.
Hating the fact that you have to work doesn't mean you have to hate your job.
I hate having to work, to earn the money to buy food, shelter and shiny electronic toys. I like the way in which I earn that money, and prefer it to other viable alternatives.
Give me $10m and I'll retire immediately. Until then, I'll keep finding and doing jobs I don't hate, even though I hate having to work.
People aren't unproductive because they hate having to work for a living. There's more to it than work ethic, but that's a significant factor across the population.
Is there a point buried somewhere in there? If you're an honest person, you'll do your job if you're going to cash your check, hate it or not. If you're a dishonest person, you'll collect the money and then whine about not being "motivated" enough to do what you're being paid to do. It really is that simple.
When I work at home I do my best to get all my data local so that I have to hit our servers as little as possible. Our VPN is slow as balls and it can take several minutes to download even a simple file. Plus if I'm on VPN that means I'm on our IM which means people are going to constantly be bugging the shit out of me with questions because god forbid they learn anything on their own.
What Yahoo is saying is that they had a non policy policy that went unmanaged and now they're going to fix that by micro managing people. If I were the board of directors I'd ask Miss Google why she left 10's or 100's of millions of dollars of non performing real estate assets on the books knowing full well this was the case. Because any other company (yeah I'm looking at you IBM) would have announced this new policy, managed to it and disposed of all the commercial real estate so that even if they wanted to back track they couldn't.
Free market. If the company wants something, they can PAY for it. Damn welfare queen corporations.
Of hearing these Gartner inspired dipshits tell me their business is 'collaborative'. As opposed to what? Funeral director? Jesus Christ this is a gaggle of fools who've finally guzzled their own marketing talk and now they identify strenuously with the Dilbert-speak of it all.
Tell you what Little Miss Google who "has it all! work!, family!, fulfillment! free time!" off the back of your husband, nanny, live in staff, car service, private schools and such. Fuck you and the paradigm you chartered a plane to fly in on. Seriously. Fuck you. You want me to commute 2 hrs a day each way to come work at your veal pen - send a car and a driver to take me there both ways so I make use of that 4 hrs a day. Or, give me a 100% raise so that I can afford to live where the blogerati hobnob.
"After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were"
Just wait until Marissa has to spend months circling the Yahoo parking lots looking for a place to park. That'll teach those telecommute slackers.
As some wise men once said
Data are not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding and understanding is not wisdom.
VPN logs are data.
Liberty.
When I was at Sybase, in the mid-1990s, they had just adapted a call-tracking system, called, logically enough, Calltrack(tm).
Calltrack was a marvel. It was X-based, and you could create tickets, move them to different queues, create sub-tasks and assign them to others, etc. It had an email interface, so you could update and query tickets via email.
I saw the possibility of everyone having a queue. How marvelous it would be to see what your boss was working on - I thought it would create a stronger workforce with a better ethic.
How wrong I was. Management had no interest in having their own queues, never mind upper management.
Applying this to Yahoo ... if every instruction by every manager was required to be entered into their work management system, instead of emails ... if every responsibility carried by every individual at a company had a corresponding ticket, where comments could be added, and progress measured, and status queried ... how much more smoothly things would run, as we would see those whom slacked off, and those whom put their backs into it, clearly separated, by statistical evidence.
Saw the same thing at Oracle, with their Technical Assistance Request (TAR) system. Hard workers cranked out either lots of easy tickets or a few hard tickets, but, regardless, there was a steady flow of measurable value being added by those whom 'got it'.
(Who remembers ISO-9001 and ISO-9002? Wasn't the whole idea to document decision-making processes? Whatever happened to that? It seems to have been buried. Has the ISO ever actually inspected one of these ISO-compliant workplaces, in Silicon Valley? They ought to do so, yearly - and make sure to speak to the terminated contractors, too, to get the full story.)
The only reason this system isn't in place is because management doesn't want to be measured by metrics. They know how easily it can be used, and abused.
So take Meyer's claim that she's flying by the numbers, with a grain of salt. She's flying by SOME numbers. She has no idea if they are the right ones. But if she is attacked for this policy, she will have numbers to defend herself with.
And that's what it's all about, at Yahoo, I surmise.
So I have stopped working, now I just slack off. They used to pay for my work and were happy with what I put out: not they pay for my time and they get what they pay for. The only work I will do, until they take that f*cking thing down, is on my CV.
I telecommute (medical issues), and during the workday I'm expected to be connected via VPN and logged in on the network. That means e-mail and IM up and running. Availability... the only issue there is if I'm away from the computer getting something to eat or dealing with the medical issues. Other than that, the reason I'm not responding is probably that I'm in the middle of assigned work and you haven't tried IMing me (IM windows pop up a notification to get my attention, the downside being I get really grouchy if it turns out it wasn't really an emergency).
If Yahoo had problems with telecommute employees not being available, it sounds like they didn't set things up and manage them properly.
Old German engineer's proverb: "Those who measure measure crap.".
Metrics always require careful interpretation. That is hard and always requires real and advanced insights into the subject matter.
From the article, I get the impression that she just wants more attention from the employees of her company (no, they are not "her" employees, if anything, it is her role to serve them). That would be a really monumental blunder, but not a big surprise.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In order to use VPN data to drive anything, MM would have to also know how many employees should be on the vpn at a given time. If she had the data to do that, then why not use it to identify the departments that must be obviously overstaffed due to the low useage of the VPN. I would use this metric, lack of VPN use to justify reducing a departments size and putting some heat on the mid-level managers to explain/justify why out of 50 employees, only 5 were in the office, and 5 more were using the VPN on a given day.
I just call BS that MM used any vpn data to drive her decision.
there's so many in /. who thinks they're a special snowflake. Cry me a river about the exodus of talent. A new crop come up at the end of every spring.
When I get to work at home I work MORE hours than when I am in the office.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Likewise, we're hearing from people close to Yahoo executives and employees that she made the right decision banning work from home.
"The employees at Yahoo are thrilled," says one source close to the company.
"There isn't massive uprising. The truth is, they've all been pissed off that people haven't been working."
If it works for the employees, then our opinions here don't mean much in the debate.
Well, our opinions don't mean jack in the debate, actually. The main reason for arguing the matter is more out of concern that the disease may spread. Because businesses operate according to the stampede model. They all tend to run in the same direction, regardless of whether it's the smart direction for them or not.
I'm cynical about "the employees", however. If "the employees" are 95% of the company, but don't include a 5% who were, in fact major productivity people and who get bent enough over the change to leave, then the net effect is a loss, regardless.
In any event, if people weren't being productive remotely, a more reasoned approach would be to yank them all in and not let them back out until they had proven themselves. An outright ban is a ham-fisted approach for a company that really cannot afford ham-fisted "solutions" right now.
I'm so much happier working from home. Im on my laptop from 8 to 5. I'm rarely disappointed when putting in late night hours.
No more hour long commutes. Hell i dont even have to take a shower. It's a no-brainer that it's a win-win.
I've been telecommuting over a decade for the same company:
* I am logged into the VPN all day long, regardless of what I am doing.
* We have an IM/meeting room type of software which I am logged into all day.
* Anyone can send me an IM at any time (and see what "state" I am in).
* Anyone can mail me at any time.
* Anyone can call me on the phone anytime.
This is an interesting revelation -- over a decade has passed and I cannot imagine a single day where I don't feel it's necessary to be reachable to the extent that people who don't work in my immediate organization would even think that I was remote. The reason, I suppose, why I've gotten away with this arrangement as long as I have is because people always tend to seem surprised that I'm remote.
What sucks about this:
If you are conscientious about keeping a telecommuting arrangement, you may feel the need to be available more often than is necessary. As desktops in the office sit idle on evening and weekends, I tend to remain logged in, answering off-hour e-mails or handling issues which arise out of business houses. Commendable though this may seem to some, it has led to work-life separation issues, which lead to a strange dysphoric psychological state. I'm not in it all the time, but while I know I'm not a slave and can quit any time, it sometimes feels like that -- I feel "owned." I feel pressure to outperform and outwork those who go into the office and who can actually be seen each day.
I could simply log off past a certain hour, but the problem is as people come and go from middle to upper management positions, I cannot count on newcomers being open to telecommuting. People hostile to it keep taking over, so I feel the need to have situations to point to like, "At 2am on a Saturday a server went down and I was on top of it by 2:15am!" Ordinarily this has caused the hostile-to-telecommuting people to grumble about it but then drop it, not wanting to make an issue of someone who has been doing it (with the full support of my immediate supervisors) as long as I have, with ample documentation.
These are the simple facts, and as someone who has done this as long as I have, I feel no self-consciousness about saying it with authority:
* People can telecommute. Just as it takes discipline to do anything, people can learn habits -- new habits -- to work independently. If people are not doing this, they need coaching. If they're unwilling, they should not telecommute, period. I am hardly a hardcore disciplined type, but I get up, set goals for the day, and force myself to accomplish them and document them. Watching my e-mails and IMs, my boss always knows what I am working on, and I am always a phone call away. It's simple: Set goals, state them to who you need to deliver to, and meet those deadlines. That's all there is to it. That's all there is to managing remote employees too. Know what they're doing and when they're supposed to have it done by. As a telecommuter, sending regular and concise status reports on what you're working on and where you are with it tends to keep people off of your back. If *their* supervisor asks what you're doing, they can simply send on your summaries. This takes all of 5 or 10 minutes a day. Plus when it comes time for your assessments/reviews, you have lots to refer back to show what you've accomplished, in neat bullet point form.
* Facetime is overrated and has more downsides than upsides. Forcing people to document problems, solutions, plans, and problems in text e-mails creates a paper trail and forced clarity-of-thought which exceeds what can normally be done in conference rooms. Are there exceptions? Yes. But most of the time, people who like voice communication like it because it is easy for them, without any regard as to whether the audience (me, as I rarely initiate it) can keep track of their tangents, the "umms, errs" and other verbal drivel, and confused, roundabout way they describe problems or propos
It's always been a doomed company. The only asset is the memorable name of the company. Have you looked at the new layout? It immediately induces a headache. We're missing the point, this isn't about teleworking/commuting at all. Yahoo is just a terrible service, plain and simple.
If management is that bad as many here suggest, good and able employees must have left the company by now.
Many smart people would rather move than work under bad management. They can find companies that offer the same perks easily.
Thus, we can safely assume that the smart ones that are still at Yahoo are there for reasons other than perks.
So Mayer's ban will most likely help than hurt Yahoo.
I started working from home full time on Monday, and it sucks beyond compare. There's no definitive quitting time, so I wind up working from when I wake up to when I go to bed. It's 8:57 PM and my in box is still full of shit to do.
However, here are some valid counterpoints to ponder:
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
Hating the fact that you have to work doesn't mean you have to hate your job.
That would only be true if it was simple to move jobs, there was more or less full employment and there were a majority of pleasant firms to work for. Especially in the current economic climate, if you've got a job (and aren't a slashdot superstar) you stick with it however much you hate it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I don't think that's true. The current climate makes it harder to change job, but that just means it takes a little longer. It's still possible.
Most companies aren't terrible to work for. If they are for you, consider why - some people cant cope with how large companies work, some cant handle the pressures of a small business, some prefer to run their own, some would just be better switching career.
Or it's possible you live somewhere that all companies are shit. Move? Start your own? Telecommute with a firm elsewhere? Not Yahoo though ;)
Seriously, if you can't find work that you can enjoy then you won't enjoy retirement either.
Mayer didn't get to be CEO by being stupid. Telework productivity is measured by the project or function that is being performed. Every process has measurements or metrics, if those measurements aren't being met its time to change the paradigm. There are a lot of successful telework stories but like everything else, there are enough bad ones to compare it to. When an employee is in the office, how much time is spent at the water cooler or designated smoking area or in your neighbors cube just chatting about last nights game or creating rumors about so and so seen with so and so? The telework program is justified and has saved time, money and created a happier workforce. Like anything else you get one or seven abusers of a system and the boss is going to pull back the reigns and have middle management reevaluate the program.
It should trouble us when a business decision of any kind is labelled data driven simply due to there being any evidence at all supporting it. Seems to me it could also be called "woman driven" but we wouldn't do that. It could be called anxiety driven, too. It could be called data misinterpretation driven.
I've noticed data driven popping up recently in the news as if Google only recently discovered the concept of reasoning using evidence, and has graciously shared that with the world. Now this shallow term will be applied to anyone who thinks anything upon glancing at a graph, right?
Hey everybody, let's apply DATA DRIVEN thinking to global warming. That will solve it!!
If you have an abundance of self centered prima-donna's with delusions of grandeur on your payroll, the way to get rid of them is to make moves like this.
These are the employees who believe that you are honored to simply be in the same room with them, and should hang on every word they say.
These are the employees who are quick to criticize everybody else's work, management, the companies products, etc. but rarely offer workable solutions to any of the problems.
These are the employees who believe that the world revolves around their needs, that everything is all about them, and that that the whole world must change because they believe it should work the way they want it to.
These are the employees who whine and complain about a lack of a written "rules" document, but when assigned to write the document, tell you that it is not their job to write such standards, it is your failure as a manager to produce one.
There are the same employees who either grossly under estimate, or over estimate the time it takes to do something.
These are the employees who prattle on endlessly about the glorious accomplishments of a previous job, who have resume's that look like police blotters because they can't hold a job.
These are the same employees who believe that "The corporation OWES them something" or that the government "Needs to do something" or that "It should be declared illegal"
A lot of these folks are online, and give obvious clues to their delusions of self worth in every post they write.
If you force all of these folks into the same room, and force them to interact with each other, the herd will cull itself in a bloody, no holds barred political death match. These types of folks are generally extremely brave in cyberspace, and complete pussies when forced to deal with people face to face.
Don't believe me? Get a real executive to be completely honest with you about what they deal with on a daily basis, you'll see...
Murphy was an optimist
Sounds like rationalising after the fact
Many of us poor working stiffs have no opportunity to keep our employer at arm's length. Get back to the cube farm where you belong.