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
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.
For many roles hours in office/on VPN is a completely worthless metric.
It is not a worthless metric for all roles. Phone/Net tech support for example. If they are not logged in, they are not working. Even there it's an easily gamed metric.
Remote work creates new challenges. Perhaps Yahoos management hasn't been up to it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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!
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.
not everyone codes at home
sales, pre-sales tech support, tech support, IT and other jobs can work from home as well
with home and cell phone plans being sold with unlimited minutes/calling it makes it easier and cheaper
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.
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.
I wonder if the metric they were using would completely miss people that are constantly logged onto the VPN. What log were they looking at exactly? If I am logged in for more than 30 days at a time, would they think I never did any work?
Seems like a flawed and rather lazy approach to actually checking up on the actual work output of your employees.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Every time I hear people complaint about lazy employees, I blame their managers. I mean, what are managers for? I don't expect them to micromanage what everyone is doing all the time, but their role is to receive the work, distribute it and check that it's delivered on time and quality.
If there are slackers, I can't believe their managers don't know about it. Unless they're also slackers, or don't give a shit. But then the company has far worse problems to attend than telecommuting.
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).
It is not a worthless metric for all roles. Phone/Net tech support for example. If they are not logged in, they are not working. Even there it's an easily gamed metric.
Perhaps Mayer checked those users who need corporate network to do their job then?
To me, this sounds like military-style management.
You are supposed to work as a team. If one of you goofs around instead doing their task, everyone suffers.
It's classic team-bonding strategy, and I don't see anything wrong with the approach.
She can prove wrongdoings happened but instead pointing fingers everyone gets punished. Now the group can work out itself who deserves to get soap-sock treatment.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
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.
When I was a kid the local amusement park installed one of the first computerized time clock systems.
Inside of a year night maintenance employees were sleeping under the bridges all day, others bought themselves season passes so they could stay on the clock for days, then come in as guests to actually work a shift and clock out.
Many managers really are so dumb they would drown if they were caught outside in the rain. They look up with their mouths open when the rain hits the tops of their heads.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"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
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.
"Inside of a year night maintenance employees were sleeping under the bridges all day,"
And thus, the troll was born.
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 assume the agreement explicitly gives the employer free will to undo the arrangement. That's how mine reads. My employer can make me switch back to in office work whenever they want to.
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...
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.
The CEO's job should be to axe the least successful projects and lay off everyone. It actually helps if you're cute as a button like Ms Mayer. She reminds me of this cartoon
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-12/
The middle manager's job should be to sack the least successful employees in order to not end up running the least successful project. As the saying goes, you don't have to outrun run the predator, you only need to outrun your fellow runners.
I'd make them cute too, like cartoon characters to cut down on the number of layoffs going postal and damaging valuable equipment.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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...
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 ?
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/
"I suffer in the office so you have to as well"
But it's so much more satisfying than roasting bugs under a magnifying glass, though it scratches the same neurotic itch.
"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(
DVCS where the company doesn't get regular copies of your work somehow is a disaster waiting to happen on multiple levels.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
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.
Managers don't make people lazy. Lazy people do make managers necessary, though.
'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
Managers don't make people lazy.
Some don't, some do.
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.
*turns on the tunnel*
I have *no* idea what you're talking about. *shifty eyes*
It's entirely possible that Yahoo has a serious management problem as well. If the company has a productivity problem, there's nothing wrong with solving that problem using a variety of (reversible) solutions. There's no reason the "low productivity from WFH employees" problem has to wait until you've solved the "managers don't effectively measure or resolve poor employee performance" problem. Use a variety of tools and solutions to solve all of the problems you see. Once you're back on track, reconsider some of the changes and possibly bring back a WFH program that still allows you to gauge productivity.
I suspect the data show that WFH in its current form is a net drain on the company. Once they have their productivity and management problems sorted, it's likely a future WFH program might not be a net drain. But if today it is, then it seems quite reasonable to eliminate it.
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
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.
Except that... lazy people can make excellent programmers. They get things done right first time and automate the hell out of everything, because having to repeat shit just takes far too much effort.
You just have to understand how laziness really work. For instance I annoy a friend of mine by parking a couple of hundred yards away from the supermarket. He doesn't realise that a 200 yard walk is less effort than driving around in circles trying to find a space closer.
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.
Hear hear. Im not lazy. I am efficient, so I can be lazy.
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.
if you have to circle around looking for a place to park at your workplace, it's time for you to either:
-Man up, get a Yamaha YZF-R1, learn how to ride one, and enjoy the 10-second quarter miles.
-Green up, walk or ride a bicycle to work, or use public transportation.
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.
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.
You are of course completely wrong! IT has to be the number of semi-colons written in their code that gives the real metric! Or the number of non-whitespace characters for those pesky Python-folks that refuse to bow to good metrics!
Hehehehe, back in the real world, CEOs can easily mask their cluelessness and incompetence by providing "hard numbers", no matter how misinterpreted and irrelevant.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
However, here are some valid counterpoints to ponder:
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
That's one way of looking at it.
Some of the things I hate the most are unwillingness to learn and resistance to change. In a previous job I had, I worked with several people who were terrible engineers. People like that attempt to compensate their lack of skills by working very long hours.
As an example, they'd spend days doing horribly repetitive tasks. I'd spend a few hours writing a script and then those tasks would complete in minutes. And doing it all over again was just a matter of re-running the script. A few more minutes.
Guess who management loved the most. I'll give you a clue, it wasn't me. I remember having a heated argument with my then manager about lack of methodology and tools, and then he replied to me: You don't need any of that fancy stuff, anything can be done if you work long and hard enough.
You may be right, but if the only solution is to force the employees into the office instead of slapping middle management real hard, it won't work. It will only scare away the best people and leave all the gunk behind, making things even worse.
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.
I wouldn't call that laziness, though. No one should WANT to do work that doesn't need to be done. To me, lazy is unwillingness to do work that actually needs to be done.
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