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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.
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..
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!
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.
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.
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.
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".
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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.
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.
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.
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.
"Inside of a year night maintenance employees were sleeping under the bridges all day,"
And thus, the troll was born.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.