Might be there's another reason that Marissa wants to have junior nearby ...
Posted on 02/26/2013 10:31:10 AM PST by jimbo123
Last Friday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working remotely.
Human resources boss Jackie Reses sent out a memo telling all remote employees that, by June, they needed to be working in Yahoo offices.
This upset many employees – mothers in particular.
-snip-
Mayer – who had a baby last fall – is a working mother, but she's able to bring her kid to work.
That's because when Mayer had her son last fall, she paid to have a nursery built in her office.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Not necessarily, given modern day collaboration tools that allow individuals on a team to interact over distance.
The fact is, with nearly 20 years in IT and Management/Business I consistently see better collaboration here on FreeRepublic than I have in probably 90% of team situations where presence was compulsory.
To the point of when talking to people about the potential of remote collaboration I like to cite the night I lurked out here in Fall 2004 and saw Freepers deconstruct the whole Bush ANG Memo story. Which not only ensured that the hit didn’t impede Bushes reelection, it also brought down Dan Rather.
In that case, as others, there was no value in being present. It would have been a detriment actually, because it was only through remote collaboration that the knowlege necessary to expose the memo as fraudulent would have come together.
Hell hath no fury like a Techie scorned. The story is a deliberate leak I’m certain. The ability to work from home is a prime reason why many people go into tech in the first place.
Also don’t tell your employees no remote work and then outsource a bunch of new tasks to Hyderabad.
She *is* telling them to “do as I do,” it’s just that she has brought in means to do so that are not available to others.
I also worked from home for part of the week for about a year. Did so because I shared an office and it gave me some needed privacy. Also realize many sales people work from their homes. I did not mean to apint everyone with the same brush, just meant to poiint out that there are people who abuse the privilege and get lost in the system, just like what happening at Yahoo. Companies need to reign that stuff in.
I’m actually surprised more companies don’t jump on this idea. Office space is not cheap.
I've been working from home since 2008 and have no intention of ever going back to an office. Your example is likely failed management. My employer is very happy with me thank you very much. I have a job to do (as do my counterparts who work in the office). If I don't accomplish my work it is pretty obvious. In reality, I've gotten numerous promotions and have consistently been ranked very well during my performance reviews.
What ends up happening (at least in my case) is that I get to my "office" prior to my co-workers and push away from my desk later. You see, I don't waste time or resources traveling to and from work every day. I don't have to leave by 4:30 to catch the train. In the end, I'm sometimes the only one who is working at 5:30 because everyone that works from the office is in transit home.
If you can work from home, I would highly recommend it. It takes discipline, and a dedicated space. I have a door I can (and do) close when others are home. The woman in your example was obviously abusing her situation and a good manager would have been able to nip that in the bud. You cannot do parenting while you are working from home.
I concede that you may not have what it takes to work from home. Perhaps you require constant supervision. For each his own I guess. Just don't try to force your limitations on others.
I've been doing this successfully for a while now and my wife will be joining me shortly. Once that happens we will be able to have a lot more freedom in our lives. We can work from anywhere we wish as long as we have reliable broadband. Sure glad my boss is not a little tin-pot dictator like you appear to be.
I haven't been exposed to her that much except from hearing a couple of lectures. She wasn't an uninteresting speaker but what really stood out was her strange, somewhat humorous, laugh.
I have no problem with a ‘work at home’ policy if that’s what a company wants for some employees.
I have a big problem with the Entitled Generation. They feel they are entitled to the freedom to make their own rules about everything. Spoiled brats, many of them. If they don’t like the burden of coming into the office - they can quit.
Interesting you bring this up... At my company, at least for the IT dept, the rule is you will show up at the office... Period. Which is why it took me 40 minutes to drive 3 1/2 miles to work last Thursday, and nearly 2 hours to drive home, during the heavy snow in Kansas City.
However, with the 2nd heavy snow storm in less than a week, management agreed to let IT try working remotely, and so far it's worked pretty well.
But for our department, unless there are extenuating circumstances, we work at the office. Period.
Mark
Working from home is an excellent way to ruin a marriage.
You may think it is cool, but now you are in her “nest” all day long.
The first day you tell her to turn down the radio and she will just get more bitter as time goes on.
Think about it.
The traffic to where Yahoo is in Silicon Valley is HORRENDEOUS. If I worked for Yahoo, I'd have my resume out faster that I write this post. Losing a companies top talent to a competitor due to stuff like this is a sure way to Chapter 11
Typical liberal with top-down executive order mindset. A better approaach is to allow departments and directors to allow work from home on exception basis and let the managers work this out. In some areas like testing there may be little WFH. In other areas perhaps more. She has handled this poorly and clumsily. One size does not fit all.
Of course she had a nursery built into her office. She wants her kids to watch Mommy finish augering a major company right into the ground.
As a lab techie (with a room full of automated equipment in Arizona), I have a number of customers at our branch in Beijing. If I had to work with them face-to-face it would be a heck of a commute. The fact is, they work remotely, I work remotely and everything gets done on or ahead of schedule. There is no other way to collaborate over these distances. Time of day is more of a problem than getting things done. It’s 3:30AM there now, at the middle of my workday.
Remote working is a fact of life that gives me the flexibility to keep the balls in the air 24/7, and my company would be shooting themselves in the foot if they every tried to stop it. This Yahoo chick is a yahoo, and this bright idea of hers will fail. Unless, as another poster mentioned, she’s just trying to cause attrition, in which case it will be seen as a spectacular success.
You must be another widget maker like me. ;-)
I once worked at home. Didn’t do squat on some days (except cleaning my garage), and produced more than I would have at the office on others. There are serious legal problems for the employers when it comes to working at home, and I’m not sure if they are ever resolved to the satisfaction of companies’ legal departments. What happens when you have an accident while “working at home”? One example.
Why do you care where she is or what she's doing while she earns her paycheck? Why do you care how much she makes? You sound like a bit of a liberal control freak yourself. Maybe a jealous one to boot.
Might be there's another reason that Marissa wants to have junior nearby ...
It’s a function of leadership and management to keep things like a sense of entitlement in it’s proper place.
Doing so requires the ability to effectively balance various forces. The “Entitlement Generation” as you describe it, happens to be approx 80 million strong. Just as big as the Baby Boomers. They aren’t going to leave much choice in the matter, you might as well step out in front of a speeding semi, hold up your hand and order it to stop, for all the good it’ll do you.
Like I said, this strikes me as a situation where management has allowed a culture to get out of control. It needs to be addressed, but simply ordering people back into the office is an incredibly risky, if not short sighted, route to take.
I note that you use the word “presence” as something that has value in the work environment. The idea of presence has been undergoing a radical change over the past dozen years or so. I work for an enormous software company that utilizes “virtual presence” to its competitive advantage, and it provides an excellent work-life balance to its employees. By combining team workspaces, audio conferencing, video conferencing, instant messaging, calendaring and email into a seamless tool, all of the aspects of presence are accomodated. In a global corporation, where a functional team might consist of folks in the US, UK, Australia and India, being able to use this type of tool is invaluable. I know, because its my job, along with my team, to run the beastie. Our feedback is consistently good (like 89% approval of an IT group by its user base - virtually unheard of). We can also hire people based on their skill set - and location is irrelevant.
On a personal note - I’ve worked at home using this technology for six years now. I touch base with my cohorts in the UK in the morning and in Australia in the early evening. I welcome my daughter home from school every afternoon. My dogs are at my feet, and some days I work in my pajamas. But I do my job very very well, or so say my bosses. Some days I work 9 - 5, other days 11 - 8, and occasionally 7 - 11...it all depends on the requirements of the day. I’ve stopped putting over 12,000 miles per year on my car, and my deparment is not cross-charged for office space used. My work environment is far superior to what I would have at the office - I have a much better chair, better lighting, superior systems equipment. If for some reason I do go into the office, I make use of what we call a “hotel cube” for the day - simply a vacant office available to company nomads.
It works out well for all involved - especially the company, which keeps its cost of doing business very low and its employees happy. All that is required are motivated, honest employees and a company that is a meritocracy, not a totalitarian hypocrite’s paradise, like Yahoo is shaping up to be.
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