Big Bad Yahoo

It’s About Work, Not Working From Home

Marrisa Mayer’s new policy at Yahoo which basically eliminated full-time work at home or telework for about 200 employees (Atlantic Wire, March 6, 2013) has been causing quite the stir for weeks now. The news hit the internet and press outlets around February 25^th, 2013 and the buzz about it has not abated since. Numerous comments and blog posts have been generated in response, most expressing anger or doubt about Yahoo’s apparent shift on telework. The latest editorial slamming was Jennifer Glass’s Op Ed piece in the New York Times entitled, “It’s About Work, Not the Office” (March 8, 2013). Glass takes a fairly negative view of Yahoo’s new policy while acknowledging that the company is not turning its back on an accepted norm in corporate America, but rather it is returning to the fold. In fact, her criticism goes beyond Yahoo to a corporate culture that seems to value face-time more than the needs of their workers or the work itself. She implores corporations to consider the actual work employees are doing and not where they are doing it. Her ire is sharply focused on what she considers the misguided idea that requiring employees to be in the office is more beneficial than telework. She contends that work at home is a positive development and should be embraced by corporations for its wide-ranging benefits. While I agree with her that corporations are not overly concerned with what their workers want or need, I don’t think telework is one of those issues we need to pull out the whip for. The idea that there is only an upside to telework is misguided. There is a difference between putting in time at work and doing work from home, especially when we consider innovation and productivity – two things employers expect from their workforce.  Do the arguments she makes for telework, that it is a win-win for everyone, really hold water or is there something to making employees come into the office?

One of the bigger claims being made in the article is that corporations benefit from work at home because employees are more productive when working from home, i.e. they put in more hours. Glass makes reference to research that estimates that those working from home put in 5 or 6 more hours a week than those working from the office. Some of that extra productivity occurs because telework employees simply have more time since they don’t spend time commuting. However there is also research to suggest that when workers come into the office they are more innovative than if they stay home. Glass dismisses this research:

 “In the last week, I have heard a number of claims that research supports the idea that workers on-site are more innovative than those who work from home. I remain skeptical.”

While she found no reason to be skeptical of the earlier research she references, she remains doubtful of research that in essence points to a possible downside for employers: less innovation. What’s the basis of her skepticism about the research on innovation as opposed to the research on productivity except that the research on productivity happens to support her position? It seems to me that the research suggests that there is an up and down side to telework. In other words, it generates more productivity, but less innovation. As a company, when making a decision about telework, all research needs to be taken into account and factored into the assessment of the company’s needs. If it’s innovation a company wants or needs, it might do just what Mayer is doing and require employees to put in more face-time.

Glass attempts to minimize the research on innovation by stating:

 “Besides, much of this “research” simply shows that workers who collaborate with others in loose networks generate better ideas. It doesn’t suggest that the best way to create new products and services is by isolating your employees in the silo of a single location.”

Before you can start to create new products, you need to generate ideas, which is why innovation is important for companies that are successful. They are always looking for new products or ways to improve old products. You have to start somewhere and if collaboration gets you to better ideas and new products then as a company, you want to foster an environment where collaboration can happen. If everyone is at home and no new ideas are generated, then what? You have no new products and your company will be left behind (much as Yahoo was left behind by Google). Further, the research also does not suggest that having everyone scattered in their homes is the type of “loose” network that generates ideas. But alas, she wants us to believe that the research on innovation does not mean that collaboration cannot happen with at home workers. Toward that end, Glass argues that collaboration can occur outside the normal office environment and offers this example:

“Yet I have never seen a single university administrator try to corral faculty members into more face time at the office. Instead, researchers are encouraged to travel to conferences to meet with peers and find out the latest developments in their fields, and to use technology to maintain contact with a web of associates around the globe who can be mustered on demand for consultation and support.”

I love this example because it does not prove what she wants it to. If what we are debating or advocating is that collaboration can happen when workers are home, this example is a bad one. These people are not working from home. At most this is an example of how work stretches beyond the four walls of the office (a generally accepted observation and not a point of contention). It does not suggest that telework is a valuable tool. There is no doubt that work stretches beyond the office. Let’s remember that corporate companies also send their employees to conferences and training. In addition, they too encourage their employees to use technology to keep up to date on current developments and maintain contact with experts in their fields.

What does this example say about telework, really? Not much. At most it says something about how innovation does not only occur within the office, but that is not the issue we are contending with, is it? As stated earlier, no one is debating that idea. We are trying to decide if collaboration can happen when employees work from home and whether that is a good option or alternative to working in the office and this example does not speak to that point. It merely states that collaboration happens outside the office as well as inside the office. It does not suggest that telework fosters collaboration.

She likes examples and I love them too. Here’s another example of collaboration happening outside of the office:

“To give one small example, two of my colleagues, at Cornell University, a demographer and geographer, recently came up with the idea for a study to improve the retention of women working in science while chatting during their children’s after-school swim lessons.”

They could have also had this conversation in the cafeteria or the hallway at work, but would they have if they were both working from home? Ideas come from all sorts of places, but ostensibly, working from home means just that, working from home, and not sitting at your kids swim class. The point she was trying to make dissolves quickly when one realizes that this is an example of exactly the type of collaboration that is more likely to happen in the office when everyone is there. It’s nice that they both happen to be at the same swim class and had the opportunity to talk about work, but guess what? If they were both at the office they would have had this conversation too. My whole point is that they are more likely to have that conversation if they are both at work rather than leaving it up to complete chance that they both happen to be at the same non-work related activity. I would suggest that this example demonstrates the opposite of what she is arguing. Collaboration is less likely to happen when working from home since you can’t count on these chance encounters.

Yes, it is nice for employees to be able to have the opportunity to be with their kids at a swim class, but the chances of collaboration in those situations are rare, whereas they are more likely if the workers are in the office.

The research is clear, collaboration and innovation happens less when workers are at home physically separated from their peers. Her article while providing numerous examples does not offer one of collaboration with peers working from home aside from the usual (email, conference calls, etc.).

So why has Yahoo ignored what she perceives as the benefits of work at home and returned to a more archaic, come into work model? Glass provides two possible answers that are not born out in anything Yahoo has said officially: 1) Yahoo wants everyone to work ridiculous hours or practically live at Yahoo and 2) Yahoo wants to monitor their employees more closely to make sure they are being productive.

The thread running through this piece – that working at the office means longer hours at the office is an assumption that is not supported by the evidence we have. Forcing employees to come in to the office may be inconvenient and yes it will also mean less time at home for employees, but it does not necessarily translate into longer work hours at the office.[i] Nowhere in any of the material that has been reported does it suggest that suddenly Yahoo wants people to stop having a life. They simply want people to show up at work. They don’t care if you have a life or not, they just want you to show up and do your job.

Individuals working from home (full-time) are isolated, no matter how much technology they have. There is no replacement for wandering to a colleague’s office when you’re bored to chat. When you’re at home and bored, you’re going to put in a load of laundry not shoot the sh** with your friend down the hall (and quite possible come up with a new idea). Yes, people waste time talking about American Idol, but the point is that they TALK. I spend a lot of hours talking to work colleagues about crap, but you know what, we also talk about work and a lot of times our ideas come out of those meandering conversations. We don’t have those types of conversations when I’m working from home.

Yes, I am more focused when I’m at home. It’s easier to be more focused when you don’t have your buddy to talk to you or people constantly interrupting you. But let’s recognize that working at home is not all sweet smelling roses. You do lose something when you’re employees are at home, mainly innovation and collaboration, just as the research suggests. You may have more productive employees, but if what you need is innovation, you want them in the office. (As an aside, even though research suggests that those that work at home put in more hours, logistically it’s much easier to not be productive when at home. If you have conscientious employees, they will be productive regardless of where they are, but not everyone is. I know for a fact that when one of my colleagues works from home, all she does is check and respond to emails. Where’s the peer pressure to stop playing solitaire for fear of your boss walking in on you when you’re at home? I would be interested in discovering exactly how those hours of productivity were calculated in the research. Does an employee put in two extra hours at the end of the day because she took a two-hour break to take her kid to a swimming class? If so, she’s not putting in a 10 hour day and thus she is not more productive per se, but rather she is organizing her schedule differently.)

Collaboration is important and there is less of that at home. Yes, you can still call, email and even participate in video or voice conferencing and that’s great, but it’s not the same. When I leave a meeting at the office, I notice that people process the meeting after in smaller groups. They go into each other’s offices to talk about the meeting or will go for a cup of coffee. Sometimes nothing comes of that but chatter, but sometimes good ideas come from those after-meeting conversations. When I’m at home and leave a meeting, it requires me to log out or hang up and that’s it. I’m not having the same conversations with my peers as I would if I were at the office. I usually just go back to work, which is great for productivity, but not innovation. Companies want both, not just one.

I think technology has made work at home possible in this day and age and companies and employees should take advantage of the opportunity if they can. But there are limits. Working at home full-time is not always ideal.

Marissa Mayer’s policy was directed more at the employees at Yahoo that worked from home full-time rather than those that did it occasionally. It is not unreasonable for a company to demand face time from their employees, especially if the company is in trouble as Yahoo is. It’s also worth noting that it’s not a complete ban. The New York Times reported that episodic telework was not being outright banned as managers told their employees, if you have to stay home for the cable guy or a sick kid, go ahead and do that. Use your best judgment.

The second answer Glass gives as to why Yahoo has changed its stripes is that what Yahoo really wants is better accountability and to get that, they need to be watching their employees. She argues:

“Companies like Yahoo will not get more out of their employees by watching them like hawks and monitoring their every move.”

That’s assuming that the point is that they want to watch their employees like hawks. The company is in crisis. They want “all hands on deck”, they want everyone in the room invested, looking at each other, having informal as well as formal conversations. They want people invested more in the company than in their laundry. I would venture to guess that Mayer wants everyone at the office because having some people out of the office full-time wasn’t working and she wants ideas generated about how to get Yahoo back on track. The idea that innovation and fresh ideas are generated and come out of collaborative efforts is not new or revolutionary. I think she is trying to get back to that environment at Yahoo. She is not ordering everyone back because she wants to spy on them. She’s a smart woman and no one thinks spying on your employees is the way to pull a company out of crisis.

What she wants is to utilize the resources she already has more effectively. She is trying something new (and it’s new to them even if it’s not new to corporate America) because what they had before wasn’t working. Every other CEO Yahoo has had has tried external fixes to get the company competitive again (revamping their mobile services for example). Those fixes have not really helped and so Mayer is looking inward. That does require all hands on deck as well as a change in corporate culture. So she’s putting ideas out there and seeing what sticks. That’s what FDR did during the New Deal. Not everything worked and not everything Mayer tries will either, but an all hands on deck approach is not the colossal error everyone seems to think it is. It’s not only advisable to utilize all of your resources (including requiring people to come into the office to share and generate ideas), but seems wholly appropriate and reasonable. Given the small number of people that actually telework at Yahoo and in this country in general (about 17% according to Glass), it is astounding to me the reaction this issue has gotten.

Get a grip folks. She isn’t asking her employees to give her their first born, only that they come in to the office to do their jobs. Millions of people do it all over the world. It isn’t going to doom the economy to have more people coming into the office, it isn’t going to make us mindless drones with no lives who never get to see our kids, and it does not signal the end of civilization.

Having an employer tell you that you need to be at work is not unreasonable. Will they lose people? Probably, but the fact that they will lose some people is not a reason to not try something new. Some will lament that they’ll lose good people, just the type of people they need to pull them out of their mess. Really? If they had those people there already, why are they still in this mess? If they haven’t contributed to solving the problem yet from home, wouldn’t that suggest they need to come into the office?

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[i] In fact, there is strong argument to be made that banning work from home is bad for employees, but has very few negatives for companies and that sucks for employees, but something being bad or inconvenient to employees does not necessarily translate into bad for the company, which is where a lot of these arguments start: It’s bad for employees, therefore it’s bad for the company. That is not always the case.

What Happens When this Ends?

What happens when this ends?”

What happens when this ends?”

On a nice winter night in London, with Christmas lights coloring city sidewalks and snow blanketing the streets outside my hotel, the sexiest, loveliest person I have ever known asked me that question just days after declaring she loved me. It was unexpected and propelled my brain immediately into an endless loop of question and possible answers. When I was cognizant enough to move, I did. We had been lying in bed engaged in loving kisses, the kind that might escalate into something more heated, but could just as likely remain languid, loving kisses, that communicated the intense bond we had formed more than words ever could; the kind of kisses that make you feel a connection to someone as something beyond a physical presence and makes atheists believe in things unseen. I didn’t stray too far from her, but since I was unclear what was expected of me, I needed the distance.

It’s an odd sort of question. How does one formulate an answer to a question that seems so unknowable? How does one even begin to frame a response? I wanted to run away from it. It assumes something I was unwilling to think about – endings. It’s also the type of hypothetical I hate, since there is really no answer. We can’t predict the future so there is no knowing what happens when something – anything – ends.

But we like to think we have answers to everything or that if we don’t, we can find them. It’s why we continue to engage in debates about the existence of God. It’s why we are continually reaching beyond our atmosphere to discover the mysteries of space. We want answers. We need answers. And while we are intelligent enough to continue advancing and acquiring knowledge, whether we are gathering it like picking fruit off a single knowledge tree or moving from tree to tree in some sort of metaphorical paradigm shift, we often fall short of understanding the limitations of our knowledge and our capacity to know. We don’t always have the answers and sometimes, we find that difficult to face.

Nowhere is this more evident than in matters of the heart. We don’t know why we fall in love nor can we really explain why some relationships fall apart and others survive. We can try to come up with explanations, but there are simply too many variables. For ten years those socks on the floor do not bother you enough to end things and walk away. Suddenly in year eleven they become a part of the general dysfunction that has become your relationship; an exaggeration of how relationships deteriorate perhaps, but not much of one. In any partnership, at any given time, there may be a hundred things you wish could be different about your partner or your relationship. For years those things may not bother you too much, because someone’s ability to pick their socks up off the floor is not the reason you fell in love in the first place.

And yet, somehow, somewhere down the line in some relationships those small little things along with possible big things become too much and things end. Other relationships never reach that point. We struggle to understand it, why did this relationship survive where others fail? We formulate theories and justifications all in an effort to discover the pattern and thereby the secret to success in love.

We use metaphors to help our explanations. Perhaps relationships are like pots of water over a fire. Resentments build over time like water boiling over. Perhaps the metaphor is more accurately that any pot of boiling water eventually boils away.  We can extend it further and argue that some relationships boil rapidly and fade just as rapidly while others are simmering for so long that the fire goes out before the water evaporates. Or perhaps it is simply the nature of all things with a beginning that they must also have an end. One thing is clear, all relationships do end. Whether it is through mutual agreement, contentious battles, or the demise of one partner, every relationship will end. It is inevitable.

We don’t go into them believing they will however. In fact we are much more optimistic about romantic relationships then any other type of relationship. We do not assume we will have the same friends forever, but we do make those assumptions in considering romantic partners. In some respects it’s understandable that we have a different view of romance. Those relationships are of a very different type. The attachments are intense, the intimacy greater than familial or friendship ties could ever achieve. Besides that we want them to last forever. We reluctantly accept all of our familial ties, even the deadbeat sibling, but we work at romantic relationships because we want them to thrive and survive.

So then how was I to approach this question? She was expecting a response. With moist eyes and a slight tremble discernable on her lips, she was waiting for me to speak. I mumbled some nonsense about not knowing the future in an effort to stall while I figured out what she wanted me to say and what I wanted to say and try to formulate a response that would fall somewhere in between. Still the assumption that it would end irked me and pushed out all other things until I was consumed by it when it should have registered as logical.

If you know something will end, why start at all? That was the question that hung in the air between us. And because I was still struggling with how to respond to something so utterly unanswerable, I let the assumption implied by the question creep in, until there was nothing left but endings.

It’s a logical question and on the surface it makes sense. Things end. Why wouldn’t this? But what she was asking was neither logistical nor logical in nature.  It was a completely emotional question. If we can’t imagine living without the wonderful feeling we had been immersed in and things end, what happens when it ends? What happens when there is no longer an us? The fact was that I didn’t know and could never know what would happen because it is unknowable. However, I was being too linear in my thinking. She had asked the question, but she was not looking for an answer to it. What she craved was reassurance. She wanted me to say it wouldn’t end or at the least that I didn’t want it to. That’s really all one can hope for in relationships that the desire to continue to be engaged in each other remains for as long as one can sustain it, that we continue to know and discover more and more of ourselves and each other as we continue to grow into better and better people. She wanted to know that I didn’t want it to end and that I would continue to love her is if it never would. That was something I could do. I, like her, wanted us to continue and that is what I needed to say. Despite the risk of endings, I wanted this with her. What happens when this ends? We simply start again. In all my over thinking, I had forgotten that I already knew our pattern. Endings were not new to us. Neither were new beginnings.