Yahoo kills telecommuting. Three cheers for Marissa Mayer!
Thank goodness someone finally had the courage to stand up and say that telecommuting is officially banned. Because telecommuting has been implicitly banned for a long time in Silicon Valley, but only Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has the courage to say it, point blank, without apology. And her honesty is going to help all of us.
Telecommuting has been dead for a while.
Facebook has something called lock-down, where no one can go home. Kids come to Facebook if they want to see their parents. Really. Which means that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has also been promoting the end of telecommuting, but it’s actually more difficult for her to come out and say it when she is also championing the cause of women and encouraging them to “lean in” and have kids alongside a huge career.
Both Mayer and Sandberg really want women to succeed in business. They don’t want affirmative action for women. Mayer and Sandberg have young kids and they are giving up their time with their kids – in an extreme way – so that they can run big, important companies.
The message here is that if you want to work at a company where people are doing big and important things, you have to give up everything. It’s okay to say that. Sandberg and Mayer are giving up everything so why can’t they ask that of everyone else?
Telecommuting is for people who don’t want to give up everything for their company. Mayer doesn’t want to work with people like that.
Companies move more efficiently if everyone is at the office.
The reason flexible jobs are hard to find is that most companies demand that you show up and put in face time at the office. We have been clamoring for ages that women want flexible work, but companies don’t want to give flexible work. (In fact, women are so fed up with the lack of flexible work that they are starting businesses at a higher rate than ever and Forbes called entrepreneurship the new women’s movement.)
The Harvard Business Review combines easily-found data to show that innovation happens faster if people work at the same office, and company culture is easier to control and more energizing if people share physical space. Also face-time is linked to higher performance, which is linked to the idea of propinquity, the word to describe why people work better if they are in the same room. If you are near someone, you get along with them better. It’s how human beings work—it’s part of our social DNA that goes back millions of years. We understand each other if we see each other, which makes sense since we read so many nonverbal cues. So people who are physically together are more efficient, more productive, and more innovative than people who are not physically together.
This is the type of data Mayer is relying on to justify her demand that people work at the office. Sure, there is data that individual workers are more productive if you let them handle their personal life with flexible work. But there is also evidence that top firms don’t need to accommodate those people. In Silicon Valley, home to Facebook, Google, Airbnb, none of most desirable companies make room for a personal life. They don’t have to. They have plenty of people hoping to give up their whole life to the company.
Telecommuting encourages a less dedicated workforce.
The poster-child for flexible work is Deloitte. Vice chairman, Cathy Benko, wrote the book on flexible work, literally, and Deloitte even goes so far as to do consulting for other companies on how to make flexible work for women. But let’s be real. Deloitte is a consulting firm, which means people with power and big careers there must travel. A lot. And they are flexible for the sake of the client, not for their employees’ kids. If you want to telecommute at Deloitte, your career is on a slow track. It’s an alternative career.
People telecommute so they can decrease the conflict between work and personal life. Brigham Young University shows that people can work sixty hours a week as a telecommuter and still maintain low conflict in this area because of the flexibility that telecommuting enables.
Mayer doesn’t want to work with anyone who is working sixty hours a week. She is in Silicon Valley where an 80-hour week is full-time and 50-hours is part-time. In fact, women who have taken the mommy track at big law firms have been saying for a decade that at top firms, 50 hours is a part-time week.
This is true of startups as well. I have written before that the reason women are not startup founders is that startups require 120-hour workweeks. When I cut back at my own startup to 60 hours a week, my co-workers talked about how I had basically quit working.
CEOs should get to choose who they work with.
If you want to have a slower career, you deserve to be able to make that choice. But you shouldn’t get to work with people who are giving up everything for their job. It’s not fair. Of course it’s fine for you to leave work to eat dinner with your kids and put them to bed. Actually, I think it’s really nice. But it’s not fair to go home to your kids at 5 pm and start working again at 9 pm when your co-worker has been at the office those five hours. Your co-worker deserves more than that.
Who do you know who has given up more of their life for work than Marissa Mayer? I can’t think of one other person, actually. She was renowned as one of the hardest workers at Google, where hundred-hour weeks are de rigeur. And she is renowned for being the only CEO in US history to deliver a baby while running a Fortune 500 company. Marissa Mayer can tell anyone that they are not putting in enough hours. She’s giving up everything for work, she has a right to demand that her co-workers do the same.
This is true for most firms where A-players work. People who want to be top in their field want to work with other top players. That seems fair.
The future of work is better with Marissa Mayer running the show.
Mayer is more honest than everyone else. The workforce divides into two sides: people who try very hard to decrease the conflict in their life between work and home, and people who try very hard to get to the top of the work world. You can’t do both. You know that, you just don’t like that Mayer is institutionalizing it.
Once we get honest about what you need to do to get to the top, we can start having a real discussion about how to make choices in adult life. The reality of today’s workforce is that if you want to have a big job where you have prestige and money and power, you probably need a stay-at-home spouse. Or two full-time nannies. Which means most people don’t have the option to go on the fast track, because most people have not set their lives up this way.
So let’s just admit that most of us are not on the fast-track. Stop bitching that people won’t let slow people on the fast track. Stop saying that it’s bad for family. It’s great for family. It means people will not continue operating under the delusion that you can be a hands-on parent and a top performer. People will make real choices and own those choices.
This is true for men and women. There is no longer a gender divide at work. The declaration that Yahoo no longer allows telecommuting is monumental because Marissa Mayer smashed the last shard of the glass ceiling. Today anyone can rise to the top if they give up their life to do it.
Women graduate college at a higher rate than men and women earn more money than men. Until there are kids. Then women slow down. By choice. Women tend to start slowing down at work around age 28 in order to be done having kids by the time they are 35. Generation Y women are well aware of this, and the pattern is so ubiquitous that business schools unofficially let women in earlier than men because women need to finish working at full-capacity so early in their career.
Which means the top performers at work are mostly men. But it’s not a gender thing, it’s a time thing. That’s what Marissa Mayer is saying: don’t think about coming to my company unless you’ll give everything for your job.
Mayer is not saying parenting is bad. She is saying she doesn’t want to work with hands-on parents. But look at the CEOs of any Fortune 500 company: they rarely meet anyone who is a hands-on parent aside from their spouse. Hands-on parents don’t exist at the top of the Fortune 500.
People still have lots of choices, you just can’t have everything.
Family historian Stephanie Coontz writes that today’s workforce is so demanding that families can only handle having one person in the workforce. She shows how the average work week does not allow for people to take care of children, which means that one partner needs to drop out of the workforce and take care of kids. The Harvard Business Review reports that if someone works 60 hours a week, they are three times more likely to have a stay-at-home spouse.
This workplace shift has already happened. Mayer is just forcing us to admit it.
If you want to parent—really be there for your kids—then you need an alternative career track. You can telecommute, you can work part-time, you can freelance, you just can’t work with people who don’t need those same accommodations.
So today, people have choices, people have more control over their lives than ever, and people have good information to make intelligent decisions. Mayer is forcing you to make hard decisions. You don’t like that. But don’t blame her.
Having worked from home during the end of her pregnancy and giving birth to a boy, Marissa Mayer returned to work at Yahoo Headquarters where she has built a nursery next to her office suite. Shortly thereafter, she drew ire after issuing a ban on telecommuting [43]
Must be nice.
For some industries and positions, I believe that people work longer hours so they can say they did and there is a stigma on “only working 40 hrs” I get all of my work and then some done in easily 40 hrs a week – and I am easily the most productive person in my group. Same goes for the work group I came from before – there were people there who loved to sigh and mumble about how they work 60, 70, 80 hrs a week. Newsflash – I don’t stand in awe of you for that, I don’t have more respect for you because of that; in fact, I wonder what in the world you’re doing that makes you work such long hours. If it is because you’re ineffificient, you don’t grasp technology enough to make yourself more productive, you procrastinate or don’t know how to manage your time, well, that’s your and the company’s problem, not mine. I get paid for 40 hrs and I take great pride in my work and being individually successful at work and ensuring I help my work group be as successful as they can, and I work my butt off while I am at work so I get that done in 40 hrs. I do not envy or sympathize with those who spend longer than me doing that (and not even achieving as much), instead I feel quite the opposite. Oh, and I am INTJ if you couldn’t tell ;)
Are these companies really worth people giving up their lives for? Is it really worth working around a bunch of type A people who feel guilty for not raising their own children so are going to take it out on their fellow workers?
I do not think that being in the office is the most productive way to be a top performer.
I think there are several problems with being in the office 50+ hours a week.
1. People get fat and unhealthy from being in the office that long.
2. People spend more time surfing the internet and wasting time because it is impossible to work that long contuinually.
3. People who feel that more work in the office should lead to a rise to the top get bad attitudes when it doesn’t happen.
Let’s face it, not everyone can rise to the top because there needs to be only one CEO and one VP etc. So, what is the problem with workng with people who prefer a more balanced, realistic lifestyle, better exercise, and better relations with their children since they are not trying to get to the top?
Besides, so for all the people at Yahoo, SAP, etc. companies who have implemented these policies, are they prepared to lose their brain trust. If so, what shall these qualified individuals do? Start their own businesses? If you want to work at home or in a coffee shop and your job usually promotes that, then how do we fix this problem?
Why do we keep talking about flexible work as a “women’s issue”? It’s a work issue. Plain and simple.
But it has to be marginalized. There’s a great, tacit agreement out there that if you worked long hours, everybody down the ladder sure as hell better work at least those hours.
I came within an inch of working for Google. I had the offer letter and a start date. I had to decide if it was more important to see my daughter grow up or be part of a big thing like Google. I decided on my family instead of Google.
Three years later, I don’t regret the decision. I am financially self sufficient, have loads of free time and can pursue things that I feel are important to me, not some large company.
Everyone has to decide what’s important in their lives. We only live once.
I know someone who works for Google. What he likes best about it is the hours are sane. He usually goes home by 5pm, unless there is some problem (rare). He is very happy he doesn’t work for a startup, where the payoff requires a successful IPO (moonshot) and the hours are insane.
There are departments within Google that work long hours, but they are not the norm.
The Japanese love to work. When I was there in the 70s they had a campaign to get people to cut back and spend more time at home. The idea never caught on but even if it had, the Chinese would have out-worked them.
If she finds a cure for cancer, I’ll be impressed. Otherwise the fact that she’s more interesting than the company says something. Not much, but something.
This article about Sheryl Sandberg says many of the things mentioned in this piece.
http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandberg-shouldnt-speak-for-working-women-2013-2
To go with what some others have mentioned here, it does sound like the telecommuting policy was getting abused at Yahoo.
http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-mayer-is-right-to-ban-working-from-home-2013-2
Simply put Yahoo was/is in trouble and Mayer was brought in to try and turn that around using whatever means she deemed necessary to do so. If I was dead set on telecommuting I’d probably not be at a company as big as Yahoo in the first place. I’m an INFJ and like I stated in an above reply, I’m definitely not a fast track career person.
Marissa Mayer is the CEO of yahoo. She is the boss, so she gets to make up whatever rules she wants. If the people who work for her don’t like her rules, they can always go work somewhere else. With that being said, I disagree with this policy.
First off, I agree that “Telecommuting is for people who do not want to give up everything.” However, I do not think it’s reasonable to expect everybody to give up everything for their job. Giving up your entire life is a reasonable price to pay to be a CEO with a 117 million dollar salary. However, its not fair to expect a programmer making 70K a year to make that same sacrifice. If Mayer expects all 10,000 of yahoo’s employees to give up everything for work, then she should give them all 117 million dollar raises.
Sacrificing your personal life and time with your family is what you have to do if you want to run a big & important company, but not everybody wants to run a big & important company, and there is nothing wrong with that. I know it’s not a cool thing to admit, but it’s true. Most people are not trying to be CEO. Most people are content to be a middle manager or a salaried individual contributor. And once in a while, salaried individual contributors need to stay home with a sick kid, or wait for the cable guy-And they should be allowed to do that.
Also, let’s be real-you need people on the slow track in order to run a successful company, if you didn’t , fortune 500 companies could only employ a handful of Executives and still be successful, and I can’t think of any who have managed to pull that off.
I also agree that it’s time for everybody to get real and stop lying to themselves and others about being able to “have it all”. You cannot be a hands on parent and CEO-This is true. But, If we’re going to keep rubbing everybody’s nose in the cold hard truth about having it all, it needs to be the whole truth. You can’t tell people that they must either give up their entire lives for their careers or drop out of the workforce completely. This just isn’t true. Having a life and being CEO is a fantasy, but having a job, while having a life is a viable alternative. And, seeing as how sacrificing your entire life for your job pays off less than 1% of the time, it’s the only option that even makes sense.
For those who aren’t trying to be CEO, telecommuting facilitates greater productivity. It enables people to give a little bit more of themselves to their company without having to make the additional sacrifice. People who work 60 hours at the office, and 10 hours at home after the kids are in bed per week, aren’t going to put in 70 hour weeks at the office just because they can’t work from home. –They’re just going to be less productive.
What has bothered me most in the press are all the quotes and blurbs suggesting that this move would affect childcare. I’m sorry, but remote work is not a child care alternative. You cannot fully focus on professional activities if you are worrying about diapers, meals, or the homework status of your children during that time. Telecommuting provides excellent opportunities for some people, but it is not a child-care alternative.
I agree. The only reason I was able to successfully telecommute for five years is that my wife didn’t work and could keep the kids out of my hair.
What I find most distressing about this piece is the assertion that 40+ hour work weeks (up to 120!) is somehow “normal.” Overtime pay was instituted for a reason!
Yes, I know that salaried employees aren’t eligible for overtime pay – that’s not my point. My point is that we instituted overtime pay to break employers’ chokehold over the lives of their employees. Absurdly long working hours are ultimately destructive – to individuals, families, and society as a whole.
EXACTLY. Feminism was about women being able to have it all – not being able to have it all at once. Grown ups should know that.
I believe the hope was that the work world would transition from being a man’s world to a woman’s and man’s world where children could be brought into the office or some other accommodation so that women COULD HAVE IT ALL. There are some differences in the sexes based upon gender roles. I’m fine if men need to bring the children into the office, but either way the kids must be raised otherwise we will be in trouble on that end too.
Here’s the deal, in a perfect world work would accommodate both sexes. It just doesn’t and that is the problem–not feminism!
Marissa Mayer’s bold decision to eliminate telecommuting has done something that I thought was impossible: it got everyone to pay attention to Yahoo! again. Whether or not it was the right decision to make (only time will tell), it was an amazing marketing move!
Let’s just wait till someone dies, has a heart attack or collapses in their office. You can make any rule you want, but your body is not going to live by it. Poor people at these companies and in the States – work is not going to be with you when you are old, sick or alone. Very sad that you are returning to the 18-19th centruries where there was one day off and a 14 hour workday…
Thank you, Penenlope, for separating fact from fiction.
This article is tough to read because it speaks the truth.
Time is a currency and there are competing demands on that currency. Our decision is how to spend that time / currency to lead a satisfying life.
I think my experience is that I don’t mind being in the office even with young kids, ’cause I have daycare for them. But having a sick leave policy that supports me keeps me there.
Your point that Marissa only wants top players is a good one but…I think it’s a mistake to only populate your company with highly driven, entrepreneurial types. You need the workhorses as well in various departments. The trick is fitting the right people into the right roles, not choosing one kind of person and squashing that into all the roles.
It’s weird how much projection and exaggeration is going on in the comments.
Mayer just wants people to show up. That hardly excludes everyone but “highly driven, entrepreneurial types.”
Initially was a bit annoyed by your blog—before I read it. You make a great deal of sense. I suppose when you get older and grow up—-then there is more to life than devoting your entire life to a company—and therefore most of us who choose that path not be defined by who we work for will never be among the weatlhy. Marissa Mayer—seen her on interviews—would have to be a difficult woman to work for—-and I would say the same for any man who thinks like her also. However, it is the Mayers of the world who help make the United States a competitive global economy—my problem with people like her is that she would roll over people to get a head—and therefore she or he would not be on my list of likeable people—worked for people (men and women) like her and now glad to be retired and self-employed.
Good read.
Great post!
Why would I ever want to be a dedicated employee and give up my life for a company? The only thing worth my time, long term, is my own venture – not a Fortune 500. That’s just the Borg Hive with employee benefits.
Fortune 500 is attractive to me precisely because I DON’T have to dedicate my entire life to my job. If you are a highly skilled IT professional with an in-demand skill-set, you don’t have to work 80 hours a week to make a very comfortable living. It might now be $117 Million, but $100-150k is certainly better than a stick in the eye and enough to live comfortably in most metro areas.
Don’t you work at home, Pen?
I never heard of someone on their death bed saying, “I should have spent more time at the office.”
Life is short and you can not take it with you.
How about “I wish I had been able to provide for my family better” or “I wish I had done something more meaningful with my life”? Not very different.
Yes, that quote has always annoyed me too with its smarmy assumption that everybody works an office job that they hate. That quote always reveals more about the person repeating it than it does about reality. In my mind I always imagine that it’s a Postal Service worker or DMV clerk typing that blog comment.
I’m pretty confident that millions of people regret on their deathbed that they never pursued the work they really wanted to do.
And others regret that they pursued their dream in a half-assed manner, or chickened out or got pregnant or before they made it.
Spending 40 hours a week at an office job you loathe is nothing to be smug about!
Yahoo is not a startup, it’s a struggling tech company that is going all in on Mayer. Anyone else who chooses to devote their entire existence to Yahoo is seriously misguided.
Penelope:
1. Marissa’s decisions (from how she announced her pregnancy and forward) have been calculated to help her achieve personal and business success, not to address society’s hang-ups about how she should behave “as a woman.” Which is awesome.
2. It actually *is* a gender thing, though, and here’s why: Biological imperatives dictate that it will *always* be the woman who has the kid. The result of women choosing, en masse, to trade parenthood for time would result in the extinction of the species. Thus, from a macro perspective, it’s not really a choice.
3. The real argument should be an economic one. We need enough young people in the economy to support the older people, so we need women to have babies. It is ridiculous to me that the societal “profits” of children are socialized while the personal “losses” of children are privatized to the woman and the whole situation treated as a choice.
So while I think Marissa Mayer kicks ass, the fact that the structure of things is incredibly stupid makes for unpleasant cognitive dissonance in my Gen Y, not-yet-a-mom mind.
I think it depends heavily on the person and the job itself. Some jobs can be done easily at home, especially jobs that are easily measurable and don’t require interpersonal contact.
For urgent communication, there’s email and phones.
You can even arrange for people to spend some days at home, and 1-2 days in the office for meetings/drinking contests.
Besides, dropkicks who work at home will still be dropkicks in the office. At least you’ll save bandwidth from their Fox Sports downloads.
Penelope – your writing usually resonates with me but I disagree with this post on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start. There’s a veritable cornucopia of unsubstantiated generalities throughout the post so I’ll throw out one of my own. Marissa is over her head and proving herself an incompetent narcissist. Instead of truly taking steps to enable innovation, she’s grabbed for the first pre-industrial-age tactic she could find and in the process, enabled the creation of a low trust environment. Did you happen to dig up any research on how much innovation happens in low trust environments? Of course Wall Street will see this as strong, positive leadership. Just like the Street saw Groupon and Facebook as sure bets. Who gives a crap what the Street thinks – it’s wrong more often that right. Yahoo is just another tech titanic going to the bottom with millions of investor dollars and there’s a good chance FB will follow soon. These companies simply don’t know how to innovate. As for the ‘career choices’ presented in the post – they aren’t choices any more than wondering whether you should kill yourself with cyanide or a pistol is a choice. The ‘choice’ to abandon your marriage and children in the pursuit of 80 hour work weeks is a choice that will cost you your relationships, your drive, your passion, and your health. But we all know this because we’ve seen this movie before in the late 90’s – those of us paying attention, anyway. Working 80 hour weeks does not drive innovation. Warming a chair in a cubicle at HQ and ‘chatting around the water cooler’ doesn’t drive innovation. And Marissa is not bold or gutsy for trotting out antiquated, misplaced, industrial age, life sucking workplace myths and claiming them to be the bold, bright future of Yahoo.
Great points, Jeff. Unfortunately we have the delusion that staying competitive requires a short memory.
nice news thanks.
First – Mayer is not giving up everything that she is asking her employees to give up. In fact, she built a nursery in her office for her child. Again giving the message that her family is more important than her employees’ families. Second – I’m not a fan of Sandberg either – because not all women want her world and define there “success” in life by their jobs. In fact, I define my success by having a balanced life and actually getting to spend some time raising my kids while having a challenging career. Third: “Sure, there is data that individual workers are more productive if you let them handle their personal life with flexible work. But there is also evidence that top firms don’t need to accommodate those people.” – What we NEED to do and what we CHOOSE to do are two entirely different things. Good companies should do many things for their employees that aren’t “needed” – to act otherwise is short-sided. Forth: “If you want to telecommute at Deloitte, your career is on a slow track. It’s an alternative career.” You are as delusional as Sandberg and need to look very closely at what you define as a “career.” Fifth: I need to stop reading this article . . . I’m getting too worked up and I actually have a non-alternative career to get back to – and one that lets me leave at 5 to pick up my kids.
This might be my favorite article of yours.
Totally true.
The worst is having given up everything for a career at a young age, as I did, and finding out later that it wasn’t worth it. You can’t go back.
I enjoy this blog a lot, but this article is full of cherry-picking and BS.
Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are not startups – they were startups. They’re now big companies, and plenty of people there work 50 hour weeks. That’s why the Google buses leave SF at 8 in the morning for Mountain View and come back at 6. So the “you have to work 100 hours” point is a gross fallacy for big Bay Area companies. Founding (rather than being an employee at) a startup is incredibly grueling, but as soon as post Series A funding, employees still have some degree of work-life balance. Let’s not perpetuate rampant Silicon Valley myths.
You can’t found a startup or be a top lawyer at a big firm or be an investment banker or a few other things without sacrificing much of your personal life, but there are plenty of “big” jobs where you can have some balance.
As for Yahoo, they have very specific morale and productivity problems. Mayer ruling out telecommuting is not some universal business axiom revealed, it’s just her trying to deal with her company. Time will tell how well it works. Other companies can find competitive advantages by accommodating workers who want more flexible time. A highly talented person working 40 hours a week is much more valuable than a mediocre one working 60 hours.
This article supports what I have witnessed and experienced in my own work.
I have always said, I wanted a job outside of work, which means, I’m not willing to put in more than 40 hours of work. Does that preclude me from getting promoted, NO, but some may think so. I worked with a guy, whose life was his job and he thought everyone else around him needed to work as many hours as he did. Instead, I have learned to work smarter and free up my time for other activities.
I have experienced mixed reviews with telecommuting. I worked with a woman, who telecommuted for personal reasons. Often times it was impossible to reach her at home, but she did come to the office for meetings, which made it much easier to exchange ideas. I telecommuted for 3 weeks, when my daughter was born. It gave me a lot of flexibility as when I started my day and also allowed me to work more hours cause I was already at home and present to my family. At the same time, my coworkers had no way of knowing, if I was actually working because they didn’t see me in person.
Companies really need to figure out what they want out of their employees. If Yahoo wants their workers to spend more time in the office, they need to be understand that some employees will be unhappy because their desire like mine is to have a life outside of work. Again, this should not prevent them from promoting good, quality employees, when opportunities arise.
Brett – I don’t think you are familiar with today’s technology.
There is instant messaging, so you always see who is on and can send an instant message. There is teleconferencing when people can “meet” over the phone and also share computer screen. Plus, if there is someone who never dials in to the meetings and is unreachable while working from home, this person probably will not be employed for long.
I also hate it when people here make it a women issue. In my experience, both men and women take this option when allowed if they choose it. In my group, one person who works most from home is a man in his early 30s. He is also the most productive person in the group.
This is such an excellent and thought-provoking post! Quite frankly, I am sick and tired of the old-fashioned ways that persist in the United States. If we had child care that women felt good about that was affordable – the way that Denmark and other European countries do – none of this would even be a discussion. Everyone, men and women, would work full-time their whole lives and the kids would be well cared for. The United States is stuck in an old-fashioned mentality thinking that one parent needs to make career compromises to raise a family. It’s infuriating!
I’m not sure I get the reasoning that she is solely responsible for Yahoo’s stock price and thus the special accommodation. The employees must play a role or it wouldn’t matter if they worked from home. Nor am I convinced that Google is where they are because they spend more hours at the office. But other than that, I agree with what your saying. I think it’s shameful that we think this slavery is a good thing, but it is what it is.
I think it is terrific that telecommuting goes away. In the end, it is a nightmare for mothers. It may be great for everyone else in the family but it is bad for mom – her career, her future potential, her energy. It is nice that someone has finally acknowledged the farce. Moms twist themselves into a pretzel to do for everyone else – her husband, her family, her kids.
Susan Maushart says it wonderfully in her book, “The Mask of Motherhood” when she says “The myth that part-time work offers women the “ideal” compromise between paid and unpaid work, family care and self-care, is yet another contemporary delusion – more insidious for being more widely held. In fact, in many respects, the mother who works for pay part-time has the worst of all possible worlds.”
“Company culture is easier to control and more energizing if people share physical space. Also face-time is linked to higher performance, which is linked to the idea of propinquity, the word to describe why people work better if they are in the same room. If you are near someone, you get along with them better. It’s how human beings work—it’s part of our social DNA that goes back millions of years. We understand each other if we see each other, which makes sense since we read so many nonverbal cues. So people who are physically together are more efficient, more productive, and more innovative than people who are not physically together.”
It’s sad to me that our social DNA is so important in the work world, but not for families. Children also benefit from having BOTH parents around physically — that’s what makes families work best. I don’t see why taking four hour break to have dinner is a bad thing — you come back to work refreshed and better able to perform and innovate.
I feel like someone needs to blow to cover off the idea that people can work 120 hours and be as productive and useful the whole time. That’s horse manure and everyone knows it. There’s no reason to work those types of hours because the human mind has limitations (though many people want to deny it), and pushing yourself to ignore those limitation is what makes people depressed and anxious and ultimately leads to divorved, domestic violence — you know those things that you suffer from Penelope. Why would anyone want that lifestyle just to say they’re at the “top” of their field?
What use is it to be at the top if do not have loved ones to share it with?
She is running Yahoo into the ground so another company will buy it.
Looking at the topic not from the male/female split (which this clearly can quickly tangent to) but rather to the “worker”, I view solely from the perspective of no matter what you aspire to leave as your legacy, you have only one life to do so. At the end of my life, I’ve made the decision that my family is most important. I want to die knowing THEY know that they were my priority…not some office building or company that will not mean diddly in the future. I want to experience MY life and THEIR life. Not a CEOs or CIOs life. With that, I am completely comfortable with my career and the expectations that go along with it. When the choice is made for you by your company, whether you are a VP or an Administrative Assistant, and it does not fit with your priorities, then you are faced with a choice.
I find it to be tragic when one’s own children take a back seat priority wise to a career.
Have kids or don’t, but if you do, then make them your #1 priority.
Then again, how un-American is that in a nation whose morality has been reduced to worshiping mammon.
The first bullet point in any telecommute policy is that it is not a substitute for childcare. That said, we need to remove childcare from the debate because telecommuting has nothing to do with childcare–it also has nothing to do with eldercare, napping, binge eating, or playing video games. An employee is either doing the job or not–does it really matter what is distracting him?
In my company telecommuting has been used as a benefit to keep valuable employees from leaving when life changes have dictated that they live far from an office. Friction arises when employees that have considerably less value begin sending emails on a regular basis that they will “WFH.” For those employees there is very little valuable work occurring at home or in the office–it’s just more annoying when it’s known that they are at home.
The telecommuting debate is not a geographic problem, it is a skill set problem. Suggesting that this is a geographic debate seems particularly archaic given the global nature of work in 2013 when companies regularly work across multiple time zones. Companies must hold management responsible for attracting and maintaining the best skill sets and culling the rest.
This only marginally makes sense in an area like Silicon Valley where there is a plethora of talent. Outside of a few geographical areas this is a nonsensical approach to management as you are limiting your company to the best subset of talent available within an hour or so commute. Forward thinking companies don’t put those kind of constraints on the talent they can acquire and will almost certainly have far superior people working for them. My money is on the companies with the better people.
I cannot begin to tell you how awful Marissa’s life sounds to me. Why on earth did she bother getting married and having a baby? To devote all of my waking hours to Yahoo (Yahoo? Are you kidding me?), would make me want to shoot myself in the head.
I work for myself. I’m a single mom of teenage boys. I started my business so I could be present for them, not so I could give up my life. Wow. Her life does not compute to me. Think I’ll go out to my studio and enjoy myself….
If you exchange your entire life for work, what have you won?
A life where I could have 10 million dollars but no freedom to do what I want sounds like prison to me.
And there’s nothing glamorous or impressive about prison.
Plenty of families have 2 parents working full time jobs, where one may have to work 60 hours per week. My parents did with 3 kids, and they churned out a lawyer, a therapist, and a dentist. It wasn’t easy. there were babysitters and relatives/grandparents in the house often, but to say only one person can have a job and only one can be engaged in the child rearing, is not economically viable or realistic to most families.
“Sandberg and Mayer are giving up everything so why can’t they ask that of everyone else?”
That’s one of the most stupid things I have ever heard. Do you know that they earn $30, 50 million per year? Just by working one year, they earn 8 lifetime of money of what most people earn. 1 year, equals your 8 lifetime of salary.
Give me $30 million. I can tell you I will never work from home and “give up everything.”
Every time I drive by the huge Yahoo campus in Sunnyvale, I wonder why they need so much office space and so many employees for whatever it is they actually do. Maybe this new, “Please show up to work in person” policy is MM’s first shot across the bow. I would expect many more.
You know, I’ve read Frederick Taylor, and he recommended no more than eight hour days for intellectual work. Longer days worked for more physical labor. I suspect that political work (including office), which is what executives such as Mayer do. might also allow longer hours, since humans have been doing that longer than engineering. However, makin everyone do eighty hour weeks is probably counter-productive. (Those who charge by the hour instead of by what is produced, may want to work longer hours.)
Nobody reads Taylor. We get our Taylorism second-hand, with plenty of influence from Henry Ford.
Workaholic nerds who spend 80 – 100 hour work weeks only choosing to associate with other workaholic nerds might end up becoming very much like Swift’s original Yahoos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_(Gulliver%27s_Travels)
The claim of 120 hour work weeks is a massive exaggeration. The market for engineers is ridiculous right now, someone who didn’t want to work in those conditions would find another job in a week.
Engineers stay later at work because they tend to come in later, and not all that time is spent working. I’ve worked in the software industry for 8 years and if you are good, you can work a strict 40 hour work week and get paid handsomely.
I’ve read a ton of coverage on this story, but this is one of the best pieces yet. (And I say this as someone who loves to telecommute…) Thanks for adding some depth to the coverage.
With all due respect, I am not buying this “can’t have it all” argument. In my world, having it all will never inlcude any job where I am expected to work 60-100 hours per week. How does that even qualify for “having it all” ? Sounds like a big fat miss to me. Because you can have it all – I do. I work in a stable job, for 37.5 hours per week earning about 100K per year. I have a full pension, full health benefits, 4 weeks vacation, 4 weeks paid sickness, and 14 other paid holidays. I drop my son off at the bus 1 minute from my front door, walk 6 blocks to work and I am home by 4 every day. My husband makes a similar salary and works for the same employer, in a branch of the organization. If my child is ill – I work from home. My husband and I are both hard workers but after 8 hours we LEAVE. We do not have BIG JOBS, whatever h ehck that means, but honestly, short of POWER, what more would we want. As an aside, there is such a thing as Human Rights, and failing to accomodate people in the workplace for thing such as disabilities (which could involve implementing teleworking) is discrimination.
People working together really is important. Often I have an idea and then my co-workers add to the idea and change it making it better and it happens so much faster if we meet in person.
I think your work hour numbers are inflated. I think there are studies out that show that people aren’t really working 120 hours a week it just feels like it. I think focus is more important than hours, especially when the work is hard and requires creativity. And really is Yahoo! that terribly important if you are not a stock holder? It’s not not doing anything that different from many other companies.
I haven’t read all the comments, but the thing that makes Mayer’s proclamation so cheesy is that she is having a nursery built right next to her office. “Who cares about everyone else’s kids? As long as I got mine right here with me.”
Even though I believe face to face collaboration is great, it doesn’t need to happen every day or 60 hours a week. I also think Mayer’s strategy is an easy way to get rid of a bunch of employees. Simply firing people always looks bad, but pulling a “let’s all come back to the office” has at least some followers.