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.
My thoughts about telecommuting aside (and I have them; I’ve done it to varying degrees for years), as someone else mentioned, expecting everyone in your company to act like mini CEOs is … kind of insane. I’ve known several CEOs, and they are a special breed. They’re not driven; they are consumed, utterly, by the bowels of the machine they are trying to create. (Relevant side point: They are also compensated, monetarily, for that effort. No one else in a company earns anywhere close to what they do; they get PAID to give up their lives.) You can, with great effort, assemble a team of 10 that are more or less like that who will stay with you for several years till they figure out they are living in hell. You cannot scale that up to the thousands.
How does working 120 hours a week work, anyway? I’ve always wondered that. If you multiply 16 waking hours by seven days, you only come up with 112 hours. You get close if you multiply 17 waking hours by seven days, but then of course there is the time to get dressed, commute, and eat. (Obviously we are completely eliminating the time for any kind of social interaction right off the bat.) So what that means is that someone would have to sleep five hours a night, working every single waking hour otherwise, to get that time in.
That sounds like torture. Or war.
Is it any coincidence that the people who most revere business are usually those who most revere war?
I always love your swift sure grasp of the Reality Principle, Penelope. And when I read your comment on how telecommuters have not earned the right to work alongside people who are genuinely working full-time and on-site, I nodded in agreement. If that’s the culture that Yahoo is now determined to build, they have every right to fire female and male telecommuters.
But isn’t this particular case (Mayer) a bit like Clarence Thomas coming out against affirmative action?
“telecommuters have not earned the right to work alongside people who are genuinely working full-time and on-site”
Why do you assume that people who work at home don’t work full time or even for longer hours than someone in the office?
A person can work from home and a) spend the time someone else spends in traffic working b) actually work longer hours at home instead of browsing internet.
I wondering if you’ve ever had an experience of working for a company that is RESULT-oriented, so let me enlighten you. As you work you accomplish something – or not. Then you get compared to other people based on your ACCOMPLISHMENTS e.g. value your work produced for the company, patents that you did, ideas, projects you led (yes, you can lead remotely too), money your work brought to the company. Now, do you think somebody who worked 90 hours a week in the office but at the end had nothing to show for it deserves more than someone who worked from home but came up with a great idea and then built something based on this idea that resulted in a million dollar contract for the company?
Never mind, I didn’t realize yours was a sarcastic comment.
A correction: If you go home at 5pm and start work again at 9, you have been home for four hours, not five.
Rumor has it that Ms. Mayer had a special nursery built in her office to the tune of $50k. If this is true, then her sacrifice doesn’t quite match the sacrifices she is asking of other women….
It’s not a rumor: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/28/how-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-is-building-a-nursery-by-her-office-and-dissing-working-moms/
“Mayer is not saying parenting is bad. She is saying she doesn’t want to work with hands-on parents.” Mayer had a nursery built next to her office at work and can afford a full-time nanny as well, so no big deal for her. Will she do the same for all the other new moms? No?
Penelope may be right that Mayer is simply stating out loud what is already the case, but cheering on the end of telecommuting, at least for the “top performers” — from her farm out in the middle of no-where — is just as elitist as Mayer.
Another way to read this, knowing Mayer’s own handling of family, is that the people at the top (like Mayer) are the “top performers” that get to reproduce. Sounds like going back to the old feudal system.
I am a Mom to two awesome little ones and I work FT and have a photography business that I do on weekends. My commute to work with daycare involved is 1.5 x 2 = 3 hours per day. I can tell you, on the days I work from home I not only work more, but I get things done faster and without distraction. Not having the stressful commute is invaluable. I am accountable, we use metrics to report productivity, and my clients are happy. My boss is an engineer and she expects results and detailed reports of all work completed. I am fine with that.
I used to love your blog. But since your homeschooling craze, putting pics of you on your blog showing physical abuse, and now this- I am unsubscribing and sending any emails that sneak in to JUNK. What happened to you? I used to really enjoy your work.
Now I find almost all your posts insulting and infuriating and just plain attention seeking. This woman is disgusting and what she is doing is tragic. Instead of managing the REAL problem she is punishing ALL employees. As someone else said, “Melissa, 1981 called and they want their job back.” Sitting in a cubicle does not = productivity, and as a Gen Xer I am shocked at your support this decision.
Oh and by the way, some of the most unproductive and lazy workers are the ones IN THE OFFICE sitting there staring into space. Get with it. Seriously.
This would all be great… if working those extra hours actually meant that you were rewarded for your hard work and excellence. But that is not how America operates anymore. The tax code is designed to reward a handful of people at the top while everyone else is lucky to get a tiny raise — regardless of how good they are. So, really, why should anyone other than a handful of people at the top work more than 40 hours a week? GET REAL.
There is work hard, and there is work smart. As a woman SVP with two young children, my goal is to accomplish more in less time, put more focus on what I do well, and rely on and support the people on my team to be their level best. I guess I chose to model leadership differently from Marissa. And I really value that time with my children to help them be the next generation of leaders after we’re long gone.
I also recognize that there is an entire network of grandparents, friends and others around me that allow me to be successful at my job and at home. Not everyone has that luxury. Everyone’s situation is different. I vote for more choice for managers and employees to work things out for themselves. Mandates are dangerous.
Look, Mayer knows her employee population better than I do. Evidently, she consulted data before making this decision. I’d be shocked if this policy remains indefinitely.
I am a software engineer working for a world-famous research center of a large Fortune 500 technology company that allows telecommuting and doesn’t really care how much time you work as long as you produce results. From this perspective, and based on my experience with telecommuting, it seems to me that this article makes a lot of assumptions which are not necessarily correct. Also, the author claims that “telecommuting is dead” based on two companies – Yahoo and Facebook. How about all the companies that allow it: IBM (google “at IBM as much vacation as you want”), Cisco, Intel, and several others?
Further:
1. The article assumes that working from home is only for women with kids. Based on my experience, everyone does it including young males, and mothers do it no more often than single males. There are a number of reasons – not being willing to waste time driving (this time can be spent working), saving money on gas, flexibility of say meeting this contractor or going to a dentist in the morning and then working later on in the evening.
2. The article assumes that people who work at home are working less. She sites one study but ignores all of the studies that showed this isn’t the case and they people often end up working more hours. This was most certainly been my experience. I personally prefer to come to work as being single I enjoy meeting people there, but I also know that when I work from home I usually work longer hours.
The author doesn’t take into consideration that that the companies that allow flexible schedules and work from home tend to be very result-oriented. At the end, you have to produce results. You are compared to others based on your results.
3. The author seems to assume that longer hours = being more productive. This isn’t true. Some people can get more done in 50 hours than someone else in 90. Also, at some point you’ll also get negative productivity. You’ll end up making mistakes at 10pm at night when you have to spend the morning fixing – from personal experience.
One number the author mentioned is 90 hours a week. Let’s do the math here. 90 hours a week means almost 13 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is something like 7am-8pm. Adding to it commuting time of say half an hour door-to-door (since we aren’t allowing telecommuting) would mean one needs to get up around 6am to get dressed, maybe grab something to eat and drive to work. Then, you get home at 8:30pm, have dinner, maybe rest for an hour, and it’s time to sleep. With no days off since even one day off means not enough sleep. If you are really young and very healthy, you could probably pull it off for a year or two, but then this will catch up with you and your productivity is going to go down significantly. As to 120 hours — do the math….
4. The author seems to think of telecommuting vs being in the office as 100% of one or the other. In reality, it could be both. One can come to the office on some day or even hours and then work from home the rest of the week, one can work from home one day a week and come to the office the rest of the week. Not all stages of a project require a lot of face-to-face time. Sure, when you are in the brainstorming mode it’s nice to be together. It doesn’t often work very well in large multi-national corporation when you need to discuss stuff with people in China and India, but in a small startup – sure. But then, once you get to a point in which you take ownership of a component and start working on the design of your component, you need some quiet alone time to think, plan, study, write it up. Ditto if you work on a patent. Then yes, you’ll need meetings for design reviews which you can either hold over the phone/screen sharing or face-to-face. If you prefer face-to-face, you can always come in. When you get to the coding or are trying to find a bug, you really want peace and quiet.
One other thing I’d like to mention is that when you work for a large multinational corporation, you often end up working with people who aren’t even located in the same building. In fact, they may be far away in India or China. Then you are not face-to-face with them even if you are in your office. You also need to deal with time difference, so you end up scheduling meetings for 7am or 10pm to accommodate everyone, so you have to do them at home anyway. If you are in the office and say if you share an office, then one person being on a teleconference can be very distracting to another person.
5. The author also doesn’t seem to be familiar with modern technology like instant messaging, ability to have group chats, to share screen, etc.
One other thing I’d like to add is that a company needs to attract the best employees. Flexible work hours and ability to work from home are among the perks. Facebook and Google have a lot of other perks: free food (and good one too), laundry on site, even hairdresser and dentist. Yahoo tries to do what Facebook does but without the perks. They are going to end up losing their best employees who value flexibility.
Hi Penelope,
This is an never ending issue. Its whirling all over the world like fire. Now a days human beings have turned to be machines and money minded. People aiming to soar high in their careers will agree with Marissa Mayer but people who want to leave a balanced life by maintaining both house and work will never agree to this, so I think this issue has more debate with less results.
Ankita Ray
This was an enormously entertaining column cum replies. The only reasons for working 80 hours per week are 1) it is a first job and you want Yahoo on your résumé, 2) you think you can make a lot of money through the stock or 3) you have no choice.
No one is efficient working 80 hours and no one has time for creative thinking working 80 hours. It makes sense at entry level because you are learning how to do something. It is highly unlikely that MM knows how to manage a large company and just as unlikely that Yahoo will be delivering transformative wealth to its shareholders. People should only work there to take something they learn somewhere else.
I work in the office nine hours a day and I know for a fact I would be more productive if I worked from home and I wouldn’t miss connecting with my coworkers and management on a daily basis. The level of productivity, innovation and connectivity is really up to each individual.
What’s sad about this article is that it’s not reflective of attitudes in most of the world: “living for the job” is an American phenomenon. Successful companies exist in Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, where workers get lots more time off and have shorter workweeks. There have been studies that show a balance between life and work makes workers more productive in the shorter times they are at work.
Quality of life is also important. I’m not a fan of telecommuting for a number of reasons, primarily because telecommuting is still WORK, and it tends to bleed into life outside of it. I want a clear boundary between life and work because I think it’s better for a healthy perspective on life. None of that exists in this article — just a very Ameri-centric notion of advancement that doesn’t seem to be helping the average person at all. I say let the job-climbers go for it, then offer a more normalized notion of work to the rest of us.
That “more normalized notion” is never going to be reality until the people who control the money allow it. Right now, and for time immemorial, they have too much invested in the current way. I see a day when our choice is to work 120 hours a week or 0, because it suits the purposes of the people who run things.
Interesting perspective. The trouble is, there are plenty of highly competent tech folks who don’t expect to rise, and don’t intend to work 60 hour weeks. It’s not clear to me that a large company can staff itself entirely with type A no-lifers even in Silicon valley. The job market here is hopping… not enough highly experienced geeks to fill the jobs, apparantly.
Then there’s the problem that for most people with normal biochemistry, doing work requiring concentration, creativity, etc., an 80 hour week involves 20 hours of cleaning up past mistakes, 20 hours of productivity, and 40 hours of making new improved mistakes to be cleaned up in “prime time” next week. Those of us who are not hypo-manic know all about the tradeoffs involved in “working hard” vs “working smart”. If you work too many hours, your efficiency suffers badly – at best (with a simple job) you take longer per task; at worst, you make mistakes that take longer to fix than they took to make. This is less true when you are 18 – but that’s when you have no experience, so your efficiency is already low compared to an experienced colleague.
I’ve had jobs where I needed to put in 50+ hours of “face time” – and I probably did 30 hours of work, 10 hours of relationship management, and 10+ hours of web browsing. That produces more net output than 60 hours actively working on software development and maintenance, except during short term emergencies. and management loved both my productivity and my “attitude” :-) the latter since I was clearly working the hours they thought necessary. Of course I try to avoid jobs like that.
I don’t see why a company with such a terrible product should get so much press for business practices. They’re failing. It’s a terrible search engine and an even worse email platform. Marissa Mayer could brand her whole workforce and drive them to work with a cattle prod. It wouldn’t make me use Yahoo! again.
Why is Yahoo getting so much press? Three words: Cracking. The. Whip. It’s more important to do what people believe traditionally gets results that to actually get results.
Have to say this one of the few times I do not agree Penelope.
Article: “Yahoo! We get to work together face to face.”
http://www.issurvivor.com/
5 minute read, think Les Miserables lite.
The notion that CEOs may demand people give up everything for the company may apply to senior managers, who do get commensurate compensation for this sacrifice. It may apply to everyone in a tiny startup. But Ffor the rank and file in a large company this demand is not only inhuman, it is counter-productive. People don’t feel they owe this to their CEO and in their frustration will respond by working less efficiently, not more. That said, nobody said they should allow full-time telecommuting – at Intel I led the development of a well thought out program allowing one day a week at home, which works great to this day. More on this: http://bit.ly/WFHNZ .
Wow, what misguided priorities and flawed thinking. More time at work = more success! More sacrifice = more money!
Boy, if we could only lock everyone in a room indefinitely, we’d have the most successful company ever!
Except that’s not really how it works. Not all work requires face to face interaction. Even the most brilliant mind only offers up diminishing returns the further you push it without rest. Burn out enough employees, eventually you’ll have no one left to hire.
What you’ve drawn up here is a great blueprint for any company to eventually collapse in on itself. Good luck with that.
Can an entire company really be run with exclusively people who are “on the fast track,” though? It might make great sense to put executives at the helm who are fast trackers. But aren’t most people working as lower-tier project managers, designing packaging for minor offerings, doing Web analytics for one product, and so on? It seems to me that a company full of fast trackers in the most minor positions would be a company rife with backstabbing and pointless competition – because not all of these workers can ever be in the top tier.
There are those for whom no competition is pointless.
It seems you’re confusing a few different issues – telecommuters, those who want workplace flexibility, and working mothers. From what I’ve read, the larger percentage of telecommuters are men, not women, and it has more to do with companies hiring the best talent – wherever they happen to be, and allowing them to work in an environment they can be the most productive. People who have control over when and where they work are more productive and have better morale and loyalty. (CNN: Benefit of office face time a myth)
Are you really insinuating that those who telecommute aren’t 100% committed to their jobs? As opposed to the Mom or Dad who skates into the office late after dropping little Johnny off at school, takes a long lunch then and leaves early to get to Sally’s soccer game? Slackers can be slackers anywhere. According to Forbes (Don’t Get Caught in the Telecommuting Trap), those who telecommute are more likely to put in five to seven hours more per week on the job than their in-office counterparts. They’re less distracted by in-office annoyances, so more of their work time is actually devoted to actual work. Oh, and companies with telework programs report 63% less unscheduled absences. (Telework Research Network)
Being in the office actually probably is better for your career — but only because it gives the perception of working hard without actually having to do any hard work. We feel more conspicuously productive at work, regardless of whether or not we’re actually more productive (Atlantic: Telecommute Nation), and regardless of actual output managers will give more leeway to those in the office simply because they’re present. (MIT Sloan Management Review: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters) While Marissa Mayer will have all her employees in one place, there’s no evidence to suggest that those people will actually be good workers, or whether they’ll just be really good at putting in their time.
I agree, CEOs should be able to choose who they want to work with. But if a CEO chooses to only work with those who live in your own zip code (let’s be honest, BECAUSE IT’S EASIER) your company will be that much further behind those that have successfully figured out how to make telecommuting work for them (especially on a global scale). It’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of when.
I find it ironic that someone with Aspergers would dis telecommuting so much when it’s the perfect thing for an Aspie. Just think, no having to deal with other people and their small talk, no distractions, just being left alone to work. And you can trust an Aspie to get the work done and even be more productive than someone going into the office everyday.
The other part of this is that, on their deathbeds, how many of those corporate people will say, “I’m so glad I worked 80 hours and week and didn’t have a life…”
You forget the fine art of rationalization. Those around them will translate it into dedication to family, service, and building a life. Even if all the person cared for while they were alive was money and power.
The Yahoo CEO isn’t being bold or powerful or courageous. She has simply given up the fight to change how we work. A male dominated workforce continues to disadvantage women, she tells us to continue with the lousy corporate culture in place. We continue to struggle to change it. Oh and she proudly states she is not a feminist, as if she would be where she was without all who came before her.
One thing I’d like to point out is that sometimes a woman (or man) will take on something like this knowing it is only going to last a short while. I posted a comment on another post where I mentioned my nine month stint working weeks in one city and commuting home on weekends. One reason it was so difficult was because I hadn’t planned for it to be a long term situation. I just miscalculated the headache of moving and then we had to wait. By the time I waited, the company decided they didn’t need me anymore.
Which worked out for both of us. Sort of. But my point is this: if you are offered a six figured salary and you take it knowing that you only plan to keep the position long enough to pay down debt or accomplish some other financial goal, yes you miss your kids, but its temporary. It’s just a thought.
That said, my husband and I had the conversation yesterday because I had a offer from a foreign employer. Our version went like this:
“What if they offer you a six figure salary?” He asks.
“For two years away from you guys?”
“We could take a vacation. Pay off debt.”
“But this is what is happening now. The kids won’t even be the same people when I get back.”
“So you’re saying no?”
“They cannot pay me enough to be away from you. There isn’t enough money in the world.”
That is how I feel about it, but there are other ways to think about this, I’m sure..
My question refers back to Sandberg’s Ted Talk, but also to the whole topic of a world with women equally represented at in high positions at companies like Yahoo, Google and in political leadership. Why would this be a better world as opposed to a world where the best leaders are the leaders, regardless of gender?
Great article
but this raises a point that all techs have to answer – culture change as they become public and become bigger. Techs cant really continue to be nice and have these schemes without no consequence,especially when top management have to answer to shareholders
Wonder how long till Google kill their free lunches?
People are crazy if they think that telecommuting is dying. There are TONS of job postings daily on Indeed, SkipTheDrive, and CareerBuilder for telecommuting. SMH, some of these comments are crazy.
I don’t know; ROWE has research behind it as well, and experientially I think people find a lot inefficiency and blunted productivity and dysfunction in the workplace, as well.
I think that telecommuting has to do with personal choices and priorities as i can also conclude from this great article. It outlines how you cannot have the freedom that provides the opportunity of working at home, while at the same time maintaining all the privilledges that come with hard work, more strict deadlines and surveillance at office. This is the part that refers to the employee. Then it is up to the company, its policy and its ability to affect the efficiency of the employees if keeps them at office.
“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.”
I disagree that this is the case, especially for introverts. Introverts are not energised by being around other people.
I’m sure many people would be more efficient and productive if they weren’t subject to constant noise, distractions and interruptions from others. Work doesn’t happen at work – http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work
Innovation also requires serious amounts of solitude, even for extroverts. See Susan Cain’s TED talk – http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts