At the same time that I, Edwin, wrote yesterday’s post, our marketing guy and and social media guru, Avi Kaye, had his own thoughts on the new Marissa Mayer rule at Yahoo – he doesn’t see working from home as impacting productivity so much as getting some creative juices running.
Here is his take:
Marissa Mayer has cancelled the ‘work from home’ option in Yahoo, and opened a can of worms. From downright derision to calling it an “epic fail”, the response to this move has been overwhelming.
Bottom line is, that in the state that Yahoo is in, this is probably one of the best moves for Mayer to have made. The corporate culture of working from the house took a turn for the worse in Yahoo, with rumors abounding of employees who did their bare minimum required so they could take care of pet projects on the side, people who continued to draw paychecks even though they’d effectively slipped between the cracks and more.
According to the memo sent around the company, “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home… …We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”
Now, it isn’t that other companies don’t have a ‘work-from-home’ policy (Google, Mayer’s previous employer, is a great example), but these companies aren’t in the same financial straits as Yahoo. Just as a comparison, Google employees make 178% more revenue for the company than Yahoo employees. And despite all the many comments deriding Mayer for this decision, it’s interesting to note that bringing people back to the office – and making sure that there are more face-to-face meetings – is one of the first steps Mayer is taking in office to start putting Yahoo back on track.
By the way, according to many posts, Mayer’s move won’t have any effect on worker productivity, as it has been shown that working from home or working from the office doesn’t affect workers’ productivity, but the New York Times has reported that Mayer’s move wasn’t actually about productivity at all. The move is aimed to help the company focus on creativity, as studies have shown that face-to-face interactions tend to help people’s creativity, which will (hopefully) help Yahoo start producing the kind of innovative breakthroughs they so desperately needs.
Just as long as they remember to actually get work done at these new meetings 🙂
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