Yahoo takes big step back by ending work-at-home

Marissa Mayer, Chief Executive Officer of Yahoo!, poses during the 43rd Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Friday, Jan. 25, 2013. (AP Photo/Keystone/Laurent Gillieron) / Laurent Gillieron

(MoneyWatch) Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Marissa Mayer has pushed her company conspicuously toward the culture of her former employer, Google (GOOG). But a recent crackdown on telecommuting puts Yahoo well out of the tech norm and even management practice at many corporations.

As Kara Swisher reported at AllThingsD, Mayer instituted a new plan that requires employees who work remotely to relocate to corporate offices, many of whom were originally told that they would be allowed to work from home. Not only does it put the company at competitive disadvantage when trying to attract talent, but it might indicate a fundamental weakness in Mayer's managerial style.

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According to the memo that Swisher reports to have obtained, the professed reason for the change is to improve communications and operations:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

The memo goes on to say that, starting June, all employees who received permission to work remotely, and according to Swisher, that extends even to employees with arrangements to work from home one or two days a week, will have to work at a Yahoo office. Those who don't want to comply will have to quit.

The decision could put Yahoo at a significant competitive disadvantage. Flexibility in working conditions has come to be considered a basic requirement at high tech companies. Yahoo has already found itself in competition for talent, and as Twitter traffic has already shown, some rivals are already trying to use the announcement to pull talent from Yahoo.

The change in policy does seem odd. Many tech companies manage to enable communication and collaboration effectively without having everyone on the same physical premises all the time. Given the nature of global operations, such collaboration often takes place among personnel in different offices, making physical proximity impossible.

One thinly-sourced report by Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider says that a single person who supposedly was "familiar with Mayer's thought process on the matter" said that many of the people working remotely "weren't productive" and were effectively hiding, and that people who would not come to an office and quit instead would reduce costs without requiring layoffs.

If correct, this reasoning should be disturbing. Corporate management should be able to manage productivity problems without resorting to changing an overall HR policy. If people would not improve or comply with new conditions, they could be fired for cause.

To eradicate all forms of remote working would suggest that Yahoo is incapable of the most basic types of managerial controls.

[peterv43]

Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer recently decreed workers would be required to show up at the office rather than work remotely. Negative reactivity was immediate, inside and out - mostly out right now - but reactivity nevertheless.


A renewed emphasis on face-to-face interpersonal interactions, in-person meetings and give-and-take, on the important search for meaning and clarity that cannot be gleaned from an email discussion, and on impromptu get-togethers that lead to innovation provide the basic rationale and foundation for Yahoo's new strategy.

From my perspective, whether or not the new strategy to bolster Yahoo's survival, revitalization and sustainability will be successful is anybody's guess.

The important question is whether Yahoo employees will honestly commit to, sincerely engage in and self-responsibly buy into the new strategy.

Change management is not the issue here. Conscious change management is the issue. Meaning?

When human beings are exposed to changes in their workplace, resistance is a natural and common reaction. Moreover, even if change is the "solution," management needs to expect and plan for resistance. Whether people adapt to change or not, is the challenge - Yahoos challenge, in this instance.

My question, from the outside looking in, is whether Yahoo is dealing openly, honestly and directly, i.e., proactively, with resistance, and not just resistance, but the root cause of resistance fear?

As a "smart" company, I'm going to allow that Yahoo has their new strategic management ducks in a row their vision, their financial, technical and marketing strategies, tactics, steps and the like all neatly articulated, power-pointed and bound.

However, in terms of being a "healthy" company (the people side of things), I'm curious if they expected and planned for possible "health issues" resulting from the change e.g., low morale, increased turnover, absenteeism and presenteeism (when your body shows up, but you don't), increased confusion and politics, reduced commitment, engagement and buy-in and other behavioral and attitudinal issues.

Conscious change places an equal emphasis on both - the smart and healthy aspects, the technical and the people. Did Yahoo? We'll see.

In a word, fear. (It's important to know anger is a secondary emotion. Underneath anger, lies fear)

As this adventure unfolds, I'll be curious about attitudes and behaviors, e.g., disengagement, absenteeism, presenteeism, rumors and gossip, subtle or not-so-subtle sabotage, anger, passive-aggressiveness, nit-picking, acting out, wanting to revert to "old ways," old habits, old patterns of be-ing and do-ing. I'll be interested in the unhealthy tension that is part and parcel of resistance tension that gets in the way of meaningful and productive change.

Just as a runny nose, fever, high temperature, and achiness signal an on-coming cold, the unhealthy behaviors, above, often signal ill health in the "body" of an organization. The "cold" (dis-ease) in this case is resistance and the cells (individuals) are being infected by an organism called fear - an infection that seriously undermines performance, production, morale and, eventually, profits.

Typical change tactics often focus on the symptoms of resistance - not the root cause. To reduce and eliminate resistance, reduce and eliminate the root cause, fear - about how folks will be affected, fear about the unknown and unfamiliar, real or potential fear of loss of control, recognition and security, fear of moving away from the status quo and fear of losing (one's own sense of) command and control. An open, healthy and honest change effort requires a conscious, compassionate, and caring focus on people a proactive, honest and organizationally-responsible effort that transcends logistics, politics, market share and all the other B-school and Wall Street Journal analytics that most change management efforts focus on, almost exclusively.

Of the hundreds of comments I've read about Mayer's decision, the vast majority the angry, the very angry, the resentful, the disrespectful, the victimized, the rumor-y, the gossipy, the belittling, the hateful, the selfish, the inane, the nostalgic if truth be told, are largely symptomatic of fear - fear of loss in some way, shape or form.

Put into place short- and long-term efforts to support folks to deal with the root cause of their resistance fear and navigating the white water of change becomes a less harrowing experience, for the pilots and the passengers.

Proactively supporting folks to recognize, explore, own and voice their fear, and supporting them to be OK with it and to move through it, is the antidote for a smart organization that seeks to be healthy.

Where will the Yahoo journey lead? Stay tuned.


(c) 2013, Peter G. Vajda, Ph.D.

[Montessahall]

Well this work at home employee is glad to not work for Yahoo!

[HistoryNote]

The cost of a remote office is often overlooked.

There's the ISP cost to keep a fast internet connection to each remote office. Plus the printer and fax devices at each remote office. Plus the cost of remote IT support. Plus the cost of cellular service, and data plans, and periodic replacement phones. Plus the cost of shipping replacement devices. Plus the cost of answering services and POTS lines. Plus the cost of insurance on a remote office. Plus the cost of re-investment when the assets fail to be returned in working order when the remote office is closed.

[eriksherman]

Given that people working from home typically use their own high-speed connection and equipment, and that any cell phone costs would be covered the same way as the company would if working out of an office, and I'm not sure it's an issue. You may be thinking of remote offices, but in this case, remote meant working out of the home.

[Rickornotrick]

While this seems like a huge step backwards for some, I personally think in the long run it will do for Yahoo what the CEO intends. The part of the article I want to focus on is the sentence, "Corporate management should be able to manage productivity problems without resorting to changing an overall HR policy. If people would not improve or comply with new conditions, they could be fired for cause."

While this was once true, in today's business environments of matrix organizational structure, this type of management rarely exists. HR departments are not what they once were and are typically powerless to affect true change in an organization, they do what they are told by upper management. Therefore it is NOT an HR policy change, it is a management change being affected at Yahoo. Bringing people back into the offices might also be a first step to rebooting the organization in a more traditional and entrepreneurial structure where people are in charge of the areas they oversee and you don't have a bunch of employees all just trying to stay under the radar and in the meantime accomplishing nothing.

[LawReport]

Good for her! If there is one thing I know it is people who work from home typically not only do not get a full days work in, their customers suffer because they are not at their post to make sure the job is done right and completely. There isn't anything you can do better from home than you can at the office except lay around in your underwear watching TV and surfing the web all the while keeping an eye on email or instant messaging requests in order to jump-on to give the appearance of work. People have been abusing this "privilege" for years and it is about time it stopped. I'll tell you another thing that needs to happen; the work day needs to go to 8.5 hours with no raise in pay. That's right no raise! I have worked salary for the past 19 years and never have I considered my job to be a 40 hour week. I expect to work as long as the job isn't finished. If Americans got their sensitive heads out of their over-sized rears and started thinking like this we could take a huge step toward making ourselves competitive in the world markets. Blame the government for not protecting American interest and maybe there is some truth to that but the fact is you don't deserve it because Americans are lazy. We get to work late, take break early, stay too long at break, break for lunch early, come back from lunch late, take another break or two in the afternoon then have the nerve to leave early! I can't wait to hear all the bi_ching about this one. For every person who chimes in and tells me they don't do any of this there are 1000s and 1000s out there sitting silent because they are guilty so unless 100 million people respond to this and tell me I am wrong I stand correct. Now get to work!

[skeezix06]

Speak for yourself, McGurk. And by the way, people who are paid salary typically get more than people getting paid by the hour and should be smart enough to know that salary automatically means overtime without pay above salary.

You have a strange and completely unrealistic idea what working from home is really like.

[Bweezo]

Wow, angry much?
You sound like one of those archaic Machiavellian control-freak bosses who live in a silo. If the type of employee you describe is typical of the company you work for, why don't you leave and find one that fits your criteria? For some reason I get the impression not too many of your coworkers would be heartbroken.

Thanks to tools like Google Chat, Skype and others, employees can work remote and stay very well connected and productive.

[jtdev1]

She OBVIOUSLY doesn't understand the internet "GEEKS" don't like to talk to people face to face.

[jtdev1]

In my company it's up to the manager's discretion on who or when someone works from home.

For her to apply the same rule changes to everyone regardless of who or what they do is not a smart move.

So when the servers are down and the people are home in bed, will Yahoo be willing to wait the 1/2 hour or more for them to drive in to the office to fix it? What about waiting until the next business day.

This should have been handled manager by manager, not company wide.

[Cyberqat]

Yahoo needs to refocus and recommit to a new vision. They also need to slim down. In many ways, they are a startup all over again.

That kind of environment needs 110% dedication. I don't think she's necessarily wrong, or sorry to see those go who don't share that level of committment.

[arskeptical]

Who wants to start a betting pool on how long it will be until she "decided to persue other opportunities" ???

I got $50 on December.

[HistoryNote]

I'll wager there are twice as many fresh unemployed minds willing to accept the requirement to "show up" as there are employed work from homers that won't accept their cheese being moved.

[LawReport]

I have $50 that says you cannot punctuate properly.

[HistoryNote]

Work from home can be less fruitful than work on site. Working through an RSA SSL VPN tunnel (wireless) to remotely support another remote (wireless) user can be agonising at times. It usually works better, or more efficiently, if at least one of the parties is on site, within the domain infrastructure.

Working in the Goggle Docs collaborative cloud is an experience worth having. Goggle's infrastructure is second to none. It is remarkably error free. Not perfect, but close.

I support many work from home users. There are times that issues simply cannot be solved remotely. Typically these are expired password issues, where the user needs to come on site to reconnect with the domain to resolve a cached account. MAC users running parallels are the most frequent.

Work from home is okay, but it's not a permanent solution. Everyone needs to show up once in a while, if for no other reason than to refresh account creds and share some face time with those at the office.