CIO QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Joel Dobbs asks:"What do you think of Yahoo's decision to terminate telecommuting and what work-at-home concerns are unique to IT?"
CIO Questions by Joel Dobbs, , Fri, 03/01/2013 - 16:36
Hisayuki
Hikichi
I do believe that this is one of the alternatives for a company where concerns communication?
We set telecommuting technology for:
1) Communication tool for global members.
2) BCP tools when natural disaster and other major issue happens, and occurs.
3) Life work balance alternatives for those who are in maternity leave, and care small children.
4) Save time and hours for who doing care for elderly family members.
So, those are auxiliary technology selection on top of office work.
For those company and many of technology companies are doing as free space, remote work, flex time in everyday work, human communication may lacks as time goes by. Warm human communication and team building is essential to proceed projects and target task. IT can be digital, but IT will be used by human being, so, some swing back to analogue is normal.
Important thing is the balance of use. (On site face to face communication should not be extinct)
Thoughtful opinion piece from the New York Times on this subject.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/opinion/in-defense-of-telecommuting.ht...
The headline on the piece is almost verbatim what I said in a video blog I shot last week:
http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/video/individual-performance-simple...
"Eighty percent of success is showing up."
--Woody Allen
BTW, Robert Half Technology just did a work-at-home survey for IT workers. Top lines are that three fourths said work-at-home is somewhat important in considering a job. But the same percentage also said they preferred working in a office.
http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/jdodge/three-four-it-workers-...
One point that hasn't been discussed yet is that this kind of policy limits your market to the local vicinity. No virtual teams means that you can't hire the best in the country or the best in the world. You can only hire the best in your local area. (not everyone wants to move to the expensive Silicon Valley. I for one, had a chance and declined.) This limits your talent pool and thus, limits your competitiveness.
The other point that I haven't seen made is that Yahoo is a tech company - and technology has enabled new ways of collaborating with each other around the office and around the world. I'm surprised that a forward-thinking tech company would take such a traditional stance.
I get the lack of creativity and the need to feed off of that in the office, or in the same room. But she could have been more balanced, rather than so black & white. I think this shows a lack of maturity on her part. She's smart, but she's still young and relatively inexperienced as far as CEOs go. I'd bet in 10 years she might think differently.
There is certainly a competitive advantage to being able to hire the best people no matter where they live. In fact, in one of the companies I referenced in my blog on the subject, we were able to hire and keep people who would have otherwise been out of our reach (believe it or not, not everyone wants to move to New Jersey!). We were also able to regionalize our clinical research staff eliminating tons of travel costs in the process not to mention the lost time while traveling.
I completely agree that a more seasoned CEOwould likely have handled the communications differently. It should have come from the top, not through HR.
Good points, Sherry. I had many chances over the past 30 years to move to Silicon Valley, but stayed in the Northeast where I preferred to raise my family. My location never really interfered with my ability to work, except where I had to manage a staff. Geographical flexibility is critical for IT skills in short supply, such as mobile developers and big data analysts. Maybe Yahoo will make exceptions for those skillsets.
I just shot a video where I wondered how many in IT work at home. I know IT vendors have large populations of folks who work outside the office. After all, IT vendors and IT are largely responsible for making work-at-home possible!
I work for HP doing cloud computing installations globally. Just now I was on a voice conference with a collegue in Bangalore and a client in Dubai, ordering a server to be spun up in a data center in the UK. While I had the conversation, I was watching a herd of deer pick through the snow looking for food, from my home office in Michigan, USA. At 4pm, when my client and colleague are asleep, I'll pick up my kids from the school bus. I'll probably be back at my desk for 2 hours after 10pm when the house is quiet.
When you work in the global IT economy for a mature global company like HP,the value of having people that can still do their job from home, and give them added value of work life balance, is huge.
Clearly Yahoo wants to stay a local Silicon Valley startup, with rowdy teenagers as employees. Mommy Mayer needs to ground all her teenagers because they misbehaved. That's too bad.
I'm sure glad I work at a company that treats me like an adult.
Great post, Peter. I am working at home today working on a post about mobile virtualization. Junior Brown is belting out "Joe, the singing janitor" in the back ground (thank you, Spotify). Earbuds in the office would have ruined it.
What does three useless and frustrating hours M-F in the car accomplish?
"When you work in the global IT economy for a mature global company like HP,the value of having people that can still do their job from home, and give them added value of work life balance, is huge."
Bingo!
One thing to keep in mind is that Marissa Mayer is a product of Google (employee #20). At Google, the workplace ethos was built around people coming into the office and practically living there. One of the first things Google did was hire a cook, so that they could provide everyone with meals -- so that no one would leave the building ( a process that would involve getting into a car, driving, getting waited on at a restaurant, chatting, waiting for the tab, getting back into the car, maybe getting stuck in traffic, etc.). Google also hired masseuses for the office, so that employees could relax without leaving the building. The idea was to squeeze every ounce of productivity from Google employes as well as to foster interaction between them ON SITE. This comes through quite clearly in the book, "I'm Feeling Lucky, Confessions of Google Employee #59," by Douglas Edwards. So if it worked for Google, it will work for Yahoo!? Not necessarily. Google was a startup where people expected to put in long hours away from home. Yahoo! is a mature company. It will be a lot harder and might not be entirely possible to change an existing culture.
Well put, Stan. Some people are cut to work at home and others are not. It is privilege that should be easy to take away and hard-earned to get. I think sometimes the focus should be on individuals and the nature of the work versus letting telecommuting somehow define the company culture.
At first blush, it is tempting to jump all over the Yahoo CEO and hurl all sorts of Luddite epithets at her. She certainly doesn't help her cause when she builds a nursery next to her office so she can spend quality time with her baby. But once you get past the what does seem like workplace elitism here, the essential question really boils down to 'Is telecommuing right for every company', and the easy answer is "No." There are unique aspects to any company make it a stronger contender for having some or all or most all workers telecommute to some extent. But I will say this. If the reason for not allowing this increasingly expected benefit is that senior management inherently doesn't trust workers to get their work done when they are out of sight of their managers, then that is a troubled company. Because if they are goofing off at home or in some virtual office, they'll do the same around the water cooler in your own office. I've managed literally hundreds of people so I speak with some experience here.
I think when companies aren't getting the outcomes they want, they need to try something different. If that doesn't work, then try something else. For a full "rant" on what I think, see my short video blog at the Enterprise Mobile Hub at http://bit.ly/WsKuOJ.
A very polite rant actually!
Following the more recent press reports I, tend to agree that she may have taken a dramatic step to make a point about the cultural change she wants to see. Several insiders have gone public with stories of widespread abuse. A very public and dramatic act such as this one is a good way to get everyone's attention.
Agreed. This USA Today report talks about the abuse and the use of VPN logins to determine the activity of remote staff. It seems this is more of a poorly-communicated attempt at fixing a cultural problem than a direct attack on teleworking.
It's interesting that VPN was an indicator. In my work role (remote from an office location) I do not need to use VPN very often anyway but I'm sure there are still plenty of other measures that could be taken.
What's bclear is that this is a topic that required some debate and that different circumstances are in place for different companies and for different roles. I'm very interested in hearing more about what happens next at Yahoo - such as whether they'll lose a lot of people to other companies as a result.
We'll keep our eye on it, Richard. The biggest risk is that they drive off talent. Work at home is a big deal to IT.
http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/jdodge/three-four-it-workers-...
I agree that VPNs should be a thing of the past and I am surprised that Yahoo uses one much less for tracking remote workers to see if they are on the company's network.
It seemed like something has to jolt Yahoo! because nothing else is working. It fortunes have sagged for years except for a brief time when Terry Semel seemed to get it on track.
I agree...this was more about the shock factor. I wouldn't be surprised if slowly things moved back to where workers have the ability to work from home again.
As a leader of a small IT consulting firm where 99% of my staff work remotely, I see the benefits of allowing a work-from-home policy, but also understand that you must have the "right" people in place to be able to do this. At our company, the only people that commute into the office on a daily basis are those that prefer working in the office. Most of my folks are seasoned professionals that have been working in the consulting industry for many years, so there is little supervision needed. This policy allows our workers huge benefits from work/life balance perspective. But it is also a huge benefit to the company. Not only were we able to reduce our "bricks and mortar" footprint, but our employees are typically happier and feel more empowered. Now the downside is that we sometimes lack that sense of community that I think Yahoo is trying to get back, but the benefits of working from home far outweigh any negitvies from my perspective
It's the same for me as community manager at the ECF, Mark. I go into the office once a week (50-70 miles thru hellish traffic, depending on which route I take). The basis for my work-at-homeprivilege is that I am trusted to get the job done. Mobile technology is rewriting the rules of work and if you look at the big picture, the Yahoo backlash is nothing more than a blip. It doesn't curb the trend of working at home. It was a `we hadda do something' measure.