NEW YORK — Since Marissa Mayer became chief executive of Yahoo, she has been working hard to get the Internet pioneer off its deathbed and make it an innovator once again.
She started with free food and new smartphones for every employee, borrowing from the playbook of Google, her employer until last year.
Comments
Clearly a move made by someone who assumes everyone is like herself. There are lots of workers who simply enjoy their jobs and are willing to give up the chance of promotion in order to work at home and be more productive. A more balanced approach would have been to have weekly office meetings in order to build stronger relationships and share ideas.
I telecommted for 13 years before retiring and it worked out well for myself and the company. It is not for everyone, but she would be better served by a more flexible approach.
Nice that she can probably afford round-the-clock nannies who will take her kid to the doctor when he's sick, make all his meals and probably even do his clothes shopping, but what flexibility her other employees have is now gonezo. Classic case of someone kicking the door shut after she walked through it. I can see maybe working full-time from home won't work, removing all flexibility from everyone is punitive and it will bite Yahoo in the you-know-what in the long run. It is employers' expectations that everyones's lives should revolve around work (a'la the Google campus) that is really contributing to the deterioration of our families and our society.
Collaboration and teamwork are important in most any position. I perform research as a healthcare economist. I often need to collaborate with doctors on medical issues, with programmers on data or programming issues, and occassionally with statisticians if there is a statistical issue that I cannot handle myself. It works out much better if I can talk to people face-to-face. I cannot think of many positions where an employee would not benefit from interactions with colleagues. On the other hand, companies should be flexible so that employees can work from home when the need arises. I would think that many Yahoo and Google employees are programmers. Programmers would certainly benefit from interacting with their colleagues.
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I find it hard to believe the work output is the same for women who work at home and have kids at home at the same time. I believe that it might work for a day or two a week but otherwise the company definitely would get shortchanged. Working at home isn't great for the worker either. They don't get to know their colleagues, they don't partake in the camraderie an office usually engenders, and they don't get to learn anything from the other employees being isolated from them.
There is a lot of dead wood at Yahoo. She wants to wants to see the faces of the people before she fires them. Also - She had an office at Yahoo remodeled so her nanny and child can spend time with her in the office. I wonder if other workers will be given space to bring their kids and nannys to work...