Call me old-fashioned, but I've been brought up to embraace exchanging ideas at the water fountain or coffee machine, managing by walking around and taking an interest in what is going on with everyone on the team, lots of informal (in addition to formal) communication, lots of exposure to customer problems to improve company value-added, and the result of that being a company culture and unified company purpose. Help me understand how those values are achieved with tele-commuting.

If the commuting time is excessive, find employment closer to home.  I don't see that as a viable excuse, you choose the life you lead and where you live and where you work, its the responsibility you take for the job that demands what you are going to do to get there.  You go to interview, you know what it is like, complaining about it is just going against your own choice.  I do work from home one day a week and it works for me, I save the commuting time and get more done, but I feel the need to be in the office to be able to exchange things with co-workers and its that communication that helps me get my job done and be prepared for what is coming next.  It's easier communication than just Instant Messaging or texts.

Tele-commuting works with specific jobs and scenarios, the discipline to do your work and not house work or with certain expertise, it is NOT for everyone.

Can't speak for wether or not Yahoo is a joke...

but a company doesn't owe the employee the choice of where the EMPLOYEE wants to work....

THe company (in non-thug environments) offers you pay for defined work.  If you want the money, do the job.  

Regardless of what the liberals have been indoctrinating in you since preschool.... its not yours to demand...

Working from home while also taking care of your young child at the same time is not productive. I don't know about you all, but I can't get anything done with my 3 year old tugging at me ("mommy, mommy, mommy, playdoh, Legos, juice box, electrical outlet, why?, mommy, mommy, etc.)  

It is one thing to work from an empty house, but to think that you are going to be an attentive parent and be a productive employee at the same time is just unrealistic if you have young kids. 

You photo at the top of the article illustrates why people cannot work from home. You show an employee playing with her cell phone while talking to her daughter. She should be working.

Ylu need to work.  You're describing childcaring with work mixed in.

I've met dozens of people who "work at home" over the past few years. Mostly, I've met them mid-morning at the dog park, mid-day at the supermarket and mid-afternoon when they were involved in parenting. Hmm...

"speed and quality are sacraficed"...

Yahoo may be hurting but is there a direct correlation to telecommuting employees.  One month on the job and this new director makes a decision like this.  Was this a knee-jerk reaction?  What assessment was done to pull the rug out from under telecommuting employees.  One has to wonder if she is trying to justify her high salary. I agree completely that if this is what it takes to save a company, and yahoo is in trouble, than employees must step up.  It just seems like a power-play here given the short time on the job and the insensitive memo.  Look around-CEO's are still taking limisouines and bonuses while freezing pay and cutting benefits for the worker bees.  Big earners are aware of rising costs of fuel, public transportation, day care but it is just a news feed to them.  The erosion of many hard won benfits for working people is an affront to middle-class America.    

Good move by Yahoo.  

I bet these work at home scenerios were leveraged as incentives instead of pay increase...will they get the pay now?  No.  I worked a tech job at home one day a week and the solitude of getting my 8 hours in after my daughter went to bed and before she woke up (which was always over 8 hours) was great.  No interruptions while trying to code from coworkers or bosses who wanted to chat and interrupt your train of thought.  So I was free during the day to be with my child, but you have to be disciplined and need the flexibility to not have to punch a 9 to 5 clock...my employer has always happy with my progress. 

What is not reported is that Yahoo has a long history of employees abusing the privilege of working from home.  This is a struggling company that this CEO is trying to turn around and this seems to be an attempt to cut off the dead wood.  Is is better for the company to make no changes and eventually go bankrupt?  

Miss. Preggo Ceo is a real charmer for sure.  Right or wrong, foolish or no; business, especially today, is a cannibal ethos. Could this be a scam? Sure it could.  A CEO is nobody's friend.  An employee is a thing to be used and sucked dry and then discarded.  This alley alley infree is a dimunition for many people. Like the Time Machine movie calling all the Eloi back to  the central hive, maybe.  But I know many less  fortunate  people who would be profoundly gratefful for any kind of a job, anywhere, doing anything. So no tears please. Options for these yahoo folks are still immeasurably better than those available to many desperate people.

I'm retired and have a friend in the hi-tech industry who works from home.  I bike ride with him, hike with him, and see him all over town at all times and all days.  He likes to joke about how he often just tunes out during tele meetings and goes and makes a sandwich, or even reads the newspaper.  He says his boss doesn't catch on to him because he's so good now at fooling him.  He helps his wife care for his 98 year old mother in law who needs 24x7 care and lives with them.  He has no interaction with co-workers, knows nothing about their lives and says he likes it that way.  It seems as though no one has anyone's back and no one bonds.  How can they?  I think Yahoo knows exactly what's going on and is doing the right thing.

I work from home whenever I need peace & quiet to compile data for reports, or when the weather is really bad. From home, I usually put in 12 hours or more, to make up for the time I might get the mail, load the dishwasher, etc. I work from the office when I need the feedback & communication. From the office, I put in my 8 hours, regardless of whether I took time to make a coffee run, to help out a colleague on another floor, or just humor a manager by listening to his vacation adventures. When I leave the office, NO MORE WORK IS DONE. I don't respond - or even look at - emails, no lgging in, no answering work phone calls. My employer knows the work (and usually more) gets done this way. If teecommuting employees aren't working, then they're not the right employees and working from the office won't change that. Telecommuting is not the problem - it's the people.

Given how widespread telecomuting is in Silicon Valley and given how people move from job to job there anyhow, how many of the people effected by this decree will be out the door and with another company before Yahoo even has a chance to figure out who they really need?

Why is this being framed as a PARENT only issue?  We ALL need to work from home at times: delivery of costly items, repair person committing to a 4 hour block when they may show up, when you don't want to infect everyone you work with, etc.  Being productive at home or not is an individual issue. Will Yahoo being giving out the flu shot for free?

I ran a five star mutual fund out of our spare bedroom for three years in the late 1990s using only Yahoo Finance, ironically, so I get the whole working from home thing, I've done it and I've made it work.  My wife and our kids had to get used to the fact that just because I was home it did not mean I was available.  I think our kids thought I was perpetrating some kind of scam or hustle because the kind of work I did in those days didn't look like work to normal people.  Like most people in the investment business I had CNBC or Bloomberg TV on with the sound turned down in case something interesting hit the screen, in which case I'd turn the sound up for a few minutes.  Most of the time I was reading research or annual and quarterly reports and conference call transcripts online, or I was on the computer doing stuff, or I was on the phone.  My kids were aware that I was getting paid but it looked like Dad was goofing off watching TV, playing on the computer or yakking on the phone with one of his layabout buddies.  Working from home you get less respect from ignorant people, and peculiar questions.  For example, one of our neighbors was chatting with my wife and she asked her "I noticed your husband's car hasn't moved in a week, is everything all right?"

You can goof off at the office as well as at home but I was in a performance business and you can't fake performance.  So, for me, no matter where you went, there you were.  However, the kind of work that I did (portfolio management) is pretty solitary, we don't collaborate or confer very much.

The company that I was working for in those days had recently moved from midtown to Greenwich partly because the founder and CEO (my boss) lived nearby and was weary of the commute even though he had a limo and a driver, partly to cut costs and partly to get rid of a lot of people without layoffs.  He told me he figured a lot of the NYC residents working for the company would leave rather than relocate or spend two hours a day commuting.  Turned out, he was right about that.  So, no layoffs, no severance, no restructuring charge.  Brilliant.

I think Marissa Mayer believes that Yahoo is overstaffed and inefficient and needs to slim down, and most investors would agree with this.  She probably figures that a lot of the telecommuters will quit instead of commuting in to the office, and she is probably right.  She can probably change her mind in a couple or three years if she wants to.

Get your plump,lazy butts to the office and quit complaining.

I wish all these stories and discussions would specify when they mean "I work at home 5 Days/week" from "I work at home on Tuesdays and Fridays" from "I work at home when a kid is sick the plumber is coming".  3 different things entirely. 

I feel so sorry for those who've gotten used to working at home, raiding the refrigerator at will, being able to put their head down on their desk, or even taking a nap if they want. I'm so, so, so, so sorry!

But most of us in the working world don't have that privelege. Do you really think you deserve a perk that most workers don't have a prayer of getting? You can't build a house or fix a refrigerator from home. You can wait on customers from home. You can't answer the Centrex and route calls from home.

Considering that most of us who work have to put up with enough people who spend more time trying to get out of working than actually doing anything, I think I've used up my ration of sympathy for the stay at home layabouts.

This move by Yahoo makes me wonder if they're truly the global, innovative player in the digital economy that they claim.  Because if they are, they should have employees on extended teams all over the world with integrated job functions, using the best of technology to stay connected, on task, and in support of the company mission.  Yahoo isn't a GM plant--the work gets done in a matrix among primarily knowledge workers.  Yes, they should all put in a full day plus, but punching in at the cube isn't how it's done these days.