

Yahoo Says New Policy Is Meant to Raise Morale - codex_irl
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/technology/yahoos-in-office-policy-aims-to-bolster-morale.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

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starik36
I am gonna go against the grain here and agree with Marissa. A situation where
you have a couple of people that are remote (while everyone else is in the
office) creates all kinds of issues.

For instance, at a meeting 20 people have to wait for that one guy to get on
the phone. Or now you have to pass the Klingon mic around so that the remote
worker would hear properly. And god help you, if the remote folks are in a
different time zone - now 90% of the people in the office get inconvenienced
because someone is 3 hours ahead of us.

We have this very situation at work and it's very unhealthy and annoying. I've
come to conclusion that on large teams it's either everyone is remote or no
one is.

Hanselman (<http://www.hanselman.com>) has a good series on working remotely
and making it work - he outlines the problems and how to solve them. At least
he is trying - other folks simply do not.

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hospadam
Anecdotally, it's typically the people in the room who are either a) late to
the meeting or b) go off on tangents or c) cause the meeting to overrun. There
are lots of good and bad things about remote workers... but being a hamper on
meetings shouldn't be one of them.

If you have 20 people in the office - and 1 remote worker - your conference
times should be at the preferred time of the 20.

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starik36
They should be, but they are not. And don't get me started on the ensuing hell
if you are trying to share your desktop via WebEx or Lync.

My favorite exchange at the meeting couple of weeks ago (with a remote sales
rep).

Meeting organizer: Just press the Start button and then type... Sales Rep: I
don't see any Start button.

This went on for 5 minutes with 20 people in the meeting waiting around.
Turned out, sales rep got a new Windows 8 laptop - no Start button.

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danielweber
Ugh. Biz people can be really bad at this, because they think everyone has
Powerpoint.

Once when I was remote, I specifically arranged before the meeting with one
coworker to set up a kibbutz session (kibbutz is an expect-script that works a
lot like screen, and screen may well have worked, too) showing my terminal,
and she was hooked up to the projector, so I could visually walk everyone
through my code.

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sodomizer
She's doing this to get away from "me-first" culture, which is common to all
dying firms, and to get people toward a "goal-first" outlook instead.

The problem with this attempt is that it's one rule trying to stand in for
many. The first thing you have to do is make sure that no one is rewarded
unjustly, and that no achievement goes unrewarded. The next thing is to get
rid of the free riders, hangers-on, bad management, sociopaths and other
office blight.

The final step, and she'll hate this, is some kind of ownership. Employees are
people who do what you tell them to do. Part owners look for something they
can do to contribute to collective wealth through the future of the company.

Sounds Communist? Not to my ears, and I'm pretty far from ever supporting dead
ideologies. It's just common sense. People need to feel like they're part of a
team, and that's how we signal that in our society, through ownership.

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rz2k
>The problem with this attempt is that it's one rule trying to stand in for
many.

Where did you read that this policy is the only thing that she has done?

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leothekim
I used to work at a company where there was a flexible work-at-home policy. It
was great, except for this one guy named Smith (name changed to protect the
lazy sumbitch). He would frequently email the team about how he wasn't feeling
well, or how he wanted to concentrate on something important he was working
on, or how he woke up so late that the commute wasn't worth it so he'd work at
home.

That was fine and all, but then he would send emails about how he wasn't
feeling well and was going stay at home, then show up for the after-hours
company parties. He once sent an all-company email to invite others to watch
videos with him in one of the meeting rooms during a Wednesday afternoon. I
responded "Wednesday _afternoon_? I think I'll be at my day job then." To
which he replied "By Wednesday afternoon, I meant after 6pm. Technically, that
_is_ afternoon."

My manager tallied up the days that he did this, and I forget the exact
number, but they added up to more than 50 work days in 10 months. The policy
wasn't specific about how many days you could work from home, so he was
allowed to do this. Worse, others started to follow his example.

And yet, he was getting his work done on those days off, so no one fired him.
But, his behavior annoyed everyone s.t. we called working at home "Smithing".
I still showed up at work and put in my best, but it certainly was
demoralizing to have to work with such douchebaggery.

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Deezul
"And yet, he was getting his work done on those days off, so no one fired
him."

He may very well have been a poor worker, but it strikes me as odd how
superficial our idea of a good worker is. Productivity being equal (at home or
work), what does it matter if he seems to be having it easy? The illusion of
looking busy still carries a lot of weight apparently.

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fusiongyro
It matters if the psychological effect on other employees causes them to
become less productive or increases the likelihood that they'll look for
another job.

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mhurron
So it's this guys problem that others can't act like adults?

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fusiongyro
I think it's unreasonable to define 'acting like an adult' in a way that's
likely to exclude 99% of humanity.

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UnoriginalGuy
Four hours of commuting a day just to do something that could have been done
on Skype, WebEx, or Google Hangouts always raises my morale...

If morale is low maybe it is because of a poor company structure, bad
management, or a stagnant job. None of which get resolved by switching where
someone is sitting.

By the way I thought just yesterday they were claiming this was the result of
workers being "lazy" (VPN logs etc)?

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phillmv
It strikes me as a way to reduce headcount without announcing layoffs.

It's shitty if you were one of the telecommuters; and while I am loathe to
side with a crappy doublespeak management move… Yahoo! does need a shake up.
That's Mayer's whole deal, right?

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strandev
Yahoo is no stranger to layoffs, why go about it in such an obtuse way? Maybe
the simplest answer is the most likely one - they want more control over their
employees.

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mc32
Exactly. The people who only work from home is in the low hundreds ~200 is
what's being bandied about. That would have near zero impact on headcount.
Other issues are at play.

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moocow01
I'm a little sad that Marissa seemingly doesn't seem to get incentives. Your
people are probably not coming in likely because the company is not providing
a positive environment. To speculate after a number of set of layoffs, getting
mediocre raises with no correlation to effort, cutbacks on everything, no
upward mobility, etc etc you end up with a bunch of employees that got gouged
too many times. (Ive never worked at Yahoo but worked at a couple of companies
that are where they are now so this is my own guess). The problem for an
employee in this sort of environment is that in a low morale workplace you
will end up being basically abused and taken advantage of if you show up with
a smile on your face ready to tackle the company's issues.

So what's the dumbest (and easiest) thing for a manager to do when morale
sucks... try to force you to be happy and productive which is essentially what
Marissa is going to do just like any other clueless CEO. IMHO she should have
handled this very differently. If you want people to show up give them a
reason to or just fire them - you cant make an already demoralized person
happy again by taking away an incentive to stay with you.

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uvdiv
I think the _Economist_ delivers the best response to this so far:

 _IN JONATHAN SWIFT’S 1726 novel, “Gulliver’s Travels”, the Yahoos are a
degraded band of humanoids kept tethered in stalls by their equine captors..._

[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21572767-forcing-
worke...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21572767-forcing-workers-come-
office-symptom-yahoos-problems-not-solution)

The tethered-horse metaphor (which they do not ease up on) really nails their
point: empirical criticisms aside, the policy is _degrading_.

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RyanMcGreal
_The beatings will continue until morale improves._

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codex_irl
I've worked from home near SF & for a European client for almost 4 years now,
we are on different sides of the world and can make it work so I fail to see
the issue here.

We have about 3 hours overlap in working hours, I have a 5-10 minute talk with
my boss each morning so he knows what I'm working on & I know what's happening
in HQ. He can view my git logs to make sure I am actually doing what I say I
am & we manage projects using Redmine. For meetings they schedule them
slightly later in the day, their time & we using a combination of Skype &
Google Hangout.

Their are times when it would be useful to meetup in person, e.g. when working
on user workflows or product design, but this is rare.

I would need a LOT of extra money from an employer to endure a 1-2 hour
commute to / from work these days & sit in a cubicle farm or factory-floor
style open plan office.

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posabsolute
Wow what a suck up article to Yahoo :

"Parking lots and entire floors of cubicles were nearly empty because some
employees were working as little as possible and leaving early."

That's certainly not what I heard from how it worked at yahoo, I guess all
those managers just don't care if the devs do not delivers there weekly items.

Not to say that Yahoo structure is not fucked up and that this step was not
necessary, but the reasoning given in this article is weak

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smackfu
Plus that very bad sounding situation, even if true, was not addressed at all
by this new policy.

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orn
From Wiki

Having worked from home during the end of her pregnancy and giving birth to a
boy, Marissa Mayer returned to work at Yahoo Headquarters where she has built
a nursery next to her office suite. Shortly thereafter, she drew ire for
issuing the ban on telecommuting

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outside1234
right - she is trying to lead by example.

you shouldn't work from home - you should be homing from work.

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ChuckMcM
I don't know if any progress gets made in this debate. Its an interesting
Rorshak test scenario.

My own opinion is that managing teams might mean that some folks are remote,
and it might mean that they aren't, but the goal is the mission of the team
and if you're all aligned on that then you working out specific communication
or productivity problems is a lot easier, for everyone.

That said, there are people who make it their goal to work as little as
possible and not get fired. Some folks are really good at it. Sometimes I've
felt that if an individual put as much effort and thought into their
engineering as they did on creative ways to game the system they would be a
lot more productive. There are also folks who are conflicted about their
goals, they are working because it pays a salary and perhaps has benefits, but
they are really passionate about something else like a musical career or one
guy I knew was trying to be a chef.

Generally though if you've signed up to manage someone, that includes
understanding what they are working on and their work habits with respect to
the rest of the team. Understand that while your manager might ask you to do
your job better you can also ask them to do their job better. It is completely
legit to tell your manager that you're bothered by folks slacking off or being
twits.

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bickfordb
As an indirect shareholder of Yahoo (through MUTFs/ETFs), I find it a little
infuriating that the only signal they had were VPN logs to determine that
employees were completely not doing their job over a long period. Where is the
manager accountability here?

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corresation
Yahoo has some 14,500 employees. There were 200 employees targeted by the
widely reported action.

Was innovation and collaboration really suppressed because 1.3% of the
employees worked at home?

This all sounds rather ridiculous.

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danielweber
I don't know anything about the situation Yahoo, but it's quite possible that
a small number of people exploiting a perk can make the other people feel
resentment.

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roc
I don't know anything about the situation at Yahoo, but in any company of
14,000 people, I find it hard to believe inter-team/department tension is
based on objective reality.

e.g. If sales and engineering don't get along, engineering will tend to
believe sales is always taking advantage of sleazy junkets and sales will tend
to believe engineering is playing games all day, regardless of the reality.
[1]

So removing perks from one or both feuding groups can hardly be expected to
address any underlying problems, real or imagined.

[1] Those situations are basically the adult version of the infamous Robber's
Cave Study.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber%27s_Cave_study#Robbers_c...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber%27s_Cave_study#Robbers_cave_study)

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danielweber
This is a good point, and bad management is going to be bad management no
matter what.

However, this seems about intra-team morale. Did the biz people really know
that Joe the UX guy was working from home?

(Honestly, if I don't see the biz or marketing person at his desk, I assume
he's off at a customer site somewhere. Maybe this doesn't work in reverse from
biz-to-dev.)

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borlak
Best Buy is not "no longer permitting employees to work remotely" -- it now
has to be discussed with your manager [0].

[0]: [http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/technology/best-buy-work-
fro...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/technology/best-buy-work-from-home/)

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InclinedPlane
When has any leader ever done something they believed would lower morale? The
problem is almost always that leadership is so out of touch they don't know
how their actions affect morale.

