One of the great benefits of mobile computing has been the ability to work outside the traditional office setting. Working remotely has enabled employees to avoid lengthy commutes and be more productive for longer hours. At least that's the theory.
Yahoo isn't buying into remote working any more. Various news groups have reported that Yahoo will end the practice this spring and all employees of the technology company will have to begin commuting to various Yahoo offices by June.
CNN Money quotes the Yahoo internal memo on the subject, reportedly issued by Jackie Reses, Yahoo's executive vice president of people and development: "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."
This shouldn't be a huge surprise for Yahoo's 11,500 employees. CEO Marissa Mayer came over to Yahoo from Google last summer and Google is not big on remote workers. You don't have to be a grizzled veteran of the working world to know that things tend to change when a new CEO comes to town.
Is this the start of a trend for American business, or is Yahoo, as some bloggers have claimed, desperate to regain some of its lost relevancy? If Yahoo is to become "the absolute best place to work," this seems like a funny way of going about it, especially for the hundreds of workers who can no longer take advantage of the remote option.
Yahoo won't discuss how many of its employees work from home, but if Yahoo is like many others, the numbers are increasing, particularly with new hires who don't want to uproot their life and deal with the hassles that go with finding a new home, new schools for the kids, and even new cars.
Traditionally, working out of the home was limited to sales people who had a territory to cover that was not convenient to the home office. In insurance, having a staff of adjusters hanging around the water cooler proved to be a waste of time. Today, traditional office jobs are being conducted out of the home thanks to high-speed Internet connections, web-mail, and collaborative communication devices such as Skype.
The ability to track production—the initial worry when remote working first began—has been resolved. For Yahoo, though, the issue seems to be about collaboration. Can the important changes a company needs to make be done electronically or must they be face-to-face?
I work in an office building surrounded by more than 100 co-workers, but the person I report to works in another office more than 500 miles away. In the last decade, I've had face-to-face contact with my direct boss fewer than 20 times. That's not true remote working, but I'd be hard-pressed to explain the differences.
© Touchpoint Markets, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.